...drivers are often only "proprietary blobs".
-TaoPhoenix
Granted. But we need stuff to run whatever hardware we have. I can appreciate the purity issue, even endorse it. But at the end of the day (actually by mid-morning) we need a functional system. And that system involves both hardware and software. Without the software,
e.g., drivers, the system is a paperweight. End of story.
Documentation? Bleh! Cake!
-TaoPhoenix
If so, it needs more time in the oven
. What little documentation I've seen assumes perfection. But that's not a *nix problem,
per se, so much as an industry-wide trend. How often do you see software installation instructions, regardless the OS, that assume a perfect install and make no allowance for an install that fails in process? Oh, and about that three (3) days thing. I'm installing/using now, I need the documentation now. Three (3) day wait? I'll go elsewhere.
... *commission* it!
-TaoPhoenix
More than once, that have I done. The problem, of course, is finding someone capable of performing the job. And settling on amount can be, as you've mentioned/implied, a difficult issue.
It's not really fair to use a certain operating system your whole life (Windows) and then try out a different one that functions on different paradigms (Debian/Ubuntu) for a few hours and then say this new one is stupid/useless/whatever simply because you can't figure it out.
-Deozaan
Hm-m-m ... I started out with Big Iron Unix, several different flavours, dependent upon the vendor. On a personal level, I started with calculator scripts, then Tandy DOS, then MS DOS/IBM DOS. There were forays into CP/M (anyone remember that one
?), OS-9, PICS (beautiful database capability, you just had to rebuild it every weekend
), a few others that have long since passed by the wayside.
I've gathered from conversations here that a number of folk my age have had similar experience. So be careful when you make that, "... your whole life ...," accusation
.
When I gave my then-retired father a laptop, he didn't care what made it run, he just wanted it to run. He wanted email because he'd been told he needed it. He wanted to browse the Web to find things and just because he wanted to do so. He didn't want a financial program, he didn't want a document processor. One (1) thing he did want, though, was not to be bothered with daily, plebeian maintenance tasks. He wanted the TV/movie computer - you turn it on and it works. At that time, Linux didn't have a desktop interface (c'mon, x-windows?), so Windows was about the only option. He wanted something that
just worked, and Windows did. (Apple did, but it was just too damned expensive - a habit they've maintained over the years.)
OK, I wasn't trying to turn this into an OS conflagration. I just wanted to mention the problems I'd had with various flavours of Linux, and pretty much support what I assumed was the intent of the original post.
But I stand by my statements in regard to documentation and drivers. They are the two (2) biggest failings/drawbacks in regard to Linux' adoption on a wider scale.
Recent Posts
. It's most any marketer's dream to have scores of people doing what the marketer would have to pay an ad firm to do. What's more, those people will use contexts and descriptives than no group of ad firms could dream up. And those contexts and descriptives will be relevant/relative to the people to whom you speak, which means that there is [potentially] a lot more persuasiveness there than any ad campaign could even begin to approach. WoM is going to be the thing 
... until something better comes along 
. Yeah, free open source software (FOSS) sounds great, but those developers need some way to pay the bills while they're developing that FOSS 
. And there is that bottom line: I need to make a living while providing someone else with something for free, even though I enjoy the process (and, sometimes, the accolades).
?
.
. Seems there's a severe lack of technical writers in the open source community 
.
mentions/references to Text 2 Folders 
.
?
.
.
?