On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:54:29 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

>>> Well, if you decide exactly what hardware goes in, you can select only
>>> supported hardware. Easy. :-D
>> 
>> As a consumer, I don't, though.  The vendor builds the machine with
>> functioning hardware.
> 
> ...which is what I meant. If HP gets to pick what hardware goes in, they
> can pick exactly the hardware that works with whichever OS they're
> preloading.

Sure.  Now, how surprised are you going to be when I tell you that my HP 
didn't come with openSUSE installed, but with Vista installed, and I 
installed openSUSE with no problems?  (Only thing not working is 
wireless, and I don't care about that - but I understand there are 
drivers for Linux for it, just can't be bothered).  This thing's got an 
Nvidia chipset ethernet card in it, not exactly a common type of ethernet 
card, at least not in my experience.

>> Now of all of these machines, which one has the most problems, do you
>> think?
>> 
>> Yep, it's the WINDOWS machine.
> 
> :-|   <== not shocked face.

Given that you're on v7, I'm not surprised. :-)

>> My wife has run Linux on her laptop since the day we got it, and hasn't
>> had any serious problems with it.  "Ah, but she has you to fix anything
>> she has trouble with", I hear you say.  Yes, but I can't remember the
>> last time I did anything on her machine other than shut it off at
>> night. She's pretty non-technical, but she's managed to figure out how
>> to use it, and she's shown some of our neighbors who were curious about
>> Linux.
> 
> Like I said, Linux has now become pretty easy to use once it's set up
> right. I find it's still tricky to set it up correctly sometimes, but
> once it works it's really not much different to Windoze. [Except no
> random OS crashes.]

It can be, particularly with laptops.  As I said, 5 years ago, it was 
fairly painful on laptops (in particular), but today the support is very 
good.

Jim

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