[bane]

Yes yes, Windows users just don't get "it". With "it" apparently a vast blackhole of time suck spent searching endless forums for conflicting advice for why basic hardware on random machine doesn't work right, or why xyz package failed to install or abc driver doesn't work right.

No thanks, I still haven't figured out how to get the 3 days of my life back trying to share some files over my home network last year when I installed ubuntu on my old (but perfectly serviceable) computer in my latest attempt at using Linux.

What didn't work out of the box?

- Mouse (stock Dell USB mouse), never did fix that, tried 3 different mice, dug up an old PS/2 mouse and made do with that, probably some obscure usb issue, but the usb hard drives and keyboard I had connected worked from the beginning

- NIC drivers (dunnah, some regular old built in 10/100 part on the mobo), took an entire day of my life to resolve, and it kept dropping connection requiring a reboot every 4-5 hours

- Video drivers (nvidia something or other), never did work right

- file sharing (I eventually got it to kinda work after hand editing a bunch of files and installing some older version of samba, really, what's the gui there for anyways?)

- Stopped seeing one of the hard drives on the second day, a reinstall of ubuntu (and all the other crap I had to do) fixed that

- X died for no apparent reason, reinstall again

- it refused to sync properly with my perfectly cromulent monitor so I was doing all this at 640x480, which works brilliantly when half of the gui controls are off the screen, I was prepared not to care if I could just get the NIC working and remote in

- after getting everything working (kinda, with gum and duct tape), ubuntu did some sort of update that blitzed the whole thing and I just gave up, I hadn't even really gotten to what I wanted to do with it.

As much as I really tried to get it to work, and I try one of these about once every year or so since 1996 with whatever is the hot distro of the moment, and I had no illusions that it would be as straight forward as Windows or OS X, I did expect things like actually being able to use the computer enough to fire up a browser and search for solutions to minor configuration issues. Every issue I had was literally a major configuration issue. I spent those 3 days with my MBP sitting next to me so I could look up help in various forums.

By comparison, I wiped the drive, installed Windows XP, most of it was spent waiting for the files to copy, I had a thumb drive with 4 drivers on it. After install I clicked setup.exe for each driver, rebooted a handful of times. Clicked each drive I wanted to share and set it to "share" and that system is still up and running...I think I've rebooted it 3 times since then. Total time spent? 90 minutes.

So if "it" is wasting a bunch of my time for absolutely nothing in return? I can't think of any other area in my life where I would allow that kind of user experience.

Imagine this was a car, and I had to rebuild the engine or the shifter nob or pedals or windshield or whatever just to drive it off the lot, and then I'd find out it wasn't compatible with every road I wanted to go on, unless I patched it with a different windshield, but when I did that the a/c stopped working. And the brake pedal would stop activating the brake system every 6 hours unless I turned the car off and restarted the engine. Bringing in my car for an oil change might make the doors or wheels stop working.

I have pretty low expectations of technology. I don't expect things to "just work", but I do expect to have a couple pretty clear lines to resolve any issues, even if I have to get my hands dirty and change the spark plugs myself.

So if this is "it", no thanks.

[dkarl]

Try again with different hardware and your experience will, with very high probability, be nothing like that. I've installed Linux on seven or eight computers over the years, and I've never had a mouse or a wired NIC fail to work out of the box. I've never had a graphics card problem that couldn't be resolved with one or two hours of Google-and-try, Google-and-try, and the last time I had trouble setting up graphics was the first time I set up dual monitors, about six years ago. I work at a Linux shop where the desktop IT department will only touch Windows, and the group of people running Linux on their desktops and laptops is much, much larger than the "OMG I love it when stuff breaks" tinkerer crowd. Most of us don't enjoy being our own sysadmins, and if it was much trouble, we wouldn't bother.

Also it has to be said over and over again: setting up Windows from a generic install disk can be just as much of a nightmare as Linux. The reason Windows works so well for most people has nothing to do with Windows; it has to do with using essentially a special distribution of Windows put together by the company that assembled the hardware. They've located, tested, and installed the right drivers on the system, and they've put together a recovery/reinstall disk that has all those drivers. Try installing Windows without having the right drivers pre-selected for you and you can easily end up in the same hell as a Linux install gone bad, except with less help available online because it's not a common thing to attempt.

By the way, your handy thumb drive with four drivers on it -- why did you need that? And why did you have it? Why weren't you that well prepared for the Linux install? It doesn't seem like a fair comparison if you're comparing a Windows install where you knew exactly what drivers you needed and already had them on hand to a Linux install where you hadn't even Googled the right driver for your video card.

[bane]

By the way, your handy thumb drive with four drivers on it -- why did you need that? And why did you have it? Why weren't you that well prepared for the Linux install? It doesn't seem like a fair comparison if you're comparing a Windows install where you knew exactly what drivers you needed and already had them on hand to a Linux install where you hadn't even Googled the right driver for your video card.

I was that well prepared for the Linux install. I had CDs burned with multiple builds of the drivers, thumb drives with multiple builds of the drivers, hell, I had an entire other computer available with working access to the internet, I spent 3 days trying to get things working which are so not even a problem on other systems. Is there some super human level of support I should have had available? Should I have built a time machine and brought forward the Oracle of Delphi and Alan Turing?

