Drink!

>>Do we care that proprietary vendor lock-in devices like iPod don’t work seamlessly?

Feck!

>>Should we be putting effort in to making them work?

Arse!

>>So, should we be making Linux more like Windows to gain more market share?

Girls!

>>Or keep Linux unique and special?

That would be an ecumenical matter!

HTH, qian

From an outsiders perspective it would appear that a distro like Ubuntu is aiming to achieve the first goal, whereas any number of other distros are more firmly focused on the second, perhaps even shunning the first.

It sounds like the people you describe who don’t “get it”, aren’t really computer people, and perhaps they never will be.

I read something interesting recently about the tech service/support industry and getting people to report error messages correctly. The writer put forward the idea that these days pretty much everyone is required to use a computer at work, even though a lot of them may not like using it, may not want to and don’t actually know how to use it well. The writer said that *most* people who use computers develop a filter in their brain to remove all the unnecessary noise/data that is threatening to overwhelm them and focus in on a specific set of tasks.

An example he gave was that when we first learn to drive, there is an incredible amount of information to process and it freaks you out. Over time your brain begins to filter out everything except what you need to see to be able to drive according to the road rules.

In the same way, people who are using computers learn to do a set of actions to produce the result they desire, filtering everything else out. They don’t care how things work, they don’t particularly want to learn new things and find out ‘why’. If anything happens outside that set of ‘action, action=>result’, they panic and don’t know what to do.

For most of these people – who I view as ‘Average Joe Windows’ – that the linux debate seems to be about, linux is way too far outside their comfort zone and probably will be until MS is no longer the default option.

Personally, I think linux is something for people who enjoy technology, who like computers, and/or who like to learn.

Also, as I’ve been looking a lot into the ebook/ereader industry lately, there are some shocking figures about the current literacy rate of people and the amount of books people read a year.

It seems most people these days just don’t want to learn anything new that isn’t handed up to them in a passive manner (TV).

This comic really hits home about the mindset of the general public.
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html

For more info see the excellent LWN article on “The trouble with discard”.

Something like this howto might help.

-c

I did it with fedora 12 and now I have 3 OS installed on my macbook.
how about wireless and brightness keys drivers?

There’s the usual Linux tools like ifconfig and iwconfig (as well as wpa_supplicant, if you have it), which you can use once you stop the NetworkManager daemon. Other than that I’m not sure, but you might want to check out cnetworkmanager, the command line interface for NetworkManager.

-c

What is the command-line equivalent to Network Manager applet, in case I want to start wlan0 (Wireless Network) or eth0 (wired) from cmd-line/virtual terminal.

Thanks,

Jay