Re: Hardware hassles: Linux vs. Windows
Christian Convey wrote:
Do you guys have any reflections on why, for technical / social / market
/ whatever reasons, this difference exists between the two OS's exists?
And are those differences necessary or accidental?
Just FYI: here's a summary of the answers I've heard. Hope it's helpful.
Sorry if I left anyone out...
1) Some distros make handling new hardware easier than others. If you
want life to be really easy, at the cost of some control, try Mandrake,
Ubuntu, etc. Straight Debian might not be the best for someone who wants
life to be simple.
2) Different desktop environments also matter. For instance, Gnome
Volume Manager + HAL is pretty sweet; KDE has a different, less praised
facility.
3) There aren't enough Linux kernel developers to both write the low
level drivers AND to polish the plumbing related to making users lives
totally easy.
4) It's not always the case that it's easier under Windows. Sometimes
it's easier under Linux, especially for older or quirky devices. But
sometimes even new systems don't handle Windows well. Companies like
Sony or Toshiba sometimes include customized vesions of Windows which
are required to make their hardware work.
5) Linux's ability to handle hotplug devices is actually more powerful
than Windows' ability. But flexibility (user editing of udev/hotplug
scripts) can come at a cost (lack of a uniform approach across all distros).
6) It's a Bazaar thing. Debian is seriously more Bazarr'ish than most
other distros. People have lots of good (and sometimes bad) reasons for
building different solutions to the same problem. I.e., multiple
libraries for accessing a digicam via PTP. This variety, while good for
quickly evolving the OS, also leads to some incompatability that you'd
expect less with a centrally planned OS.
7) Linux's modularity, where different people work on different modules,
sometimes makes it hard for the system to have one, coherent response to
a hotplug event. It's not like, when udev was introduced, someone went
through all non-application code (i.e., xf86, alsa, libgphoto2, etc.)
and modified them to have a coherent response to plugging in some new
device.
--
Christian Convey
Computer Scientist,
Naval Undersea Warfare Center
Newport, RI
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