That's the point. If you read this thread, and the rest of the topic, the common factor is that Linux fails to work out of the box on regular old systems on perfectly normal hardware.

The windows I installed was regular old, bought in the store windows. The hardware was off-the-shelf in a system I built myself. Nothing exotic (even if the system was 2 years old at the time). I installed it, it "just worked". When windows doesn't it's clear, or resolvable in 5 or 10 minutes of googling, with reliable and repeatable paths to resolution, and the system is usually able to run in a reduced function level of operation well enough that I was able to patch it up with fairly minimal fuss. Yeah sure, there's some deep voodoo that Windows bluebeards know, like how to path a registry by hand or some nonsense.

I was able to get the same distro to kinda work on another machine. But I eventually uninstalled it because, while it "worked" it was "not quite right".

Since the mid 90s, I give this a go every year, to see if their is a popular distro that's up to claims of "just works".

I've never gotten a distro to "just work" and gave up after days in disgust. Video drivers don't work, common peripherals, like keyboards, don't work reliably, audio has never worked right, I've brought half working machines to LUG meetings hoping some greybeard could coax something out of it to no avail. I've worked in hardware shops with virtually unlimited access to any sort of hardware you could imagine and after weeks of banging on the machine been unable to get something as basic as syncing to a monitor to work correctly. Stupid things like identical video cards eliciting different responses from the system.

What has improved? The install and available software. I remember 6 or 7 years ago, getting past the install was seen as a major requirement for acceptance on the desktop in the community. And coinciding with that having decent productivity software.

I think the community has stepped up and more or less gotten those resolved. But useless or nonexistent GUIs, random config files floating around from distro to distro with help docs that are out of date and have no bearing on what's actually in the files let along where, or what the configuration options actually mean, broken default packages, updates that break simple regression testing, etc. All fail to impress.

I've used Linux systems at times to save failing Windows disks, or rest system passwords on NT machines, and other utilitarian sorts of things. In embedded systems I own, where Linux is running as a ground up build for that specific hardware, it runs brilliantly. I have more Linux systems in my house than I do Windows for example. But unless problems can be reliably resolved in 1-2 hours, it's a no go.

I'll never understand why people have an issue with a singular piece of hardware on a Mac or a Windows machine and use that as an excuse to move to Linux, and then tolerate an absurd and constant barrage of completely solved problems (on other systems) every day.

[dkarl]

You have had the worst luck with Linux that I have ever heard of. Among my dozen or so personal and work acquaintances who have installed Linux for desktop use, none of them have put in one tenth of the work you have, and all of them have multiple fully functional desktop systems to show for it. My condolences for your absolutely spectacular bad luck.

[bane]

nod, I suppose, but a quick peruse of various Linux help forums will show I'm not really all that rare. This is a reality that the community is going to have to come to terms with.

Is it better than it used to be? Sure! Is it competitive? Not really.

[wazoox]

> Mouse (stock Dell USB mouse), never did fix that, tried 3 different mice, dug up an old PS/2 mouse and made do with that, probably some obscure usb issue, but the usb hard drives and keyboard I had connected worked from the beginning

Strangely I never had any mouse problem under linux for ages, but the only windows computer -alas- under my management lost the ability to use any USB devices a long time ago. USB still works when the machine's running Linux, so the hardware is fine; the USB hardware is still listed in the "hardware manager", but for some reason, USB keys, mice, etc simply aren't anywhere to be seen.

Generally speaking, I almost never have any problem under Linux that I can't solve in a couple of minutes -- except a major hard drive crash maybe. Windows remain, OTOH, a complete mystery most of the time. So it definitely is a familiarity problem. Sometimes, I may fall down to the mantra that "windows is total, utter shite". But I'm reasonable enough to understand that it's just me who just got completely unfamiliar and uneasy with it.

> Every issue I had was literally a major configuration issue.

That's quite surprising, since I hardly met any machine since 2003 where one of the common live-CDs wouldn't boot to a workable state out of the box.

[bane]

That's quite surprising, since I hardly met any machine since 2003 where one of the common live-CDs wouldn't boot to a workable state out of the box.

Bizarrely, I was able to live-CD boot to my newer machine fine. I even ran Ubuntu as my main OS for about 3 months until there was something I needed to do that wouldn't run under Wine. It worked "ok".

- I needed to reboot it 3 or 4 times a day because the sound would just stop working for no reason I was ever able to resolve.

- I could never get it to use the native resolution of my monitors. I suspect it was driver issues with my perfectly normal nvidia card.

- Video playback, flash, etc. all ran unacceptably slow.

To be honest, I'm willing to accept that not everything will "just work" perfectly out of the box. But if it takes me longer than a 2 or 3 hours to resolve a minor issue, I'm done.

One thing that still befuddles me to this day is the plethora of perfectly earnest looking GUI configuration odds and ends in Ubuntu which seem to have virtually no effect. Anything that I was able to resolve had to be done by opening up an xterm and editing some config file someplace (which usually wasn't in the place pointed to by most of the online help I could find).

