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FUD at Best Buy
In many parts of the US, the Best Buy chain is truly the best
bricks-and-mortar option for those looking for electronics and related
products. That is seen by many as a rather sad state of affairs, but such
is life; we can't all live in Akihabara. It is not a place where one normally
goes in search of technical expertise. Recent reports that Microsoft has
made an attempt to make the situation even worse should not be particularly
surprising - or concerning.
Recently, a Best Buy employee encountered some Microsoft training materials aimed at Best Buy sales people. Surprisingly enough, Microsoft would like these sales representatives to believe that Windows is a better operating system than Linux; Microsoft would also be most gratified if those representatives would convince their customers of the same. So it has put together a set of slides full of easy-to-remember sales points and gotten Best Buy to use those slides as training material. So why is Windows better? Apparently it offers a "richer and more engaging experience." It is, believe it or not, compatible with Windows, which is seen as a good thing. There is, we're told, better support for cameras, iPods, printers, and more. Windows Live stuff is not supported under Linux; neither is World of Warcraft. Best Buy employees are to tell their customers that Linux lacks "authorized support," it takes a lot of time to maintain and it doesn't offer "regular updates." There's no guarantee of security updates; "Linux users are on their own." There are no "step-by-step tutorials" for Linux. Some of Microsoft's claims have merit: it is almost certainly true that Windows users are more familiar with Windows than with Linux, for example. Others are clearly false. It's amusing to see the return of the "no support" FUD line - though it must be said that the support options available to an end user who buys a Linux-based netbook from Best Buy are limited. The "Geek Squad" is likely to prove a disappointing resource for confused Linux users. There is no mention that World of Warcraft can be run under WINE, but one should also bear in mind that there's probably no end of WoW junkies who have no interest in trying to figure out a Wine installation. Cameras work fine with Linux, as do music players, and printers are getting better all the time. The security claims still come across as laughable. It is clear that Microsoft is clearly playing a little loose with the truth here. The response on the net has been strong; Microsoft's attempt at Best Buy sales droid indoctrination appears to have touched a sensitive nerve. The Linux community does, indeed, show a high level of sensitivity for this kind of criticism. It has been years since Linux was dismissed as a toy operating system which was not to be taken seriously, but, perhaps, we still have some sensitive toes left from those days. But think about it: it's a rare corporation which does not attempt to make its products look better than those of its competitors. It's also a rare company which does not stretch the truth occasionally in the process. Lies and FUD are not justified, but they are normal. The fact that these techniques are being turned against Linux at this level is not particularly surprising. It just says that Microsoft sees Linux as a true competitive threat in need of the usual competitive response. Linux is being treated like just another competing product on the market. Much effort has gone into publicizing and debunking Microsoft's training slides. It is worthwhile to shine light on this kind of activity, and it is worthwhile to correct claims that are not true. But Microsoft's silly training slides are not a cause for great concern, hang-wringing, or outrage. They are just another ham-fisted attempt to fight off an increasingly worrisome competitor. As long as Microsoft keeps its fight on this level, we have little to worry about. (Log in to post comments)
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 5:26 UTC (Thu) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] As long as Microsoft keeps its fight on this level, we have little to worry about. Sorry, but that's definitely in the blase direction. Should we all stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's not happening? While MS latest fud campaign would suggest that they're worried about Linux as a competitive threat, letting them get away with it is not a good policy either. There are enough members of the public who are naive enough to take whatever MS says as the Truth and Nothing but the Truth (tm). Pretty soon everybody believes in MS fud it because that's "common knowledge". "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for all good men to do nothing", whoever said that.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 6:33 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
Edmund Burke.
The triumph-of-evil quotation Posted Sep 10, 2009 14:36 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] According to Wikipedia:The quotation "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing" although often attributed to Burke does not occur in his works or recorded speeches. It first appeared in the 14th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1968), which incorrectly sourced it to a letter that did not in fact contain the quoteMartin Porter has written two web pages on this quotation (start here) if you want a longer read.
The triumph-of-evil quotation Posted Sep 10, 2009 15:32 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
I stand corrected!
