Ubuntu is not free.

Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings.co.za
Wed Jul 12 18:10:54 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 11:18 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Well said.  I have to admit, I've often told people complaining about
> lack
> of hardware support that "you wouldn't go out and buy hardware for a
> Windows machine that wasn't supported in Windows, and you shouldn't go
> out
> and buy hardware for a Linux machine that isn't supported."  You've
> made me
> realize I'm not quite going about this the right way.  Next time I'm
> shopping for something, I'll make my shortlist based solely on
> features,
> buy the best one that _is_ supported in Linux - and write to all the
> other
> manufacturers to tell them why they didn't get a sale. 

I think that first prize is of course to buy hardware that is known to
work correctly under Linux, but that there are degrees of compatibility
to it all. I vote with my wallet in this order:

1. Companies whose stuff is fully supported
2. Companies whose stuff is partially supported
3. Companies whose stuff is not supported but are willing to listen to
why they should support Linux
4. Companies who don't care

I never quite make it down to #4 :-)

We should all be heartily congratulating the #1s, and communicating as
customers to the #2s and #3s in whatever way and tone is appropriate for
that company. And we should keep in mind that by and large they are not
going to come to us asking hwo to do it, they will build in Linux
support when we get them to do it; we must be the cause and they must be
the effect.

Which reminds me, I need to send Dell a nice letter telling them that
everything on this Latitude D810 JustWorks(tm) except the modem which I
haven't tested yet. And another to Epson whose printers are still as
easy to get working as their original 9 pin dot-matrix jobs

alan







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