[CLUG] SuSE 9.3 Review

[Mark Twomey]

Adam wrote:

> That being said, I do end up asking myself at the end: Why is this guy
> writing for the Inq?

Yes, he obviously is a bit thick about this, which makes him the perfect 
person to see if it's ready for mere mortals. A Linux guy saying it's great 
for granny holds no water, because he probably didn't see it as too big of a 
deal to compile the proper module to enable sound support. The fact is that 
like most other Linux distributions it isn't ready for mere mortals and for 
Linux to be viable on the Desktop is should be pre-installed and 
pre-configured on systems *at the factory*.

The reason why so much software for Linux sucks for average users is that 
the authors assume the user will "make an effort", which usually involves 
skilling up on operating system administration. As such we now live in a 
world where even Eric Raymond is complaining that he can't print. I'd bet if 
someone had come along and set all this stuff up before hand the Inq guy 
wouldn't have had a complaint in the world.

Linux fails the desktop test because it assumes the user wants to be an 
admin, Windows passes because back when they coined the "It just works" 
slogan, which MS were throwing around since before the introduction of 
Windows 95, they made it look like you didn't have to be an admin. In doing 
so they opened the market up to the tidal wave of vulnerabilities we've been 
seeing, but they proved the point that end users when given a choice will 
chose not to be administrators.

Computer users don't care about how or why something works, that's what we 
have computer geeks for.

Mark.