Subject: Re: Ease Of Use and Hardware Support (WAS: Linux Laptops)
From: Stefan Jeglinski (jeglin@4pi.com)
Date: Thu Mar 07 2002 - 09:56:02 MST
After being involved in Linux on PPC for a good 3 years now (still a
newbie!), it is obvious to me that Linux is a hobby effort
perpetrated by hobbyists. Now before everyone goes and gets their
panties up in a bunch, it's also obvious that there are some damn
serious hobbyists involved. And some of them make their living from
it. And in large measure, this hobby effort runs the internet. IOW,
I'm not disparaging hobbyists in the least.
OTOH, to learn/do Linux, in my experience you simply must be willing
to become a hobbyist. A serious one. And do it for the same reasons
that you do any hobby - because you love it or are enthralled or
fascinated by it, and by some measure which may be different from
someone else's measure, it "gets you somewhere."
And unless you know you have found an expert to help, claims of "we
support this" or "this works," especially when made by an
organization with a financial interest (e.g. Terrasoft and others)
should be viewed skeptically. Generally, the list of supported
machines is suspicious at best. I'm not at all sure the 6500, for
example, should be listed as a supported machine, because there are
reasons to believe that Apple's design has motherboard bugs, because
getting ethernet reliably working on it is a complete crapshoot (or
worse), and because at least one serious kernel hobbyist has told me
the 6500 is a special machine with evil tendencies. But everyone says
they support it, and it ain't no new machine. But I persevere with
it, god knows why.
So become a hobbyist, be frustrated and sometimes happy, and to do
OOTB productive mundane work on a daily basis, consider buying MacOS
or even Windows. Someday, Linux may, or may not, provide the same
experience.
Stefan Jeglinski
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu Mar 07 2002 - 10:10:48 MST