Fun and games with 3TB hard drives.

[David]

On 10/1/2011 7:55 PM, Craig White wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-10-01 at 19:32 -0400, David wrote:
>
>> Fedora 'out of the box' works for me too. But then I don't use laptops
>> and they seem to be a major source of problem(s).
> ----
> laptops often have short run, proprietary hardware that if no one
> provides ample feedback to developers, may very well have some
> unintended features (nice way of saying bugs).

Agree.


> ----
>>    From what I read on
>> various lists. And I avoid Dell like a contagious infection (ducks under
>> desk) because I see many with problems.
> ----
> I don't have a problem with Dell but everyone is free to choose to buy
> whatever suits them. Dell&  HP have been strong supporters of Dell and
> for a few years, Dell's point man on Linux was a member of the Fedora
> board.


I have never owned a Dell. I do know two people that have them. On came 
with, and still uses Vista. The other came with and still uses Win 7. 
Both work just fine.


> ----
>> Those were the 'users' I was referring to above. Now when Linux will
>> really, really do stuff, like Windows games for example, then we just
>> might get the 'average person' to switch to Linux. Tux Racer is *not* a
>> real game BTW.  :-)
> ----
> I'm sort of out of touch on games myself but I think what you are
> specifically referring to are the games which drive high end hardware
> sales (overclock motherboards, high end video cards, etc.) and the open
> source platform isn't especially well suited for that environment at
> this point. I'm not sure that I would suggest that this type of user is
> actually the 'average person' as you describe it but certainly a
> significant percentage of the user base.


The games that I am thinking of are the games that young people and 
children play. And some of us olde guys like too. :-) The  Call of Duty 
series. The Elder Scrolls series. The Half-Life series. The Fallout 
series. There are too many to name.


> I think that if you really wanted to examine market segmentation in a
> reasonably meaningful way, you would be looking at business use and not
> just home use. You would consider that many large corporations do indeed
> use Linux as it clearly drives down the CTO for each desktop unit
> represented whereas the Macintosh is clearly the worst in this category.
> Perhaps the most available market segment is the small business category
> and that segment has been dominated by 'must have' software such as
> Quickbooks but as more software moves to the cloud and becomes SAAS,
> then the desktop OS becomes less significant - at least in terms of
> having specific needs drive specific choices. The home user market is
> clearly segmenting at this point with the tablets stealing much of the
> home laptop and desktop sales.


The company that I work for has it's own server and the software that I 
use every day, provided by them, runs on Windows. None of it has a Linux 
clone and I seriously doubt that any of it ever will. And none of it 
will run on WINE (why would anyone actually try to do that?) or in any 
emulator (again why even try?) so I use what works.

If you have clients that can run a Linux system and their needs are 
taken care of by Linux software good for them and good for you.

But I live in the real world. More people use Mac computers and software 
than use Linux and I only actually know one person that uses a Mac. And 
it is a new one and he runs Windows on it. And, unfortunately perhaps, 
Linux is still not really ready for that world. The real one.
-- 

   David