[ryan_brunner]

The thing is, these complaints usually come from people who WANT linux to succeed on the desktop. I'm certainly one of those people - one of those poor unfortunate souls doing RoR development on a PC.

Windows isn't a great option for me because the development ecosystem around Ruby on Windows is still fairly immature. Linux would be a perfect solution, if I could get more than a hour of battery life out of my laptop, my touchpad worked even remotely as well as it does in Windows, and selecting the wrong update didn't completely trash my system.

[pandeiro]

Give up or don't give up, but agonizing about it accomplishes nothing. 6 months ago I received a new laptop that "just didn't work on Linux." I did a lot of research, tried different distros, hacked on it a lot, and now it is a dream to use, gets excellent battery life, and even suspend/resume work beautifully. Hackers don't agonize over this kind of shit, they get to work. If you don't want to invest the time, your choice is investing your $$$ in a Mac. Personally I am so happy with my laptop now that if someone offered me a brand new Macbook Whatever, for free, I'd say "No, thanks." Seriously.

Good luck.

[wonnage]

Well, you also have the bias of wasting several weeks of your life trying to set up a laptop.

Yeah, I said waste. Most people will counter by saying "but I learned linux!" No, you didn't, you learned to futz around with a bunch of conf files. I remember trying to make Pulseaudio work with my USB soundcard. Several hours of dicking about with asoundrc later and I a. still had a nonfunctional sound card b. still don't know how pulseaudio works

Not that it isn't an accomplishment. Just, while it may be a source of personal satisfaction, don't expect people with less time than you do to feel the same way!

[pandeiro]

In my case messing around with conf files improved my understanding of those specific components (acpi, xkb, alsa, modprobe, etc) and the system. By your logic what learning experience isn't a waste?

I feel you on pulseaudio though. Been there, done that, pacman -Rcs gnome gnome-extra. That took me minutes, not weeks. Because I had already learned to configure alsa, and knew it worked fine.

The overall point is people without time to learn probably shouldn't use complex systems? OK.

[teyc]

+1

It is like solving sudoku. There's a rush when you solve it, but it is not like you have made a genuine progress.