wifi was hard. i had to insert the card, then i had to enter my encryption key through a GUI. it was the worst 2 minutes of my life.It isnt hard at all.


i dont understand why people make it sound as if linux takes hours to make something work.

I really love it when i bought my new laptop and right out of the box the sound wont work. then windows doesnt see any driver or even the onboard sound. then i found something that helped.....installation cd #1 followed by 2 and 3

>> "Linux is a great open source product but how is it going to gain popularity when alot of the open source projects lack funding and support for there product. These open source project are dependent on donations and programmers that want to help the cause. From what
I have seen linux is limit to a certain extent because of it lack of funding and being able to maintain the projects. Example go to souceforge.net and do a search on a piece of software and most of them that you will find do not have a technical number that you can call or lack funding and thus you a very limited to what you can do."

...

had just installed sshd in my windows , its a cygwin + sshd all-in-1 package ... terribly-stupid-easy and its a freeware from sourcfordge ... all you need to do is just click and click and click , the installer will take care of everything eg. from setting up cygwin , generating those funny keys for funny users and install sshd as a service and start it up exactly right after you click that very last "OK" button of the installer ... straight away you can open up a bash prompt and/or ssh from another machine and i had tried about 5 different versions of this software in a stretch(about 45 min or 1 hr) including installing/un-installing , ssh from other machines and some very minor editing of profile and sshd-config files here and there ... all this without rebooting my windows at all ... somehow i can sense my basic trust for this author and his stuffs ... and i dont think he gets any real fundings or "moral" support or something ... i mean if linux can do this , that will probably help a lot in spreading linux herself for all the home desktop users ...

hmm ... to think about it ... if somehow this author and his kinds do get some fundings or whatever support , i guess people like them can probably do a lot more ...



//a few years ago had installed cygwin before but now for nothing i got myself a working cygwin un-intentionally and thats really great ...


//half cents only

.

Puhleeze, try not to be thick if you can help it. Windows teaches people to click click click on everything. Is it any surprise that this sort of "ease of installation" leads people to click on things they shouldn't?

As for ease of installation of Linux driver, well, if you can't type make && make install, you really have no business using Linux. And don't peddle a bunch of hooey about how clicking on things is soooooo much easier than typing in a command. That is just Windows brain-washing.

And I have set up WPA-PSK on my box. Again, if you found that difficult to do, maybe you aren't cut out to be using Linux. Linux isn't Windows, and it shouldn't try to be.

i donno ... but sometime i think the hardest "code ... make && make install" among all the hardest ones are those "gui-brain-washing-clicking-buttons" under *nix , easier to get lazy for this kind of venture so they just drop us some command prompts and tons of text files ... "proof yourself !!" they say ...


//dont get too serious , probably its just a joke they played on us ...


.

Explain how this is any worse or better on Linux? So we force people to type so they can't click stupidly? What stops them from typing stupidly?

There you go again... So Linux is supposed to be as user friendly as Windows but you really have no business using Linux if you can't compile your own drivers. Make up your mind already!

I don't find it difficult to do but it is next to impossible for most new users or a mom & pop windows user to even attempt to install drivers for their WiFi card + connect to a WPA-PSK hotspot.

So in short make up your mind is Linux supposed to be user friendly in that Gramps can use it or is it just for the "1337" kids?

I think you mean delusional - and that would be believing that anyone ever thinks "I can't get my printer working under windows which is a shame because it's probably much simpler than compiling a Linux kernel" or that the professional response to someone looking for support with that problem would start with "You think you're doing complicated stuff? That's nothing".

The thread started off about whether the difficulties associated with getting support for open source software are a barrier to its increased usage. When people in user-land have a problem with their PC they do one of only a few things. They fix it themselves, they get someone else's help or they move on to something else. The relative complexity of a problem means nothing to someone who can't solve it, they just want it fixed.

My point is that it gets back to the fact that support models need to reflect demand (not only in IT) and they either evolve because people get involved to make it happen or they fade away. Plenty of people have problems with their Windows install yet Windows isn't going away. There's no reason to think that open source software will go away because forums don't suit everyone or because the software is complicated.

