Replies

I'll tell you what. I'll consider switching when they release a distro of linux that doesn't randomly decide to quit recognizing my video drivers of its own volition.

I've been there done that with respect to Linux. I am not impressed.

What kind of video card?

A lot of people aren't impressed, and I can understand why especially with your frustration involving the video card. I recently suffered this pain with a NEW Nvidia card which was a bit too new. I'm usually pretty good at solving these types of problems and this one pretty much maxed me out. I came very close to just taking it back and buying another (older) one. In the end, I managed. But it was definitely frustration, and definitely NOT something that an end user should have to deal with. Until Linux OS developers can take the "edge" off of things such as this, end users are going to shy away from it.

In the LAN/WAN management arena however, Linux is a very impressive. It's like a huge tool box at the disposal of the person who knows enough to be able to use it. The problem is that these "type" of people aren't usually "normal". Here's a case in point though, and it happened just this past Friday.

My team lead where I work came to me and needed a system which gathered network traffic for three of our remote sites (out of 100), from three different interfaces on our sniffer (a Debian Linux server with a bunch of Gigabit Ethernet cards in it), but he ONLY wanted to see traffic to and from a certain specific service, and he wanted the capture sessions to span ONE HOUR intervals. He wanted to be able to retrieve the data and load it into a protocol analyzer so he could troubleshoot a problem. We solved the above problem with nothing more than what ships with a stock Debian Linux server distribution. In fact, the one we used is way, WAY out of date and dreadfully in need of patching. We've put it off because a lot of people use the machine in my group for troubleshooting and they won't let me take it down to patch it!

But I CAN empathize with the video card problem. Things like that can and do keep Linux relegated to nerds and uber geeks. It's moving into the user realm slowly though.

I just think it's a shame that MS didn't change their vile greedy ways and integrate something with Linux. Mac did this with OSX using BSD and it's one of the nicest operating systems I've ever checked out. MS doesn't share though. If they can't OWN all of it, they try to kill it...something they've tried with many other operating system producers.