Comment by RyanMcGreal
16 years ago
>Windows "just works"
That has never been my experience. Trying to customize my Windows install to the point where I can actually do anything with it has uniformly been a long, painful, expensive process every time I have had to do it.
Er, not to mention having to go over to friends' houses frequently to try and get their "just works" Windows installs to just work, already, when they run into problems.
Frankly, my last three Ubuntu installs (on an Acer Apire One, a cheap dual-core PC, and the old, decrepit PC that the cheap dual-core PC replaced) were faster, easier, and far less painful than my previous four or five Windows installs.
I had to do a bit of fiddling with the netbook to get wifi working (I had to install and configure madwifi-hal), but I had to do a lot of fiddling to get wifi working on the default XP install, so tit-for-tat.
Suspend just works, the low battery warning just works, remote desktop just works, multiple displays just works, and I'm seamlessly connected to my home PC and the backup server in the basement.
That's not to mention the fact that I can browse easily to remote servers using the default file explorer (Nautilus) without having to muck around with an FTP program, which is kind of handy when doing web application development.
What are you trying to do on a windows install that requires customization?
Also, fiddling with the wifi on *nix and fiddling with it on windows are...not quite the same thing.
I have no problem with it on linux (in fact, I have destroyed several keyboards in fits of rage while trying to get it working on windows.), but my mother would have absolutely no freaking CLUE how to even begin trying to get it to work.
>What are you trying to do on a windows install that requires customization?
Slipstreaming XP SP3 into a pre-SP1 ISO image, installing useful software (esp. Firefox), setting themes and desktop backgrounds, etc. I've done the first without too much pain, the second with some fiddling and mediocre results, and I don't even know if you can do the last.
What percentage of users do you suppose are doing these things? Less than 1%? Less than .5%?
As far as setting desktop backgrounds...the process is the same in KDE as it is in Windows or Gnome. (FVWM, which is actually the WM I run on most of my machines with X installed is a bit different).
As far as themes...I'm not even entirely sure that windows has themes. What do you mean by that?
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