*Shrug* http://www.thelizlibrary.org/dillusion.html

Anyways if that is all you could find to pick on then i guess my english is excellent considering it is my second language. Ah well the word should be spelled that way when you consider the language it comes from. Then again that site seems to say it is correct?

You do realize that there are settings and configuration files to deal with before trying your ever-so-simple make command, dependencies to install, etc... remember, to actually complete installs in Linux you will sometimes need to edit the configuration file to include the correct Linux kernel path, and if you can't find the path you will have to search for it, and depending on whether or not your distro actually installed the kernel sources you may need to install them yourself. You may also need to install compiler tools. And then you try make. And discover that there are several missing dependencies. You can't find what the dependencies are. Nobody else knows. So you end up giving up. Of course, if you are a Linux buff then you will be able to fix our first two issues, but you would still be stuck on the dependencies. Your Linux-isolation stance can justify not automating the first two processes, but will still not justify the dependency issues. And either way, this is still not any easier than InstallShield, no matter how objectively you look at it.

And somehow I use a Linux-only machine, that I installed fresh a couple months ago, without ever having to compile anything, or worry about dependencies, or any silly stuff like that. WiFi works great: a simple gui configurator, and voila!

I hate having to administer my wifes WinXP laptop, because it's always such a pain to find drivers for things, and then have them not work properly, etc. I sometimes wonder how Bill Gates managed to sell this monstrosity of an OS ...

The only way linux could become very popular among regular users, is if it went corporate, and lost most of it's customizability in favor of ease of use.

Good God, if Windows is that hard for you to use you must be doing something horribly wrong.
Or you have just gotten Windows and Linux mixed up.

Did you even read what I posted? I'm not interested in picking on you. I'm suggesting that you don't seem interested in the subject of the thread. I'm also suggesting that you should use a better dictionary site. Considering that http://www.thelizlibrary.org/collects.htm spells sex as seks along with the content of some of the other pages, they're not interested in being a language reference.

And now I've wandered from the subject of the thread, so... Perhaps you could tell us how you see things like the difficulty of users getting support or projects getting funding in the open source world?

Well for one thing, typing stupidly usually doesn't run anything. Heck, even rm * -rf really doesn't do any serious damage unless you're root.



I'm not being inconsistent at all. Personally I find a console to be just as user friendly as a GUI, its just different. And I stand by my assertion that make&&make install is every bit as user friendly as clicking on stuff. Of course this assumes that you have a brain you can actually use, but that is a different matter.


Your average new or mom/pop user usually can't do this in Windows either. You're confusing ease of use with familiairity. Most people are baffled by Windows the first time they see it. It is only because someone taught them how to use it that it becomes "easy". Teach 'em how to use Linux and that will become "easy" too.


I'm not being inconsistent, you're just confusing Widnows with the "way computers ought to work". Linux is user friendly, it just isn't Windows.

Diving into the middle of the thread, he asserted: Not so!! Linux will become more popular as it matures AND as more people find out about it. Right now, the Jay Leno curbside interviews with Joe Sixpack will show that very few people are aware that there is a choice beyond Windows (and maybe Mac).
A real tipping point will be when mainstream stores have Linux-based options--on the shelves.

Agreed. Remember, the VAST majority of people won't care about Linux if it isn't pre-installed on machines with lots of extras thrown in (basically Dell's model). It doesn't matter to 95% of the population if Ubuntu gives free CD's -- because they won't be interested in installing it and dealing with all the issues it will give their computers. I see SUSE and RedHat doing this quite well -- and maybe Mandriva. The common trait of those three is they are all on some level and in some country making deals with HP, Dell, etc to preload their distributions in desktop-level computers. Developing countries in continents such as South America are serving as the testing ground for viewing the market's interest in using Linux machines -- and if it gets off the ground there well enough, then we might just see Linux success in the United States from this. Most people are never going to install new operating systems successfully, let alone reinstall Windows. Therefore it is required that the computer industry begins preloading Linux instead.