I am also bemused by the "oh, you'll need to do a complete reinstall for that" comments. I don't have 2 days spare to sit mesmerised by a PC monitor reinstalling software suites.... I sometimes wonder if the posters on here actually USE their computers, or do they just play with them. To me, its a tool to do a job, and sometimes entertain me a little, just like my TV or my camera. I don't want to have to spend months learning how to use it, there's enough of a learning curve with the software applications, the OS should just be a load up and use, experience, surely?
If anybody made that kind of comment, they're quite wrong. The major Linux distributions are extremely upgradable; the joke about the Debian installer used to be that it was so bad because nobody ever used it more than once. Most problems you may encounter on a Linux system can be solved without even a reboot, let alone a reinstall, in a way that has never been true with Windows. I have several machines which have gone from Debian version 2.1 all the way through to 6.0 without a reinstall (and a major upgrade usually doesn't even require a reboot). Not only that, but those systems are not full of cruft and bloat because I can easily identify which package
every installed file belongs to, which libraries or other dependencies are no longer needed, which packages were automatically installed to fulfill other dependencies - and clear them all out*. If I choose to, there are GUI tools to make it even simpler. A windows box which had gone through the equivalent set of upgrades without a reinstall from scratch would almost certainly be unusable by now.
That said, the quality of new
Ubuntu releases has been a little patchy, of late.
The last few pages of this thread have been about one person's bad experience with one hardware/software combination. The web is full of examples of people suffering the same kind of problem with Windows and when you find that Windows won't boot past a certain point, there's often sod-all you can do about it because it doesn't have the loose coupling between the core and the GUI. The fact that there's a CLI you can drop back to to fix things - even in the boot loader - isn't a fail, as somebody bizarrely tried to assert. There
are perfectly good Linux GUIs that allow you to browse your network and mount remote shares without resorting to the command line (another claim made in ignorance, above), but the things you can do through the GUI are
also controllable (and open to inspection) through the CLI, giving you more power if you want it. In Windows, if somebody didn't design a tick box on a dialog box for it, you probably can't do it (you
might be able to fix it by hacking around the registry, sometimes, but that hardly counts as shiny GUI friendliness, does it?)
(Oh, and OS X can't really be compared to either Windows or Linux in this context, since it is only intended to be installed on a limited range of officially supported hardware, not the massive range available to the other two).
None of the explicitly user-friendly Linux distributions have quite the finished polish of Windows or OS X but they're very usable for an increasingly large number of people who do not class themselves as geeks at all. I
am surprised that Ubuntu doesn't automatically configure a boot option to load with the lowest-common-denominator VGA/VESA video driver. It's not a daunting task to create "Safe Mode" boot options for Linux.
So, how usable is Linux for me? Its not, its a total fail, however much I want to find a replacement for the products of the evil empire. Win7 offered me a service pack yesterday, it just worked. Yes, its huge, its bloated, and it costs money, but it does what I need it to do.
At the end of the day, if the vendor doesn't release the software in a Linux version, they just don't. Sometimes there's an equivalent that does have a Linux version, a surprising amount of Windows software can be run under Linux using Wine, but some stuff just isn't available. That may, depending on your current requirements, make it not the right choice for you, but it's no more a "total fail" than the unavailability of Final Cut Pro for Windows.
*I don't think Windows users always realise how much they have just become accustomed to, in terms of limitations and inflexibility, or that people coming the other way might (and do) say "What? You can't do *what*?!"
