Wow.. just.. wow. Normally I don’t post much along the lines of commentary or responses to flame-inducing comments, but this one struck me. It’s the usual comment I see in a lot of these new distro release comment threads: Windows does this better, OSX does that better. The one major thing that irks me about this comment, however:

Quote:

You can make it very plain jane or super snazzy. Win2k, OSX, XP (and hopefully Vista and Leopard when they’re done) are stable, fast, easily customizeable, have so much support from software and hardware vendors, and most importantly, just work once you install them.

The support from software and hardware vendors comes from MS being dominant on the desktop. Had OS/2 or even Amiga taken off, then either of those platforms would have the most support. But I do take exception with Windows ‘just working once it’s installed’. My real world example has to do with my XPS box. When I reinstalled Windows, just Windows by itself, half of the hardware did not work because the drivers were not loaded. I had to either download drivers or throw CDs into the drive and load the drivers. In contrast, when I loaded Ubuntu (at the time), everything, with the exception of 3D, worked out of the box. My sound, my mouse, my video was acceptable, burning was all set to go out of the box. Printing was a matter of a couple of clicks. For reference, I have the same sound card as the commenter, so I’m not sure what his issue is. Another thing I’d like to mention in response to the video format issues. If any of those videos were Divx, then yes, even on Windows you would need to install a codec before you could view those. Obviously WMV needs codecs on Linux as well.

Granted, this commenter may have been looking for flames, but I figured this would make a good topic for a blog entry.