Note: I really hate giving the "Linux isn't for you" speech, I've heard it several times myself from some elitist doucherocket it some Linux chatroom who's there to troll, not help, but at some point, with a user lacking a certain level of experience, and/or amount of time, it is simply the case.
-Ehtyar
Well...that's pretty much what the Macintosh crowd says about OSX, so I guess it's not the first time somebody's made that argument.
And maybe it's just me...but...I still can't see how being told to "piss off" by someone who 'genuinely cares' is any more helpful (or less hurtful) than hearing it from "
some elitist doucherocket in some Linux chatroom who's there to troll..." Both hurt the cause - and neither advances the goal.
Perhaps I see things differently because I'm in the tech support business. I firmly believe that anything that is an
ongoing problem for the average user is indicative of a
fundamental design flaw in the system rather than a personal failing on the part of the user.
According to
Uncle 40Hz's Rainy Day Fun Book of System Design: In any well-designed system, an exception to the rule must always be the
exception - not the rule.
Ian Fleming said it even better. When he worked for the Britain's Naval Intelligence during the war, he said there was a saying about how to classify a reported incident. It ran something like:
Once is chance. Twice is happenstance. But three times is enemy action!Bingo! Beneath the chuckle is a brilliant insight. It's not the problem itself - it's the repeatability that's important. Every system - good or bad -will experience problems. The key difference is that a bad system will experience the same problems over and over.
I've since adapted that concept for my own use. The 'suitable for family viewing' version goes something like this:
If I'm clobbered by something once; or I hear two different people complain about the same thing; or one person runs into the same hassle on three separate occasions - it's a problem that needs fixing on the system level.
Just my 2¢
--------
Addendum:
The fact that certain cards can be cajoled into working with Linux has no bearing on my earlier point about suggesting that one of the big distros should consider manufacturing a NIX friendly wifi card. It's an action primarily directed at breaking the stalemate with wifi card manufacturers.
I was at a meeting about a year ago with one of the big network device manufacturers. I eventually wound up speaking to one of their senior engineers about why they didn't offer a native Linux driver. He said there were no technical reasons why they couldn't. (He even went so far as to characterize developing a native Linux driver as "a summer intern programming project.") He said the real reason was that his company wanted to minimize its tech support costs - so it had an
official policy of not supporting any OS other than Windows in order to cut down on the number of support calls received.
Now, if whoever made a NIX friendly card just supplied drivers for Linux, it wouldn't change anything. But if their competitively priced card
also shipped with Windows drivers, that would "drop an alligator across the transom" since it would now be in direct competition. If a buyer had a choice between a NIC that supported both operating systems, as opposed to only Windows, the more versatile card would have a distinct market advantage as long as its price and reliability remained competitive. And with the low cost of mass producing electronics, that shouldn't pose a problem.
Kodak did the same thing when the
DX Camera Autosensing Codes (CAS) came out for 35mm film. Kodak wanted all cameras to use the CAS feature. Since that would require a reader be built into the camera itself, most of the big camera manufacturers were reluctant (citing costs) to do so. Kodak countered by saying that Kodak was absolutely committed to the DX standard, and while Kodak hadn't manufactured a camera since they stopped producing their landmark Brownie camera many years before -
there was absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so if that's what it would take to hurry the adoption of CAS along.
Needless to say, that was all it took to get everybody else onboard.
Recent Posts
) 
is probably the best of breed when it comes to replacement firmware for consumer routers.)
