The Market has Rejected Linux Desktops!?

Hi there
actually I think the problem with Drivers may become less and less in future.

Take USB devices these days . It's reasonably possible to define a "Common" USB interface so actually writing the code to interface with the actual hardware wouldn't be too much of a problem.

You can see some of this already being implemented in some scanner software for example -- Vuescan -- (not free) will drive loads and loads of older scanners that W7 doesn't have official drivers for.

So long as the piece of hardware has some type of API then it wouldn't take a humungously skilled programmer a lot of work to hobble up say a USB driver for the device.

Video drivers are already pretty well catered for in Linux, and often the 3D implementation is actually better than Windows.

I think most people have problems with Mobile Phones and TV cards in Linux -- nearly everything else works --you just have to search a lot more than you do with W7 and sometimes you may have to compile a module or even compile a kernel.

But I agree - it's NOT a general purpose Desktop OS. It's great to use but not for the guys who just want to switch on a computer and start working.

Cheers
jimbo

nate42nd said:

I like messing around with Linux on old desktops. It's fun to play with, but for a desktop OS? No way!

Most users would be taking a trip to the shop the first problem they ran into. Most computer users could not give advice because Linux is not that popular. There are reasons why it's not to popular, i have to agree with pparks1, Linux has it's place. That place is small devices like phones, and large servers. It will never be a "mainstream" user unless it changes drastically.

I was running Ubuntu for a few months. It ran quite smoothly. I encountered many problems and solved every single one of them just by googling it.

The only thing I didn't like was not being able to use .exe files. That could be a big problem for your every day user. I also really missed microsoft office. Open office is really nice, but it's just not the same.