Well, sit.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 8:46 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link] There is no mention that World of Warcraft can be run under WINE, but one should also bear in mind that there's probably no end of WoW junkies who have no interest in trying to figure out a Wine installation. Cameras work fine with Linux, as do music players, and printers are getting better all the time.Dear Editor and fellow LWNers, I run Linux, and only Linux, for almost 15 years. My wireless router, phone, NAS, laptop, desktop all run Linux. I even subscribe to this LWN thing... While Linux have gotten a lot better, IMHO it is still a hassle for (smart but non-technical) people that just want to use a computer to run Linux. With the exception of security and updates, I agree with pretty much everything MS stated. [...] Lots of low cost hardware (think cameras) won't work out of the box with Linux, or work sub-optimally. Even a the high cost section it is problematic. Unlike Apple, it is not dead simple to know which piece of hardware will work with Linux. Having a "fine print" at the back of a box saying "RedHat Linux supported" (when it exists) doesn't compare to a large white apple in the front of the box. A common reaction I see in Linux forums (even at LWN) regarding complaints for such matters is denial, and or elitism. Denial normally happens by getting defensive at a complaint, and changing the subject: oh *my* (3000 US$) laptop suspends fine. *My* camera works. *Proof* your hardware is problematic, or *shut up*. Elitism is the word I use to describe when Linux enthusiasts start making arbitrary moral judgments out of someone's buying choices: "oh, people who buy such and such *deserve* the problems they get". Even technical Linux users may have to call the support line of a bank or something, at which point you will discover the company in question may not have a "step-by-step" problem solving sheet for Linux.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 9:28 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] In my 10+ years experience there is another kind of reaction to this kind of news, and -- you guessed it -- it's yours.If what you say is true, you have missed out all Windows versions starting with Windows 95. But I won't let this distract from my main point: yes, you are right! One can assemble a user/system/software/objective combination that does not work. Sometimes, the hardware is to blame, sometimes it's the software. Sometimes you just cannot do what you had in mind. Many times the user is the weak link. I have never been able to plug anything into a Windows system without going through an installation-of-the-correct driver hell -- but you won't hear me complain about this, because I don't think my experience is unexpected, interesting or even shared by other people. That's how it is. Microsoft claiming that there is no support for Linux is simply FUD. Like the article says. So what was your point?
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 9:56 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I installed a Canon scanner on my mother's XP laptop the other day and was shocked to discover an absence of much hell. This was a first: everything else I've ever installed on that machine has been a nightmarish mess of conflicting drivers and updates and contradictory instructions.
Compare to Linux on bleeding-edge hardware (Nehalem, bleeding-edge ATI video card, lots of memory, battery-backed RAID, USB printer, force-feedback joystick, obscure bizarro keyboard, you name it). It just worked. Sure 3D is missing but that's expected: everything else was flawless (I tried Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian, and picking the default options everywhere made installation a Just Hit Return/Click OK sort of thing).
Distro installers are really pretty good these days, and the system behind them supports just about everything.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 11:55 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
Look, the stuff you quote is mostly high-end hardware. That more often than not is well supported. Low cost, 'no brand name' stuff is where the real trouble seems to lie.
My parents have Linux in a desktop. When necessary, I do remote administration through SSH. Buying new accessories for folks like that is very complicated (notice that I live in another hemisphere). Most stuff they bought, or that someone else bought for them, gave us trouble before working.
[...]
Outside of the hardware support angle:
Every time they decided to call some form of support on the phone (web service provider, web banking) it has been a nightmare.
Technically minded people don't call help-desks very often, so most won't appreciate the trouble that saying that you are running "Linux" will cause at these moments.
You need to appreciate that when someone calls a help-desk, it is because the person is already at some level of trouble. There is barely any kind of support for Linux desktops in any kind of helpdesk system.
This target group is not suited for forums, mailing lists, or bug reports.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 14:51 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] high-end hardware. That more often than not is well supported.Conventional wisdom says that older, mainstream hardware is well supported, while new and not-widely used hardware may lack driver support. Low cost, 'no brand name' stuff is where the real trouble seems to lie.Yes, in Windows. I have a low-cost no-brand-name NE2000 compatible PCI ethernet card that I have been using since 1998. It came with a Windows 95 driver. It worked on Windows 95 (with some driver installation hell), and on Linux (without problems, and on lots of different versions). No go on Windows 98, 98SE, or ME, because there apparently was no NE2000 PCI support in Windows, and of course I had no manufacturer's web page (and then, even brand name manufacturers often don't supply drivers for old products for new Windows versions); this had the beneficial side effect of making Windows secure without effort while still having network connectivity in Linux. Windows XP finally came with a driver for the card; I have not tried other Windows versions.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 16:46 UTC (Thu) by wilck (subscriber, #29844) [Link]
> while new and not-widely used hardware may lack driver support
Unfortunately, most of the hardware sold in stores is new (usually no more than a year old). Have you recently seen a PC with an NE2000 NIC on a store shelf?
