Langa bashing (was Re: Problems getting Linux into homes)

[Craig Thomas]

On Sat, 2004-04-24 at 05:48, John Lagrue wrote:
> Fred's whole article is about the lack of ease of installing 
> Linux with any hardware. Hiss whole thrust is that all varieties of 
> Windows works with his hardware, whereas Linux doesn't. Of course that 
> is because lack of drivers provided by the hardware manufacturers, but 
> that is beside the point. 
How is this beside the point? thats just begging the question. When was
the last time any one held M$ responsible for driver problems?  As an
illustration: when I purchased a Linksys  wireless network card with
only a Wintel driver, and said driver didn't work with w2k, it wasn't M$
who published the work around, but Linksys.    

> The whole point being that Linux is still not 
> entirely ready for the home market, when compared to Micro$oft's 
> installations.
I wont disagree with the statement that Linux isn't entirely ready for
the home market. However, that doesn't sound like Mr. Langa's whole
point to me. Why does he write:

"I'll name names later (if you've been following along, you may know who
it is anyway), but the problem I'm discussing isn't specific to one
distribution--- it's far more widespread than that. So, for now, let's
just say I was trying distribution "XYZ," a polished commercial Linux
that seeks to go toe to toe with Microsoft Windows."

'Naming of names '  ...a Linux distribution...clearly the intention is
to hold 'them' responsible for  hardware compatibility issues when
'they' aren't the responsible parties.  That argument is logically
fallacious in at least 2 ways: 1-ignoring the common cause that many
hardware vendors don't release drivers for Unix;  2-he makes a hasty
generalization by lumping many[all] distributions together.


> John

-Craig