What is Marmite?

"What is Marmite?"

It's sort of like vegemite but tastes like crap

(Like vegemite, it's an aquired taste)

Follow this link for pictures.

well... i always thought the smart business people created markets. it seems to me that *someone* should be the first to heavily market a "linux compatible" desktop / laptop that can also work with winxp.

my guess is that lots of the money you spend on microsoft software goes into making sure pc mfrs *don't* do this... so maybe people like you are part of the problem? hey, i'm guilty, too, but i'm moving in a direction away from guilt.

if you have a *killer app* that only runs on windows... windows seems to be your only option when that *killer app* is a requirement. when it isn't... you now have choices.

but make sure it won't work on linux... you might be pleasantly surprised *if* you do your homework.

Walmart is selling laptops with Linspire pre-installed. I imagine any other distro would operate on them as well.

They're also selling desktops with Xandros preinstalled, and HP has just announced they're going to start shipping Ubuntu PCs.

Samsclub has systems with Linux also: Linux Systems at Sam's Club

Dell offers Linux (RH and SUSE) on servers
Dell and Linux

As does HP HP.com - WWSolutions - HP Linux Home

So it seems Linux is slowly making it's way onto the desktop and it's use on servers continues to grow.

I wonder what distro they use. In the description, it just says "Easy-to-use Linux operating system." I wonder which one that is--Slackware? Gentoo?

Too slow and not aggressive enough.

I would imagine it is the same as the Walmart, which has Linspire on it.

It is called CPUBuilders, when I installed it, it looked like it was based on an old version of Mandrake; something like 8.0. It was only on there long enough for me to know everything worked. Then Debian was installed and worked fine.
Welcome to CPUBuilders

My system is the cheaper one, although it is less now than when I bought it for $157.00

I apologize first for reading only the first few threads. I just wanted to
mention an interesting point, even though I am in a bit of a hurry at the moment.

To the poster:
I take it that you live in US. You have to remember that in this country Linux is still far from mainstream. And when I say mainstream, I mean readily available to your mom or to your office secretary. However in Europe, the story is entirely different.
In countries like Germany and France (just using examples that I am well familiar with) Linux is an official OS in most of noncomputing companies, in city offices, post offices, etc. This has happened within last couple of years. That's exactly when you saw a huge influx of open source drivers on the "market".

My point is obvious: Linux has matured enough as an OS to beat XP on any front. However, It is time for it to win political battle, that is, to convince powers that are (company CEOs, city managers, etc.) in its superiority over Windows. Once that happens, you will see entirely different behaviour of companies that make periferal devices in a matter of weeks.

I'm not a computer professional, just a home desktop user. I've used Linux as my only desktop OS for over 10 years and wouldn't dream of switching to the blue screen of death.

So in answer to your question, from my perspective, Linux is perfect for desktop/home users. As a home desktop user and a Linux user, I know that not all hardware manufacturers support linux so i don't buy from them. Period. I only purchase hardware that is Linux supported. That is the only way to send the message to the hardware makers that we want Linux support. If enough consumers did likewise more hardware companies would begin supporting linux.

As for people choosing to use Windows, it's not a question of whether one is "better" than the other. It has a lot to do with what they are comfortable with. For many, if the machine was purchased with linux installed instead of Windows, they would happily use it. For others, they just don't want to invest the time and effort in learning something new.

It's not so much a question of whether Linux is "up to the job", obviously it is, it's more a question of whether the average computer user is up to the job of learning a different OS.

One of my co-workers recently got a brand new Pentium M Windows XP laptop from Dell, and right away it had problems opening up Word documents. Word itself would launch, but then it would take ten to fifteen seconds for the actual document to appear.

What was her reaction? "That's odd. I'm going to have _________ [the tech support person] look at it on Monday."

That was her reaction. She didn't sign up for a Windows forum and complain that Windows wasn't "ready for the desktop" because such a simple thing as opening a Word document hangs with no explanation on a brand new computer with Windows pre-installed. (She hadn't even installed Microsoft Office--the tech people had.) Still, she just found it odd and wanted to get it checked out.

Yet when a lot of people encounter a single problem with a Linux installation (and usually the problems are their fault--I know the first few times I installed Linux, I hosed the installation because I didn't know what I was doing), their first instinct is to sign up for a Linux forum and complain that Linux is poor and can't live up to Windows standards.

Is anyone going to argue that weird things like what happened to my co-worker never or rarely happen on Windows computers? No? Then, why are people under the impression that Windows "just works" and Linux doesn't?

It's because people have been using Windows for years, so they know what is supposed to work. If something is supposed to work and it doesn't, Windows users know that something is wrong. They blame the installation, a corrupted file, spyware, or whatnot. They do not blame the OS because they've seen Windows work before the way it's supposed to.

New Linux users have never seen Linux work the way it's supposed to. They have no idea what "supposed to" means. For example, on a Ubuntu forum, someone complained that you have to manually mount external media in Linux and that this is a problem. Well, you don't have to. Most distributions mount external hard drives automatically when they're plugged in or turned on. This person merely assumed it was a flaw of the OS and not the installation because he/she had never seen Linux work the way it was supposed to.

That's what it all comes down to. If you've worked with an operating system for years, you know its quirks, and you know that you've seen up time and down time. You've seen it working and not working.

If you encounter a new OS and the first thing that happens is it doesn't work, you blame the OS. You don't think you might have a corrupt disk, bad hardware, or that you somehow f'ed up the installation yourself.

Which leads to the second problem: Windows users in general never install Windows. I'd say out of the hundreds of Windows users I know, maybe five have actually installed Windows, whereas almost everyone who uses desktop Linux has either installed it themselves or known closely the person who installed it for them.

Installations are messy.
So to all the complainers out there:

1. Get someone to install Linux for you.
2. Buy Linux preinstalled (see above links)
3. Use Windows or Mac
4. Suck it up and learn to install Linux.

Those are your four options. There is no fifth option:

5. Make a poor attempt to install Linux and then complain the first time anything goes wrong.

Great post aysiu - it perfectly sums up why many Linux people (including me) get so pissed off with these dumb 'Linux is not ready for the desktop' threads. You see it all the time on discussion boards across the net, especially places like slashdot. Someone will start a post saying 'well Linux isn't be ready for the desktop because when I tried it I had to compile everything from source (because you didn't know about urpmi/synpatic/yum/whatever), it'll never catch on because you have to repartition (you have to to install Windows too - and most modern Linuxes have 'automatic repartitioning' and much nicer repartitioning tools anyway).." and so on like that.