Ubuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3 Beta 5

[Avi Greenbury]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:18:34 +0200
Christoph Bier <christoph.bier at web.de> wrote:
>
> Oh, yes, incorrectly. Sorry, but this is the Linux attidue[tm]
> that's far from reality and for many years I was of your opinion.
> But reality is quite different. Independent from profession (except
> IT specialists) and education most of the people I know never take
> any backup. Even when they upgrade their $WHATEVER_OS machine they
> accept to loose most of their data. Some things get burned to a CD.
> People laugh at me when they hear that I take daily backups.
>
I know this quite well (I support Windows users all day during the week). But Linux upgrades present no greater risk of breaking things than Windows updates do (I've little experience with OSX).
So, if a user upgrades from IE6 to IE7, and loses everything, they're generally (IME) quite prepared for that. If it saves anything/everything, they're happy. More so from Win2k to WinXP.

<snip>

>						But my needs changed
> over the years. I don't need anymore a fully configurable FOSS
> system even if I liked to have one! First of all I need a system
> that works out of the box with all of my peripheral equipment and
> most of the utilities I know from the FOSS world (bash and many CLI
> tools, Emacs, TeX, GNU R, gnuplot ...) and a professional PDF
> workflow (Acrobat Pro).

Well, then I'd suggest OSX is a better option for you, as you've already said.

> 
> Did I say this should be different for Linux? 

You implied it with the line 'I don't have the time to search for a good cam that's supported by Linux', which implies you want Linux to support the cam, rather than the other way round.
Or, rather, I inferred it from that line.

<snip>

>							  But from
> a user's point of view it just makes no difference who's to blame
> for the bad hardware support under Linux/FOSS. 

Yep, this I agree with. Which is probably partly why I keep jumping on people as I did you above... 

>						   Especially new
> hardware doesn't work well under Linux and other free OS, my five
> year old laptop never suspended successfully with Ubuntu. I'm
> willing to pay for a system that works out of the box with nearly
> every hardware. If it was a Linux/FOSS system I'd be *very* happy!
> 

See, rather than find an OS that works with all hardware, I find hardware that works with my OS. I know compatible OSs aren't hard to find, but since I don't mind what the hardware is, just what it does, this seems to make more sense to me. Though I accept it's not feasible for you. 

It's the above approach that's always lead me to Thinkpads. I'm a little confused at your troubles, but maybe I've just been lucky, or you unlucky. Or it's just that the lower-end ones are more compatible (which is likely, since things'll be simpler).

<snip>

>			           On my five year old laptop and my
> wife's ThinkPad WLAN doesn't work yet and I already spent days with
> the help of the Debian and Ubuntu community (not to mention my
> Nvidia graphics card). Getting basic things to work doesn't mean
> fine tuning.

Ah yeah. I've just always made sure that when I buy a laptop everything's Intel. The presence of an nvidia chipset corroborates my statement about the cheaper ones being less compatible. Finally! A good thing about having no money!

-- 
Avi Greenbury