Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Sarah
If you're up for a little extra work, but an even more solid OS, try out Gentoo Linux. Customizable galore.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by KOS-MOS
Gentoo sure does have reputation as the most hardcore distro for the most 1337 Linux users.
|
It does. And frankly, I'm not all that impressed. I'm using it right now and sure, I prefer it overall to Fedora Core (which is what I used before) and much prefer it to Windows XP (which is what I used before that), but... I've spent more time than I care to pawing through various forums trying to find a post that would tell me how to get ACPI working or have it recognize my joystick or my mouse wheel or stuff like that.
The argument for Gentoo is that it's customizible as heck, and I can respect that and see how some people might like that. However, I'm learning that it's more important to me to be
easily configurable, even if I don't get that many options, rather than offering me a bajillion ways to incorrectly set things up. I've already messed up my USE flags and I'm tired of rooting through every config file on my machine trying to figure out where I've mis-set some critical variable.
Okay, end rant. My point? One of the huge selling points of Windows (and even moreso, MacOS) is that, while they may not be as powerful as Linux, they're much easier to use. KDE rocks, but since Linux isn't centered around it the same way that other OS's are centered around their desktop software, you wind up having to dig under the hood and resort to the command line to fix things much more frequently. This is the stigma that Linux has been branded with and, whether valid or not, it's why people are afraid of it and thus, why Dell believes it won't sell as well as Windows machines.
The short version of what I'm saying is that techies can use Linux just fine - hence it ships on workstations - but most people who are savvy enough to be using Linux as a desktop machine are also savvy enough to download and install it themselves.
Don't get me wrong - I think it'd be awesome if they started offering some simple distro - not Gentoo, but maybe Fedora or Suse - but Dell is just afraid that the market for those things is too small to be worthwhile.