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What are you basing that claim on, just your own personal experience? It's a pretty extraordinarily claim to say that linux on the desktop requires no configura

What are you basing that claim on, just your own personal experience? It's a pretty extraordinarily claim to say that linux on the desktop requires no configuration, and I think such a claim deserves at least a little bit of evidence above and beyond your own personal experience. Depends on the hardware, mostly. Our university LUG does an event called Free Your Machine every quarter, and for most people, it's just defrag, install, show 'em how to use Synaptic, and they're out. It also depends on what you're trying to do. The basic things have been mostly ironed out by now (wireless is still a bit iffy), but the more advanced things, sure, they'll take some time and swearing.

actf 16y ago
"it's just defrag, install, show 'em how to use Synaptic, and they're out." I think it would be really interesting to see some statistics from this, for example the % of computers on which the default install works without additional configuration, the % of users who encounter problems a week later, the % of users who give up and reinstall windows within a month, the technical saviness of the users, etc. It seems like there's a lot of interesting data we could learn from an install-fest. "The basic things have been mostly ironed out by now (wireless is still a bit iffy), but the more advanced things, sure, they'll take some time and swearing." This seems to confirm my objection to the original point, no? I wouldn't consider wireless advanced. If my wireless connection, my printer, and my touchpad don't work out of the box (nevermind my entire graphics subsystem in 10.04) that's a show-stopper in my opinion.