Joke aside, it makes me happy to see the transition from Microsoft to Linux has been a success. I remember reading the news headline when they first announced it. I wonder how many of the 22,000 government officers that use Ubuntu at work are now also using Ubuntu at home?
The display drivers needs a lot of work (intel seems solid). Also, desktop itself needs to be super stable.
Also, the software (from companies) is treated like a second-class citizen. Chrome is horrible on linux, --disable-gpu --audio-buffer-size what user is going to bother with that?
I have to do all these tweaks and workarounds to get things to work. Regular users will not have the patience do this.
The year of LOD will only happen when everything is stable and works. Imagine if CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu on a server were this flaky? Would you use it? This is why people jump ship to Mac.
Really? Chrome is a first class citizen on ChromeOS, so I'd expected other linuxes to be well served, too.
By the way, I don't think ChromeOS is a good example. Can you use Firefox on ChromeOS? I consider ChromeOS like purpose-specific, dedicated hardware (like a router). It is a start though. By the way, Chromebooks use intel gpus - they are pretty solid.
LOD has to be better than alternatives by a significant margin in order to attract users.
No thanks.
Sorry, I'll end my rant now.
[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140#c1...
I have found the exact opposite experience.
I only mentioned Mac because many HN users cite their experience on linux as not being a good one.
On the other hand, System76 computers are not available in Germany. Best bet is probably is Sputnik from Dell, although their Ubuntu configuration is not that good.
4th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-4210U processor (3M Cache, up to 2.7 GHz)
UBUNTU Linux 12.04 LTS (64-bit)
13.3 inch LED Backlit Touch Display with Truelife and FHD resolution (1920 x 1080)
8GB1 DDR3L at 1600MHz
128GB Solid State Drive
Intel® HD Graphics 4400
3.02 lbs
Dell Price $1199.99
Not giving Microsoft money means you are not funding the exact reason why Linux on the desktop is obscure in the first place.
If MS did not have such comprehensive control of the consumer computer space, they would not have pervasive "deals" with every vendor to lock them in to shipping Windows across the board. Because if you, as a hardware manufacturer, install Ubuntu and make sure all the drivers work, out of the box it is no more buggy than Windows is at this point - probably less, and much more usable than Windows 8 for the average joe.
But Microsoft has a firm grasp across the entire industry on all the vendors, and their ubiquity for 20 years has given them mindshare you cannot easily unravel. And giving them more money is not helping that.
Sometimes you can also find occasionally a laptop in a store with FreeDOS, but I've never seen one being sold with Ubuntu.
If you think about it, Android's problems with open source allowing manufacturers to have their own flavours of Android, is one of the reasons why the average user might think TouchWiz (or other skins) is Android and that's why it sucks.
Note that this is just _one_ reason I believe LOD won't be a thing, there surely are more.
One is not really dependent on the other. You could use open source and not allow modifications or you could use closed source software and allow endless customization.
I also don't consider it an "android problem" that manufacturers do this. Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.
Good point.
> Most of the good stuff ends up in standard android after a while, which wouldn't have happened if no one was allowed to make the changes in the first place.
This was mainly due to Google pushing more stuff through Play Services. It would be nice if there was some more control/constraints on Linux flavours.