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 21:22 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] Unfortunately, most of the hardware sold in stores is new (usually no more than a year old).Yet, nix's experience tells us that even such hardware can work on Linux (but I guess he did select the hardware with Linux compatibility in mind). Have you recently seen a PC with an NE2000 NIC on a store shelf?Not for many years. All the cooler that the latest Linux kernel I use still works on it. And it was significantly earlier than Windows in supporting it out of the box.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 21:29 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
most hardware is new, but the vast majority of such hardware is not based on new chipsets, it's based on older chipsets.
with windows each device has a seperate driver, even if theya re identical at the hardware level (except for id number)
with linux the device drivers tend to support classes of devices (everything that uses a particular chipset), and as such most of these devices 'just work' when plugged in.
in my case an example is USB serial adapters. on linux I can grab any of them, plug it in and it just works. my co-workers who use windows laptops have toworry about getting the right driver for the particular USB serial adapter they have, and if they borrow one from someone else they need to also get the driver CD and install it before they can make it work.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 22:22 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Remember the context of this discussion: Best Buy recommending Windows over Linux when selling computers. The fact that Linux works with hardware you can't buy anymore isn't relevant to this. The fact that Linux works with high-end nerd equipment probably isn't either.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 11, 2009 10:12 UTC (Fri) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] In particular, the context was that they should spread FUD about add-on hardware. And that add-on hardware could easily be hardware that you cannot buy anymore (like my 11 year old NIC or my 1.5 year old camera), or it could be high-end nerd equipment.As for the computers that they sell: Best Buy is in a good position to know whether they work with Linux or not; they are even in a position to sell only computers they know to work with Linux. So about the hardware they sell they should give the potential buyers facts, not FUD. I guess that's why MS wants them to spread FUD about add-on hardware.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 11, 2009 16:37 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Yes, of course I picked it with Linux compatibility in mind! Random
off-the-shelf high-end hardware would probably have nvidia everywhere, for starters (maybe even the motherboard, yuck).
But still, I remember the days when the best you could do was get a system
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 11:32 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link] The point of my post, which you decided to ignore, was that IMHO there is very little fud in this case.You can always assemble a system with incompatible parts. We all know that. My point is that, when a regular non-technical user goes to BestBuy (or MediaMarkt in Europe) for consumer computer accessories, all of those have Windows support. Many will work out of the box on Linux. I suppose many will work out of the box on Windows. If it fails, this non-technical user will have a beautiful CD-ROM that came with the product with drivers, and an installer to get it to work on Windows. Correct driver hell? The windows driver comes in a CD with the product. My point is that is indeed not the case with Linux.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 16:36 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Your preaching to the Choir. Which, ultimately, the point of the person your trying to argue with. Nothing you said is really remarkable, nor novel here, nor hasn't been said to death a thousand times before.
---------------------------------
The truth of the matter this is Microsoft trolling. It's designed to get a rise out of people. It's pure smack talk.
Your not being 'Makavelian' enough. Microsoft is not really that good at making software. Microsoft has some of the most intellegent, well paid, and highly motivated programmers in the world working for them, yet they are having a increasingly hard time competing with a OS that has 1/100th their developmental budget and is worked on by a combination of part-timers, volenteers, and a handful of full time programmers working for a wide variety of companies all with strikingly different goals. Microsoft sinks people and competitors through advertisments, announcements, manipulation, and that sort of thing.
For example:
In the past their favorite scheme when somebody came out with a competitive product then theres was to go out and immediately try to create a 'buzz' by creating fancifull mock-ups, fake demos, and that sort of thing. Then they would announce they are creating a competing product that will cost half as much, contain all the features that the competitor does, and will be released 'soon'. Inevitably the magazines that are paid for by Microsoft adverts will swoon all over it and get excited about the product... and potential customers would take a 'look-n-see' attitude and put off purchasing everything. Meanwhile MS's competitors, lacking a similar budget, would watch their sales go stale, their capitol run out, and are left in a very weakenned state. Then months and months behind scedual Microsoft would release either a half-baked product or a rather unremarkable update to a existing product and call it done. If the competitor is lucky then Microsoft would simply buy them out. This is how Microsoft got products like Exchange.
They tried this with Linux with Vista. Remember 'Avalon'? Remember 'WinFS'? Remember Microsoft promising to deliver a 'managed code' Explorer shell that would solve all the security problems related to using legacy C code? Remember all the marketting going on and on and on around the '.NET' platform?
Well WinFS is dead dead dead. The .NET platform remains as the .NET runtime which is a unholy mess of jumbled APIs trying to be everything for everybody. Avalon was dramatically reduced in scope and capabilities now is the Windows Presentation Foundation. Indigo is now the not so remarkable 'Windows Communication Foundation'. The managed code shell was dropped as soon as they figured out that it would require 4 core processor and 5 gigs of RAM to run properly.
So on a so forth.
------------------------------------
Look carefully at what they did.
Why did they choose 'Ipod' and 'World of Warcraft', for example?
World of Warcraft actually works in Linux. It actually works quit easily. Out of the games that Wine supports, that is just about the best one.
Ipod isn't even their product! (And neither is Wow). They produce lots and lots of very popular games that will never work in Linux. Also they produce the Zune, which will never work really well in Linux.
Why on earth would they point out things that actually works decently well with Linux? Why would they use competitors products as examples?
This is Microsoft trolling. They are trying to the Linux people to nerd out all over it and get in a froth. They are baiting idiots with Blogs on places like Cnet to go and produce yet another series of 'Year of the Linux Desktop' articles and all that crap.
It's all pretty pathetic. I could of come up with a much larger number of better points as to why Linux sucks then what MS told Bestbuy.
This isn't 'Evil' it's just sad.
---------------------------------
And, in fact, it's actually promoting Linux in the long run.
For a PC technition working in a store like Best Buy or other end user support capacity Linux is nothing but complete fringe, if that. It's a still just crappy shareware to the vast majority of those types.
To them all a computer is is a beige box or a laptop. They usually have no understanding of much beyond that. No concept of what corporations use internally or on their servers or in embedded systems. They may understand on a superficial level, but it's not something that matters to them.
To them Linux is just nothing. They may have played around with it as a curiosity and gave up on it as soon as they met their first difficulty. They may use as a file server or a web server or something like that, but that would be mostly because they don't want to pay for a Windows server license or have a older system that XP does not run well on.
The more Microsoft pays for anti-Linux fud and the more they troll and the more stuff they put out about Linux just makes Linux seem like a larger threat to them.
The best thing that Linux advocates can do as a response is not to take the bait, but be honest about the limitations and capabilities of Linux and laugh a Microsoft for being so silly all the time. Remember: All software sucks.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 19:16 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
linux has < 1/100 the marketing budget of microsoft.
but if you were to figure the effective pay of all the individuals contributing to a single release of the kernel (let alone all the other usespace components), I wouldn't be surprised to find that linux has a significantly larger effective development budget.
now some of the pay for these people is in prestige not in cash, but the majority of the people are being paied to work on the kernel, just not by one company
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 22:36 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Your preaching to the Choir. I can't take it anymore. The word is "you're." It's a contraction of "you are." "Your" is the possessive pronoun ("your hat"). And while I have my red pen out, he's "preaching to the converted." "Preaching to the choir" refers to arguing when no one is there to hear you. It's a reference to a preacher giving a sermon in a church where the pews are empty so only the church choir will hear him. Preaching to the converted is arguing to someone who already agrees with you, as with a missionary whose job is to convert people to Christianity.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 11, 2009 1:53 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] And while I have my red pen out, he's "preaching to the converted." "Preaching to the choir" refers to arguing when no one is there to hear you. I can't really find anything that confirms this. Most references cite it as the same as "preaching to the converted": The first reference we can find is from 1973. Many other references date from soon after that, which points to the phrase being coined in that year. For example, this from The Lima News, Ohio, January 1973: "He said he felt like the minister who was preaching to the choir. That is, to the people who always come to church, but not the ones who need it most."
preaching to the choir Posted Sep 11, 2009 3:09 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] That's interesting. I would have expected the saying to be at least a hundred years old. I can confirm from my experience that that vast majority of usages of "preaching to the choir" are meant to say the same thing as "preaching to the converted." But popularity is a very small part of correctness to me. It was probably the 1980s when I first read an explanation that "preaching to the choir" is a mistake. The construction "He said he felt like the minister who was preaching to the choir. That is, to the people who always come to church, but not the ones who need it most" is illogical to me. It sounds like a stretch someone would make to try to explain the origin of the phrase, assuming the meaning. The choir isn't the group with the best church attendance record because they're the most faithful -- the reason they're always there is that they have a job to do. And it's hard to picture a minister addressing his sermon to the choir and ignoring the less regular attendees sitting in the pews, who need it more.
preaching to the choir Posted Sep 11, 2009 8:25 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] But popularity is a very small part of correctness to me. You are of course right, although the wrong usage can turn into being the correct one, though that is mostly for spelling. Oh, the times I've been bitching when the danish "sprognævn" (language board, or something like that) decided to make the wrong spelling the official one, when enough screwed it up. The thing that bothers me here, is that I usually quickly find a Google result that set things straight around the top results, but I haven't in this case. Or rather, none of the top ones seems to agree. The construction "He said he felt like the minister who was preaching to the choir. That is, to the people who always come to church, but not the ones who need it most" is illogical to me. I had the same feeling, it sounds like an explanation more that a first usage.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 22:41 UTC (Thu) by kov (subscriber, #7423) [Link] > World of Warcraft actually works in Linux. It actually works quit easily. Out of the games that Wine supports, that is just about the best one. Hrm. Yeah, wine runs WoW, but it's hardly as easy or trouble-free as installing or running it on Mac OS X or Windows, that after you got your 3D working - it's still a somewhat muddy territory.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 17, 2009 14:28 UTC (Thu) by ariveira (guest, #57833) [Link]
> World of Warcraft actually works in Linux. It actually works quit easily.
>Out of the games that Wine supports, that is just about the best one.
>Hrm. Yeah, wine runs WoW, but it's hardly as easy or trouble-free as
If you want a real trouble free windows game that runs on wine that is Guild Wars (and it does not have monthly fee ;P)
You just double click on setup.exe and all goes as smoothly as in windows
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 20:48 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
You're special.
Seriously.
Regular people do not plug things into computers. They buy a pre-built computer that comes with most everything they need. Usually a printer, too. It all Just Works(tm) from the start.
People who modify hardware or buy add-ons or upgrade components are special users. They are a minority. Their user experience is often not the experience the software is optimized for, and that's the way it should be.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 11, 2009 12:31 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]
I'm not convinced this is actually true. I've known a number of "average" type users who buy add-ons to be connected to their PC (some of whom called me in to assist in said connection) - usually a printer or a scanner. It's important not to ignore upgrades of add-ons as well, eg. when the printer that came with the PC dies or (worse still) when they decide to upgrade it to a multifunction device.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 17, 2009 13:18 UTC (Thu) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]
> Regular people do not plug things into computers. They buy a pre-built
> computer that comes with most everything they need. If that were true, the store could actually assemble a package where each component worked with Linux and be done with it.
But I actually don't believe it is true. Jane and John Doe will own (or
HP and hplip Posted Sep 10, 2009 11:58 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]
It always baffles me why HP doesn't trumpet hplip a lot louder.
While many, most or even all home-user products from the other large printer manufacturers are indeed PITAs or utter "bricks" under Linux, HP has almost total open-source support for its product range, and a web-site where one can check in seconds that one's intended purchase is supported. http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/supported_devices/in...
So why do they keep so quiet about it? Could it be that they need Microsoft because they also sell PCs, and that one way or another Microsoft has sewed their corporate lips shut?
Take the HP8000 product overview at http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF06a/18972-18972.... Where is Linux mentioned? Nowhere!
HP and hplip Posted Sep 10, 2009 17:00 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Do bear in mind that most of the printers 'supported' by HPLIP, at least around the normal individual's price point, give dramatically worse print quality than with the Windows driver, at a fraction of the printing speed.
If they advertised it loudly they'd have to do something about that, or risk looking really bad.
