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posted by janrinok on Saturday October 24 2015, @07:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-2015-and-things-are-easy dept.

I remember a story on the other site years ago when, following the Mojave Experiment, some guys did their own Folgers Test, asking people what they thought of this new (unidentified) UI and most of those folks thought it (KDE) was just more of Redmond's stuff.

Now, there's this story from OpenSource.com.

- Linux is so easy, anyone can install it--even by accident

One day, [...] a user's Windows install went corrupt on her laptop and she accidentally installed Linux. When her laptop couldn't [load the OS] from the hard drive, it automatically booted [to] the network. When she got the PXE install menu, she just hit Enter, installing a Linux desktop with all of our default network security settings and applications.

She then logged into it with her network account and emailed me to say that her Windows had updated and she wanted to know why her Microsoft Office looked so different now and "Where did Outlook go?" We had a good laugh over how Linux is so easy you can install and configure it by accident now, even on a laptop.

Hat tip to Robert Pogson for spotting this. The comment by IT pro oiaohm is, as always, insightful (once you adjust for his dyslexia).


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 25 2015, @04:31AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 25 2015, @04:31AM (#254234) Journal

    Well - things are at the point that you can boot to a LiveCD, and have a working network, all of your drives are discovered, and the correct video driver put to use. Everything "just works". The installers naturally use the information on your hardware that was discovered by the LiveCD. And, in my experience, the installation _almost_always_works_ without further tweaking. That is, you will generally get the Windows user's experience that it "works out of the box".

    Sometimes, things don't work after all. Then you need to know what your video card is, or your wireless/WIFI card or your hard drives, or whatever.

    I hope I'm making it clear.

    Of course, even when you do get a system that "just works" on a fresh install, most of us are going to start tweaking on it anyway. One of us is going to scream, "NOT ENOUGH SECURITY!" while others whine, "This security is just so inconvenient." Another person insists that everything is just to slow, so he starts tweaking the file system, and on and on it goes.

    SystemD put something of a crimp into installations. A lot of what I knew about Linux didn't work exactly the same anymore

    Long story short, a know-nothing can still find it a very daunting experience to install Linux, especially if his hardware isn't supported by the distro maintainer. An experienced Linux user can still run into snags.

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  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:05PM

    by isostatic (365) on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:05PM (#254329) Journal

    So Linux usually just works, otherwise you need to know your hardware
    Windows NEVER just works, you always need to know your hardware. And the right place to get drivers.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:54PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:54PM (#254332) Journal

      Yes, drivers for Linux are pretty much known today, and ship with the distro. Linux is vastly superior to Windows in that respect. Except, when it doesn't work. For instance, I bought a "gaming" keyboard. No drivers. Some keys don't work, and the keymapping is messed up. So, I go searching, and only one guy on the entire internet has anything that resembles my keyboard. It's not my keyboard exactly, but it resembles mine. Attempt to install, it doesn't work straight up. Go back and read his documentation, and it looks like I might make it work. Fiddle around with it for awhile, almost give up, take one more crack at it, and WHOO-HOOO! It works!

      Azio keyboard . . . http://swoogan.blogspot.com/2014/09/azio-l70-keyboard-linux-driver.html [blogspot.com]

      So, I have one bit of hardware for which I had to work. Compare that to my first ten or twenty attempts to install Linux, during which I logged failure after failure.