David in Normandy wrote:

What a dreadful thought. Hardware that only runs with
Vista! I'm hoping that before too long all hardware vendors
supply drivers for all operating systems. But that may be
pie in the sky.

In my humble opinion there are two main reasons why the
likes of Ubuntu haven't yet made much impact on Microsoft's
monopoly:

1. Lack of plug and play for Ubuntu. People expect to
install an operating system and for it to work, full stop.
No hunting around the Internet for drivers to get all the
hardware components working, or spending hours on forums
trying to work out how to get the computer running
properly.

To be fair winXP is not much better at plug and play - loads of things
fail to install correctly and need the hunt the internet solution. The
difference is that most people never install windows - it comes on their
PC. Hence installing any OS from scratch can be a bit of a shock.

2. Lack of simple to understand graphical interfaces for
everything. People expect to open windows and click things
or select items from drop down menu's, not to open up
configuration files using some obscure text editor and edit
scripts written in "Martian".

Yup, true. Having said that needing to edit the registry in windows is
equally scary for most. In some aspects windows has even gone backwards
in this respect - just look how they have scattered about the networking
configuration options in vista compared to XP.

Until both points are fully addressed, I fear Linux will
remain largely for the computer geeks.

The Asus Eee may alter that a little...


--
Cheers,

John.

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