On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 12:30, Charles Howse wrote: > > How would it work the other way around? Suppose you were > > having your first experience by installing windows and about > > 3,000 programs all at once. It doesn't usually happen that > > way because you buy the box with windows pre-installed > > and can't afford that many add-on programs at once. > > Whew! I'd hate to know I had to spend that much time installing Windows > apps. A few years back I bought one of those Dell specials that came bundled with win95 and a bunch of windows apps. It came with 21 CDs. Later I changed the hard drive and reinstalled everything with win98. It took 3 days and I'm not sure I had it all working at that point. > I think it's great that Linux comes with so many applications! But, since > Linux is open-source, not everything works as expected, nor has sufficient > documentation. Would you agree? No, it isn't a symptom of being open source. It is more that you didn't pay someone to build and test your hardware with exactly the set of apps you need and pre-install most of it. If you google for any windows app and 'install problem' you'll find just as much trouble as anyone has with linux. If you look through Microsoft's knowledge base for problems you'll see they exist and things don't work as expected even on things that aren't open source. You just avoid a lot of the problems if you buy a pre-loaded, tested bundle. You can do approximately the same if you know someone with a system that already works the way you want by copying his exact hardware and software setup - and with free software it is even legal. > That's why I love my Mac. It 'just works', and it gives me all the great > Unix tools. Even there, you are just lucky - and you can expect to buy a new version of the software every year or so if you want to stay current. Macs rarely have to deal with the case of someone installing something that hasn't been tested under exactly the same hardware/OS combination - and I've had trouble with it anyway. My powerbook stopped talking to my firewire camcorder halfway through importing a tape. Several months and a few software updates later it worked again and there was nothing I could do meanwhile to fix it. > No one can know everything, that's why we ask questions. :-) And no one can answer everything, so they tend to reply to things where they have recently solved the same problem. Thus 'I got this error...' is a good thing to include with the question. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx