Yesterday I had to install drivers for my printer on a housemate's laptop. It took about an hour to find, download and install them (and even then somehow we managed to get an installer in Dutch and muddle through).
It made me realise just how spoilt Linux users are that things Just Work...
2 comments:
When I installed the TV card on my MythTV box, it took two of us (me & Simon Cozens) most of a day to work out how to get the thing running, with kernel patches and recompiling and all sorts going on.
Then we had to patch MythTV itself to get it to switch the sound on for the card, but the patch was for an old version of MythTV, so needed adjusting. So it's not true to say that one platform is in general easier than that other.
Out of interest, which card?
When I first got my TV card (a Hauppauge Nova-T) it wasn't supported in the kernel that my release of SuSE used. I eventually (as a Linux noob) managed to compile a newer kernel and get it working (but break other bits of the system)... The drivers have long since been in mainstream distros' kernels, so again it Just Works, where the Windows drivers are renowned for being a PITA.
Another example of FOSS spoiling me recently: in order to get SQL Server to accept connections from anything other than its own Management Interface (even on the same machine) I had to dig around for three almost-identical dialog boxes in completely different applications, and tell it to accept TCP connections in each one, in the right order, and then reboot. With MySQL that would have been a one-line change in a config file and then restart the daemon process... maybe I've just been using Linux for too long, but that just seems so much nicer to me...
Post a Comment