Giving up on Linux...

[Michael Robinson]

One word, IMPATIENCE.  You can't get Linux up and running without being
patient, and the average user can't use Linux because they're not patient.
Linux is just as good as any of the other Unix variants, just harder to
setup with good reason.  Solaris runs on maybe 80 different hardware
configurations, so does HP-UX, and so do all other operating systems that
run the back bone of the Internet.  This is why they're installed on
specific hardware that they're specifically tailored to, because it's stable
because the OS only has 80 things to expect.  If you put Linux on an IA32
there are infinite options, the user could have endless hardware.  You can
see that your going to have way more configuration problems on a home PC.  I
had to use FC1 because neither SuSe 8 nor SuSe 9 supported my new
motherboard Intel Media motherboard.  It's about choices, different OSs
support different things.  Pick an OS that support your hardware (preferably
not Windows), try SuSe, Debian, Mandrake, and NetBSD.

Michael Robinson
(mrobinson at fuzzymuzzle.com)
(www.fuzzymuzzle.com)


-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-admin at redhat.com
[mailto:fedora-list-admin at redhat.com]On Behalf Of xyzzy at hotpop.com
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 4:18 AM
To: fedora list
Subject: Giving up on Linux...


... for the foreseeable future on my home system.

My home system is an ASUS PVP800-VM motherboard which has hi-speed USB,
ACPI,
Pentium IV with hyperthread, S-ATA, Intel Extreme 2 graphics (865G chipset).

I also have an antique Adaptec 2930 SCSI card for my LS-2000 scanner.

Redhat 9 install disks won't even boot on this machine unless I disable the
Enhanced IDE (<-- totally bogus!!) ...  Fedora Core 1 is about the same.

I decided on FC1 because it uses a later kernel (2.4.22 ... 24?) which seems
to support hyperthread and S-ATA better.  When I finally got FC1 installed
(I
had to disable Enhanced IDE, install, compile a custom kernel and then
re-enable Enhanced IDE), it was horribly SLOOOOOOW... running a shell in X
and pasting a long command line took forever to complete.

I figured that this might be due to the graphics driver, so I updated the
graphics driver from Intel and then X crashed with a segmentation fault in
the closed source part of the driver when attempting to start the X server.
Even changing back to the original driver in the XF86Config didn't fix the
segfault.  Gotta reinstall?  Who needs this? What a nightmare.

The issue here is that Windows XP runs "out-of-the-box" on this system
without
problems and it is FAST, once it boots.

I could try the 2.6 kernel (and I have a LOT of experience with computers),
but what's the use?  The 2.6 kernel is not ready for prime-time, not by a
long shot, and neither, it seems, is Linux in general.

I have seen too many bugs and posts on these topics about
SMP/hyperthread/ACPI
and other issues that cause the system to lock up after a time of running or
not run at all and no fixes seem to be in sight - maybe because these
problems are intractable without inside information about ACPI and other
things that Intel will give to Microsoft but not to Open Source developers.
Maybe Redhat just doesn't care. Who knows?

I pity the average user that tries to install and run Linux on their latest
hardware.  If I, as an experienced software engineer, throw up my hands,
what
would a relative newbie who just needs the system to work do?

I have real problems seeing how Linux is going to make it to the desktop by
2005 with these kinds of road-blocks.

Sad.


--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list at redhat.com
To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list