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Re: [LUG] Ubuntu in the 'real' world

 

Vivi Griffin wrote:
> 
> I guess that when you have used Linux for a bit, you don't necessarily 
> expect everything to work first time. 

I think it depends what you are buying.

If you buy preinstalled hardware, I expect everything to work first 
time, and as far as I can tell this is true for this reviewer except for 
plugging in his iPod (which wasn't something advertised as working, and 
wasn't bought with the machine in question).

What is depressing is the number of big hardware vendors who seem to see 
GNU/Linux as an excuse to ship second rate work.

HP famously shipped a laptop with a GNU/Linux distro preinstalled 
without the wireless working ?!

DELL shipped us a server preconfigured Redhat 9 where the hardware RAID 
performance was somewhat less than the performance of software RAID on 
the same hardware. They did have a patched kernel when we asked, but I 
think it was pretty sloppy work at the time. Might seem relatively minor 
but when you buy a rackmount server with a few disks, a CPU, a network 
card, and hardware RAID, there are only so many devices they need to get 
working and tested properly!

Linksys routers also frequently manage to have bugs not existing the in 
the stock Linux kernel that some of the models use to use. So Linksys 
managed to add low level bugs whilst "improving" stuff in their system 
integration work - argh.....

If you are buying preinstall GNU/Linux not only should you expect it all 
to work, you should expect better value for money (since a lot of it was 
free (gratis) to the system integrator), and without per box licensing 
costs.

However people should appreciate that good system integration work, 
dotting i's and crossing t's costs real time and effort, and that you 
have to pay for that. Microsoft are still in the enviable position of 
being able to pass much of that cost onto the hardware manufacturers, 
although this doesn't always result in coherence solutions, as you end 
up with third party devices with completely weird configuration tools 
that work differently to the standard ones. Although I noticed a few of 
these for GNU/Linux appearing recently (although they were all free 
software so there is hope).

> However, what you end up with is 
> almost always worth the small amount of effort necessary to get 
> everything working the way that you want it to, especially if it is 
> someone else's effort - (-:)

If you step off on the path of self support, this is often the case, but 
on the other hand here be dragons! We'll slay them together easily 
enough I'm sure.

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