Who do newcomers give up on Linux?

[Amamba]

To answer the original question - why did I give up on Linux, many times (this spans probably 5 years and a dozen distros, mainly Ubuntu of various flavors, Mepis, Knoppix/Kanotix, Slax etc.)

- spotty hardware support. My old RivaTNT2 video card was then wasn't supported by Ubuntu, and mainly wasn't supported by other distros. More often than not I didn't have sound. More often than not I couldn't print. I was never able to hook up my WinMobile PDA, with or without Synce. I know I can't use my Visioneer scanner - not Linux fault, of course. Most distros wouldn't work with my laptops wireless.

- a very confusing way of adding drivers and soft. Laypeople hate commands

- in most distros I tried the fonts were jagged and no amount of playing with anti-aliasing helped.

- complaining about these problems brought much help but even more responses like "works on my machine you lying wintroll".

- downloading and installing software can be very easy or very hard, mainly it's inconsistent; some (Flashplayer, Shockwave) I was never able to make work

- Grub... well I won't even go there

- finally, WinXP (unlike most other Windows flavors before it) just works. At least for me (I'm Linux noob but fairly well versed in Windows at least on a user level).

Now, the good part... OpenSUSE is the most polished, and the most un-broken distro I've tried in years. It's amazingly useful right from the start, it detected most of my hardware right away, installing printer driver and flashplayer was, for a change, easy; it actually asked me if I want to change Grub loading sequence at install - I didn't have to mess with menu files to put Win XP as a default for wife's sake...

I still have some problems - e.g. I followed the codec install instructions but for the life of me can't get the DVD playback - but for most part, SUSE seems to be way above any other distro I tried, definitely a keeper on my machine.

[wakou]

Originally Posted by dragonbite

But seriously, any purpose of that post other than to flame-bait. (snipped)

BTW when I replied earlier to this post, thus:

not flame-baiting at all Mr Dragon, I would not dream of such a thing,

I had forgotten that I still had my Avatar loaded, which is, obv. a very childish bit of flame-baiting, constructed some time ago during an especially frustrating linux experience. I really must get around to changing it.