this is was amuses/gets me about Linux.....
We get told how everything is open sourced etc and it's one happy family but then I read endless stories on forums over many years of the various problems people have getting all sorts of things to work: from wireless cards to graphics cards and the rest - because they don't have the driver - or because the open source driver they have..well, it sort of works but doesn't really.
Now I appreciate some derive enjoyment from sorting it out/fixing.......but this is not how mainstream computing for the masses can ever work....
I tend to sit here scratch my head and think time is money. In MSWindows you buy the thingy, download the driver run the installation program - and it works end of.
I kind-of agree with that, though I am trying to stay open minded about it, and I am interested in learning more about Linux.
My experience so far is this :
When you want to do straightforward stuff, it all works ok.
When you start getting a bit more involved, it suddenly feels like Windows 3.11 / DOS - it quickly gets very complicated and there's lots of files to edit and parameters to change.
Perhaps Windows has made us all a bit lazy though
BTW, a lot of the software that I run on my Windows machines is open source. I'll have to do a tally, but I use remarkably little proprietary software, though my biggest usage (web/email) is Chrome and Windows Live Mail, so I ought to address that at some stage
The "buy the thingy, download the driver, it just works" argument is true, although market share of Windows is the main thing driving this.
I found these figures the other day, and they quite surprised me :
Worldwide O/S market share, March 2013
Linux 1.17%
Mac 6.94%
Windows 91.89%
(there's furhter breakdown of what versions of Windows make up that share in this link)
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/01/windows-8-now-up-to-3-31-market-share-as-vista-finally-falls-below-the-5-mark/I had genuinely expected Mac and Linux to be higher than that.
Ian