Originally Posted By: FastGame
One thing that fascinates me are people and their home computers and the OS they choose. Everyday people are happy as a lark using their I phones, Android phones, I pads, Samsung pads. Mention the word Linux OS on the home computer and these same people freeze and go into shock, why ?
I think the answer to your question lies in the question itself. All of the Linux-based platforms you mentioned have highly polished user interfaces and the backing of very large multi-national corporations. The user experience is smooth, bugs (for the most part) are found and squashed in large multi-tiered testing protocols. Software programmers are highly skilled, highly paid, and are accountable to the company for which they work. The company can set a development direction and go there.
Open source stuff is great, but there are certainly both pros and cons. Testing regimes are not as deep as you'll find with for-profit corporations and, while they are generally highly skilled, programmers and developers are often not paid and they're not accountable to any one organization. The "way ahead" can seem foggy and ill-defined. Linux has been forked in hundreds or thousands of directions. No causal end user can attempt to keep up with it. The popular fork today may be yesterday's news tomorrow.
I have Edubuntu on an old laptop, and it works. It's sort of clunky, generally doesn't perform any better or worse than Windows 7 on that machine, and suffers from driver compatibility problems (wireless Broadcom NIC). With the help of BITOG, I worked through it (
relevant thread). I don't use this computer very often, though, and really only hold on to it because it works and I hate to get rid of it.
I like to say that I use it all. From Microsoft, we have a personal desktop running W10, a personal laptop running W10, and my work laptop running W8.1. From Apple, my wife's iPhone and iPad run the latest iOS version. My old iPhone 4s serves as a Pandora-playing device for our daughters. We used to have an iMac, but didn't like OS X and we sold it, but we gave it an honest 1+ year test drive. I have an Android phone running KitKat 4.4.4, a Chromebook running Chrome OS, and the one Edubuntu laptop.
My preference, going forward, is to not focus on the operating system, but the accessibility it offers. I frankly don't care whether the OS is Linux, Windows, OS X, Chrome OS, or anything else. As Jobs used to say, the interface should blend into the background and let the content move forward. While he was obviously peddling Apple's line of software, it's a concept that applies to anyone...use whatever you like to use and that's easy for you to use. We're so used to Windows and how it works that Windows really disappears and lets us do the things we want to on the computer. It's the household equivalent of an appliance -- it just WORKS.
I guess that's a good segue to the natural automotive analogy, here. To a goodly number of people, what they drive just doesn't matter, and as long as they get from Point A to Point B, they're happy with just about anything. Those people are happy in family sedans like Camrys or Accords or Malibus. To others, getting from Point A to Point B is, well, the
point, and they enjoy M3s and RX-8s and Camaros and Mustangs. The real tinkerers, meanwhile, are building and driving rat rods and kit cars, never happy with "mainstream". And it's all good. Each side looks at the others wondering, "how could they possibly be happy with
that?"
It's all just personal preference.
