People who WANT to use windows … who PREFER to use windows … should be willing to pay whatever is needed, including just buying new hardware when their system goes stale, because that is how the proprietary model works, and it is the proprietary model that workds. For these people. Who WANT and PREFER Windows.

And I’m not really being snarky here. This is really true.

If there were more pre-packaged hardware factory-built with compatibility with Linux in mind (especially if they didn’t go through all the trouble of making a custom reformat process the way they do with XP — just give a plain old Ubuntu disk and use hardware components you know work with it), then the install base of Ubuntu could very well include that all-important grandmother demographic with ease.

The fact that the Linux kernel comes with modules for a far wider array of hardware than the XP default install, not to mention all the software goodies most distros come with for free and pre-installed, means the install process is far more likely to go smoother with Linux than with Windows on any given system. Yes, there are a few hardware components that are still a wee bit of a pain (I’m thinking extremely new technology and webcams, as all those previous trouble spots like wireless, scanners, sound cards, etc., are all mostly supported now), but for the most part, whatever you need to use is probably just going to work.

Additionally, if you need to tinker, having a wider install base means you’re more likely to be able to find support on the street, so I’m more than happy to introduce my friends and co-workers to Linux whenever I can. Many eyes make all bugs shallow and all that.

That is not true. What is true is this:

1) System X will run better on hardware chosen or designed to work with System X … Other combinations are potentially iffy

2) All else being random, Linux runs with more hardware than any other operating system extant today or at any time in the past.

That is all I’m saying. This has nothing to do with grandmother rediness, becuase we don’t actually expect grandma to build the computer on which she runs Linux any more than we expect her to build the computer on which she runs Windows.

The iPod is fine, it does exactly what it is supposed to do, and the iTouch has interesting features.

If my sister worked for Android I might have an android. But she works for Appple so I have an iPod.

I am very very ambivalent. Don’t be too surprised if this baby gets jailbusted at some point…..

(There will probably be some interesting blogging about that)

So there’s no love here. Just some playing with technology.

@22: That contradicts his claim (if I am reading everything correctly).

My first reaction was that this does contradict, not support, my claim, but actually it supports it. The gift wrapped system installtion is the key factor here. That supports the claim.

And by the way, a gift wrapped Windows install is useless two or three years later. If you wipe a system that is a few years old, your chances really are about the same. The reason my daugther has a nice HP laptop fully functioning with Linux (after an utterly painless install) is because my father-in-law could not get Windows back onto that computer because of this time delay issue. Drivers that needed to be installed so they could then be updated were being viewed as viruses, etc. etc. A total mess.

He now drives a Mac, and Julia has the HP running Ubuntu. Everybody is happy but Microsoft did not contribute one iota to that happiness.

@22: That contradicts his claim (if I am reading everything correctly). The claim is that computers sold with microsoft work better with microsoft and while I would expect that they SHOULD, my experience is much like yours – you have to do everything just so or it fails.
I suppose I should point out that this is not a general failing of proprietary software – I have experience with apple, sun and dec all managing to get multiple versions of the OS to work on various permutations of hardware (though generally limited to what they want to support).

Then I tried putting Windows XP Pro on it. This was a VLK CD, so it wasn’t the original Compaq template discs with all the crapware, which is good normally, except that the template discs came also with all the drivers. As they weren’t available to me, I had to spend hours downloading all the drivers from various sites as the model of Compaq wasn’t being supported by HP any longer. Then it wouldn’t read my USB flash drive, because the USB host controller drivers weren’t installed and they used some crazy stack that the XP default install couldn’t handle, so I had to find a blank CD to burn the drivers onto. If I hadn’t had another computer to use to do the downloading and burning on, I would have been up the creek.