[Coco] Fedora 6 DVD ISO [OT]

[Joel Ewy]

Joel Ewy wrote:
> ...
> If you're using a major distribution, any drivers that are provided and
> officially supported by the distro's maintainers will in fact install as
> easy as Windows or Mac drivers...
In fact, let me just add that I have installed a lot of Windows hardware
drivers -- this is part of what I do for a living.  And I have never
been more frustrated working with computers than dinking around trying
to get Plug & Play hardware to work under Windows.  I pine for the days
when you would just set some jumpers to resolve a hardware conflict
rather than hoping and wishing that Windows would do it for you, but not
having any way to make it quit fooling around and do its job.  The
computer should do it right, or let me do it myself.  "Plug & Play"
means you plug it in, and play around with it until maybe it
mysteriously works -- but unlike the bad old jumper setting days, you
have no flippin' idea what you did or could ever do again in the future
to get it to work -- if it finally does.

Now, are you supposed to install the hardware first, and then put in the
driver CD, or the other way around?  Microsoft tells you one thing, and
the hardware manufacturers tell you another, but they can't even get
this one thing straight between them!  And if you don't do it the right
way, the scene can get pretty ugly.

Now did you ever try upgrading the motherboard in a Windows machine
without re-installing the OS from scratch?  Would you like to experience
Hell on Earth?  The trick is to install all the drivers for the new
machine on the hard drive before you do the switch-over, because Windows
will FREAK OUT and not even be able to access the CD-ROM drive to get
the drivers for the CD-ROM drive!!!  At that point, nothing else works,
and you can't make it work, because you can't load any drivers off the
CD-ROM drive, which has no working drivers.  That was with Win 9x.  Now,
the scenario in XP is a little different.  There isn't quite as much
headache with the hardware support -- I guess they've done the right
thing and made the IDE drivers generic enough so that they don't care
what motherboard they're on.  But what really galls me is that you have
to call Nanny Microsoft in Bangalore to ask permission to upgrade YOUR
OWN FREAKING HARDWARE!

When I built a faster computer to run Windows and flight sim games, I
played a little musical motherboards, and passed my AMD K6/2-450 along
to replace a K6-233 that had been running RedHat 8.1.  (I know --
ancient, old, get a new distro -- look, I have too many computers to
count, give me a break.  This is just one machine of many.)  Took out
the HD with RH8, put it in the new machine, booted it up -- and it
worked!  I don't think I had to change much of anything to make it happy
with its new brain transplant.  New processor, new motherboard, even a
new (Nvidia-based I might add) video card.  I probably had to edit my
XF86Config-4 file so X would work right, but that's about it.  And I
didn't have to call Linus Torvalds, or his mother in Helsinki, and beg
permission to do so.

Sure, sometimes I've been annoyed by Open Source software.  But at least
I haven't paid someone good money for the privilege of being pi$$ed
off.  That bugs me more than anything

I love the Open Source design methodology, and I love the Free Software
philosophy, and strongly prefer to use them wherever I can, but I'm not
a fundamentalist.  I have a couple computers running MS-Windows for
those programs that only run in Windows, and so that I can better serve
my clients who run Windows.  But all that stuff about Linux being hard
to use and Windows (and Mac) being easy and simple and trouble-free? 
Total bogosity.  "Linux is just for hackers" is an argument that
deserves to be left in the 20th Century, when it may have been true. 
(Yes, I installed SLS.)  Try a current version of Linux and see. 

To me, there's more to "ease of use" than pretty icons and buttons. 
Restrictive EULAs, draconian DRM, paternalistic corporate manipulations,
and being nickel- and dimed-to death, play a large role in my perception
of whether or not something is easy for me to use.  When something
doesn't work the way I like it, and the hood is welded shut, I don't
consider that easy to use.  When I can't use my computer because it's
infected by a virus or spyware, or because the requisite anti-virus
program is bloated beyond all rational expectations, the "ease of use"
factor plummets.  Really what people often mean when they complain about
"ease of use" is that it doesn't look exactly like what they're used to,
and so breaks their brittle, rote understanding of how to work the
programs which have icons on their desktop.

Make sure you've got supported hardware.  Everybody is expected to just
lump it when M'Soft dictates which hardware will be supported and which
won't with the next version of Windows.  Somehow people accept this and
justify it as "just the way it is".  I guess people are sheep.  They are
happy to be subservient to bullies, but complain when someone who's not
making demands of them can't give them exactly what they think they
want.  Why should we be so shocked that not every computer device ever
made will work flawlessly, out of the box, with every version of Linux,
even though Linux works on a much wider diversity of hardware than
Windows ever pretended to?  I'm certainly not going to get Windows
running on a Quadra 840av.  But Debian works...

Here endeth the rant.

JCE