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So after running a dual-boot PC with XP and Debian 6 for a few months, my wife splashed out on some new hardware and it's Linux only...
And one week into my wife having a 100% Linux desktop and it's rapidly becoming apparent that it's just not working for her )-:
It's bog-standard Ddebian out of the box - none of my "usual" tweaks, etc. it's as it is.
On the whole, it does work - it's a nice setup, 22" widescreen HD monitor, the on-board graphics seem fine - it's all Intel N10/i915 and more or less does OK.
Sound works, but no volume control... At least there is no GUI based volume control - volume in applications (e.g. bbc iPlayer does work OK) Launchin the gnome one whinges that it has no hardware to work with!
Printing - this is a major frustration.She has an HP PhotoSmart 2575 USB - I was plesantly surprised (the first time round) that it was detected and setup to work, but after printing a couple of pages it "breaks". There an obscure error message about it being disabled, and in it's properties it's then flagged as "disabled".
Same for the other printer we have - HP Colour Laser 4600N - Ethernet. It works - for a while, then finds some error and it's disabled. Re-enabling it makes it work again.
Printing used to be easy - see my previous whinges about it )-: Now with all this CUPS stuff, it's bloated and hard.
What I can't find out either is why it's breaking. No sensible error messages. Very frustrating.
The trouble is, being from a MS background, she's too used to turning it off and on again - she power cycled the laserprinter too, trying to work out why it wasn't printing - when I enabled printing in the properties it printer her document, by why had it disabled in the first place? There is nothing at all in the syslogs to indicate it had disabled the printer. This frustrating thing is that we went through this 2 days ago too and we did print something on both printers, so what's broken now?
(Incidentally both printers worked 100% of the time under Windows XP, and it turns out that she was having the same issues under Linux before, but she'd simply reboot into XP and print from there - now she's not got that option)
The other issue is of-course documents - in particular she's been sent some .docx documents that crashes openoffice.
"Due to an unnexpected error, Openoffice.org has crashed..."Asking the producer of those documents to change them produces the reply "well they work for everynoe else - it must be your PC". And in a way they're right, even if they're wrong.
How in this day and age, can opening as document cause an application to crash? Bonkers.
She has to read that document if she's to tender for the work it's specifying. That in itself is enough to make her think seriously about spending the extra on Win7 and MS Office )-:
And even if we get a fix for this, what's to say it's not going to happen again and again... It's OK for me, as I'm in a position to tell people who send me such incompatable documents where to go, (or spend the time finding the tools to fix it), but my wife isn't...
(Oh and don't get me started on Skype - which she needs to use to speak to her family - SIP based videophones don't work well enough for mere mortals - I've tried, spent a grand of my own money on them and failed there too )-:
Linux on the desktop for ordinary people? Sadly not yet )-: Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq