[mdlug] Linux push an economic phenomenon?

[Aaron Kulkis]

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 00:29 -0500, Garry Stahl wrote: 
>> Dan Pritts wrote:
>>> but...it's Unix, and it's a nice desktop environment. And I do not
>> EVER spend time dorking around rebuilding my kernel to get something
>> to work, nor do I ever have to dork with an Xfree86 configuration.
>> There are things that don't work exactly as I like, but the time I
>> used to spend customizing things to be "just so" I spend doing
>> something else instead. 
>> I never had an issue with that using Linux on the desktop.  It doesn't
>> waste my time.  I have never rebuilt a kernel to get something to work.
> 
> "never" is a very long time.  I recall when LINUX on the desktop was
> tricky and LINUX on the laptop was dicey.  But that is *not* currently
> true.  I use LINUX on a laptop as my primary machine - everything works
> out-of-the-box.  No fiddling with X, no kernel compiling.  It has pretty
> much worked out-of-the-box for the last three to four years [assuming
> you purchased hardware with the intention of running LINUX - if you just
> try to throw it on whatever you have lying around I am certain your
> experience will be quite different].

I've been using Linux on the desktop since 1998, and i don't
recall it ever being tricky, let alone dicey.

And with my first machine, I hadn't even consulted a hardware
compatibility list before building it -- and EVERYTHING worked.

The only difference was that the install ncurses driven
rather than gui driven.

I've heard of problems, but they primarily come from
"to-the-grave" MS-fanboys who would simultaneously
swear that Linux needed a kernel rebuild every day while
swearing up and down that Windows never blue-screened
(this when the Linux kernel was still in the 0.9x.y stage,
and US Army Bosnia's LINUX-run mail-server had been up
for over 400 days straight, and typical windows machines
were having difficulty staying up for a whole week).