I'm honestly interested in what problems people have under Windows or OS X that drives them to Linux. I hear a lot about insurmountable issues with these OSs, hardware that won't work or whatever. But I've almost never had an issue I couldn't resolve by downloading the correct driver for the device, clicking setup.exe and rebooting. The few times I couldn't it was because the hardware was bad.

(though there was one time I was trying to get bluetooth to work on a laptop I had, I did the above, but it borked the machine and I got a bluescreen. 30 minutes of googling gave me the magic incantations to fix it and get me back up and running...turns out the laptop was one of the submodels that didn't actually have bluetooth hardware...meh)

Now finding the drivers can sometimes be hard, especially if the hardware is oddball or very old.

[misterbee]

Fun fact about sound: I discovered yesterday that one can restore sound on a Ubuntu 11.04 system by killing the pulseaudio process (it will instantly restart and restore sound.) No reboot required, in my case.

This is now one of the more frequent activities I do on my machine. Next step is to make a desktop shortcut or applet "Fix my Sound" or a command-line script, to avoid going through the incantation to find and kill the right proces. Then install Windows.

With the GUIs, problem is that Gnome and KDE and Canonical have gone through so many changes to their config systems (supposedly freedesktop.org D-Bus or something is supposed to fix that, but there is always at least one team starting up a vendetta against another team, and breaking compatibility), and even if there is new stuff that works, there are tons of packages in the Canonical repository that happily edit config that your environment isn't actually using (gtk vs gconf vs dconf vs kde vs gnome, etc)

[bane]

The thing that surprises me most, and something I'd find absolutely unacceptable to release, is that the stock GUI config tools are broken or do nothing. This is a QA issue. I personally don't care if it took them a decade to properly test and sort this out. You should never release, release level software with broken GUI components like that.

Taking the car analogy further, suppose I tried to turn on my radio, only to find out the volume knob (which I can quite clearly see and manipulate) doesn't work, 2 or 3 days of Googling into it lets me know that there's a new knob, over on the other side of the steering wheel to control volume, that's undocumented, doesn't work properly, and dumps all the petrol from the gas tank if it goes above 7.

The actual way to resolve the volume knob operation is to swap out the radio the car came with with another one, except doing so will cause an engine conflict requiring a new transmission and a green left rear tire. Until of course the radio stops working, which requires you to rearrange the spark plugs in a random order. But hey, the new radio you put in has satellite radio that works so long as the windshield wipers aren't on intermittent wipe...so you can check that feature box I suppose.

Reading the manual for illumination it says: "to lengthen the distance of wave propagation attenuation from the magnetic speaker drivers, rotate the amplitude control clockwise (unless south of the equator where clocks work double negatively backwards <G>)"

Searching the Internet for help always ends up with conversations like

"you shouldn't have bought that radio, every body knows that"

"which one, the stock one, or the new one? I didn't have a choice with the stock one"

"RTFM"

"I did and it's entirely not helpful"

"did you try removing your shoes?"

"no"

"do that, it'll fix it. I have the same car you have, but from 1962, and that's how I solve my tire problem everytime"

"I don't have a tire problem, I have a radio problem"

"that's what you think...."

blah blah blah blah

and in the end we're talking about different cars anyways

[seabee]

> Anything that I was able to resolve had to be done by opening up an xterm and editing some config file someplace (which usually wasn't in the place pointed to by most of the online help I could find).

The price of flexibility is a lack of conformity. This is fine in the server environment where you have a bunch of machines you control and learning your distro's every intricacy is worthwhile when it's amortised over all the machines you own.

However, for a home user trying to do a specific thing to their one computer, being able to Google their solution and follow the instructions is very important. Fedora and Debian might be G/L but if you only have instructions for one you'll have to know how to translate it to the other, and that's beyond most people's ken. In contrast, Windows is Windows.

The only common affliction is hardware, but Linux still draws the short straw here. But it could be worse, at least you're not making yourself a Hackintosh.

[bane]

This is fine in the server environment where you have a bunch of machines you control and learning your distro's every intricacy is worthwhile when it's amortised over all the machines you own.

Which explains why most enterprises, once they settle on a distro, will stretch that version of the distro out for years -- all their technical staff will learn it, their greybeards will know how to wrangle weirdness out of it, they'll build an internal knowledge base how to resolve the particular 10 issues they have with it...etc. Once it's configured according to the 100 step config guide it'll run like an appliance and nobody will think anything about it unless some hardware fails.

For the end user, the endless twiddling just to get something running on their system kills any dubious efficiency improvements once it's up and running. No wonder folks are simply grabbing the useful tools and replacing the broken desktop OS with OS X.

[wazoox]

> I'm honestly interested in what problems people have under Windows or OS X that drives them to Linux.

When switching from windows Me to Vista, my stepmother had to change her scanner and printer that were perfectly working because there aren't any driver. They both still work with the latest Linux (and Mac OS X).

This is quite typical of the problems under windows : forced upgrades, nagwares, malwares...