OT: For all the Window haters

Linux hardware detection and driver installation has been a lot better in the last two or three years. At least that's how it seems to me, mostly using *buntu and other Debian based distros.

My last Debian install was smoother and faster than any Windoze install I've ever done. Debian 7 on a laptop (now six and half years old) is far and away the best computer system I've ever had. Soon I'll give it a new

Living with GNU/Linux is good.

I'm not expecting to pay any more for Windows-10 than I already have - nothing. The upgrades I've already done have required no extra hardware, if a PC can run Win-7 or Win-8 it likely has the hardware capability to run Win-10 (1 GHz processor, 1 GB memory....).

Whilst I run both Linux and Windows, as I have to run a number of Windows programs Linux is not universally suitable for me. And I can use Windows-10 to program my Raspberry Pi 2, should I wish.

I doff my hat to you for your excellent software for Windows, but it's no longer a platform for me: too many weaknesses and liabilities. (And I've rediscovered the fun of tinkering, with things like bash, awk an gnuplot.) I'm sure that if anyone can do anything useful with Win-10 in RPi2, you can, but it seems to me like a waste of good hardware.

The one Windows program I still use works well enough under Wine, dates back to pre-Linux MS-DOS days, and its author doesn't much like Windows either. :)

I just had to cross post this to where there's a 'windows just works' thread running..

Same goes for Fedora. For years its main bugbear has been the sheer pain of upgrading to the next version on its 6 monthly release cycle. That involved: (a) burn a DVD (b) do a cold install from the DVD (c) run a massive "yum update" (d) pull in all the nonstandard packages you need (e) get your various services up and running

IOW Fedora was almost as much a pain to upgrade as Windows, except that you only had to reboot once.

Since Fedora 20 most of that's gone: you simply run the FedUp utility, which does an in-situ, and quite lengthy, online upgrade to the new version. This is followed by a reboot and 'dnf upgrade', which takes a bit longer than my usual weekly run, and more or less everything is up and happy once again. yum, the old RH package installer, has always been pretty good (some people have said its package dependency resolution is better then apt) and its recent replacement, dnf, seems to be very much the same but a bit faster and slicker.

But then you cannot run those Windows programs on it!

I may adopt Win 10, I rarely use Windows, and only then for some legacy programs I need to run from time to time. My OS of choice is Linux, a mix of Ubuntu and Mint, although I need to use Sci Linux for as well. I also have a Mac and therefore use MacOS, which I quite like. Ditto some IOS devices but I'd not say either was my OS of choice. I also tinker with R Pi's, again Linux.

I'd say I was very much pro-Linux but also a realist, it has some issues, like any OS. One of these is, of course, lack of driver support. The welcome post by mm0fmf is refreshing news. Of course, I appreciate the lack of driver support is more to do with the HW manufacturer BUT it is perceived as an OS issue, and that is what counts when it comes to adoption.

I'm not anti-Windows, I certainly prefer Linux to Windows by a considerable margin, but that doesn't mean I must be anti-Windows or believe the claptrap which the conspiracy theorists pour out. If anything, their brand of support for Linux is rather like the ISS brand of Islam, it isn't doing the cause of Islam any favours.

There's no "conspiracy theory": Microsoft's success is due more to marketing, bribery and bullying than to quality, and the governments of both he US and UK are clear in their desire to spy on law-abiding citizens. M$ software is closed-source and self-evidently bloated and hardware-hungry, and they themselves admit harvesting personal data and colluding with governments by providing backdoors.

It is Micro$oft which has brought the computer industry into disrepute.

Nah. IBM was first. Microsoft just followed along..

-- New Socialism consists essentially in being seen to have your heart in the right place whilst your head is in the clouds and your hand is in someone else's pocket.

Indeed. Far too many noobs don't know who the real enemy is. ;-)

I'm convinced that Brother Hils isn't a real person but a bot put together by some AI undergrads to see if they can produce a Conspiracy Eliza. Either that or the former script writer from Radio Albania in the

Anyway, he neatly typifies the Windows Hater who hasn't noticed the seismic changes occurring since MonkeyBoy left MS.

Microsoft have picked up IBM's ball and run amok with it. Microsoft are the real cyber terrorists.

What a sheltered life you have led, but that is what bourgeois education and propaganda does to people.

LOL. I neither want nor need to pay Microsoft [*] for already-obsolescent, bloated, backdoored spyware, and I'm a "hater"?

This is Radio Tirana, broadcasting from the People's republic of ^^^^^^ Albania.

You are wasting your ac wireless with that, the Intel 7260.HMWWBR ac

---druck

Indeed and I offer many apologies for giving the wrong name.

I have a Radio Tirana QSL card, received in 1974, somewhere in the loft. The postman didn't get to too many letters to deliver from Albania and rather than just pushing it through the letterbox rang the bell and wanted to know what it was. Cheeky bugger. My mother was concerned that her pre-teenage son was writing to such places as Albania during the height of the cold war. If the postman was intrigued what on Earth would the "feds" think! She hit the roof when stuff from Peking arrived :-)

LOL!....

I think you are confusing "works" with "has drivers for all the hardware"

:-)

But that is not the case at all... with Windows it is more often possible to FIND drivers for exotic hardware, even in cases where a Linux driver cannot be found or is of such abysmal quality that you would not want to have it on your system (or cannot, because it does not compile).

However, when comparing the collection of drivers included on the installation media, so that a freshly installed system works without having to Google for drivers and download and install them one by one until all the yellow exclamation marks (except one) are gone, Linux wins hands down! And that has been the case for many years.

In fact, with Windows it is normal that you will have to hunt down drivers after install but it is possible, with Linux it usually works out of the box and if not it is a sign of serious trouble ahead. (because installing separate drivers into the system is usually not going to work well, except for some special cases like video card drivers)

Not quite.

The legal status of some drivers means they cannot be 'provided in the installation disk' as they don't fall under the gnu public license terms but have to be 'pointed to at a separate repository' .

There is nothing wrong with them, apart from their proprietary nature.