HP and hplip Posted Sep 10, 2009 18:14 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]
If HP simply stated "Supported by open-source software package hplip version m.nn and above under Linux" in the specification, that would be enough to lay the lie that it's hard to buy a printer or MFC that works with Linux. So why don't they do even that?
It's not my experience that hplip output under Linux is noticeably worse than output to the exact same printer from Windows. Maybe I've been lucky - I always buy reasonably-priced printers rather than cheap ones so that (a) it has a network interface and can be shared by all my systems, (b) because I can do the sums for cost of the ink over the life of the printer, and (c) because past experience leads me to expect such a printer to be faster, to last longer, and to maintain high-quality output for longer, than the cheapo-cheapo models.
Cheap printers (from all manufacturers) are loss-leaders. They sell the printer below cost price, then make money over and over again on the consumables from people who didn't do their sums in advance.
HP and hplip Posted Sep 10, 2009 20:55 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Because if HP loudly trumpeted that they "support" Linux printing, they'd have to put in a shit load of money actually supporting their software when regular users come along and have bugs. They don't want the hassle.
They support Linux because some commercial clients of theirs need Linux support and demanded drivers be written or that their business would go elsewhere. That these drivers are Open Source is a practical choice by HP. Not wanting to make it all too clear to the world that HP is paying people to write Linux drivers is equally practical, because HP doesn't want every computer novice in the world switching to Linux and then filing bug reports or demanding refunds when they find out that 95% of the models supported by hplip are only supported poorly. For example, the margins are still always screwed up on my HP PhotoSmart 4850, my roommate's HP PhotoSmart C600 prints 3x slower in Linux than in Windows, and my parents' previous printer's output just looked like crap when I printed to it with a Linux laptop.
HP puts a lot of effort into making a few models work very well and just gives passing support to other models because it's not far out of their way.
Trumpeting half-assed support and then having to actually put in the time and money to Do It Right(tm) when a bunch of users start expecting actual support would be financially inconvenient for HP and wouldn't give them any business advantage -- heck, they already practically own the Linux printing market, and they barely had to put any effort into that at all.
HP and hplip Posted Sep 14, 2009 10:37 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Elanthis' response pretty much covers it, but I would add that if you're buying network printers then you're probably spending *at least* twice as much as Joe Normal, and are likely to have a better experience. For one thing, because a network printer implies that it's almost certainly a laser[0], which are still uncommon in the home (but tend to be better supported).
[0] I've been waiting over a week for my supplier to come back to me after asking for a networked inkjet printer, for those people who need to do borderless colour printing; they seem to be pretty tough to get hold of.
Best Buy, Future Shop, etc... live by FUD Posted Sep 10, 2009 13:13 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Unfortunately, these big-box stores live by FUD. That's why they always pressure you to buy overpriced "extended warranties". Given the general level of sleaziness in these stores, I'm not at all surprised by MSFT's tactics.
Linux a "toy operating system" Posted Sep 10, 2009 22:50 UTC (Thu) by vomlehn (subscriber, #45588) [Link]
I had the unpleasant experience, not too long ago, to have to use the Windows command line interface to do things I was used to doing on my Linux PC. My strongest impression was that using the Windows command line interface indeed felt much like a toy operating system.
On Windows, I couldn't whip up quick command line loop commands, the collection of scripts I use to make my life easier was not available, trying to write those scripts would have been quite difficult as I heavily leverage the many standard tools available on Linux (what, no getopts?). I was quite pleased to get Linux versions of the utilities I needed so I could go back to being productive.
Linux a "toy operating system" Posted Sep 11, 2009 7:32 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
May I suspect that's because the only CLI that you looked for and accepted as being good is a Unix shell?
Microsoft's Powershell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell is a full featured very powerfull shell, and its intergration with .NET makes for very effective scripting, if you know your Windows toolkits. But, on an abstract level, that's the same on Unix, shell is no good if you don't know about sed, awk, or dozens of other commands you need to use inside a shell script. You need to learn about a toolkit and that can only be done by using it.
Windows is by architectural design not a command-based system, so by definition a good shell under Windows needs to integrate with the classes that make up the abstraction that modern Windows systems are about. (Access to registry, services, registered mime types, etc.) And Microsoft produced just that with Powershell.
Joachim
Linux a "toy operating system" Posted Sep 11, 2009 12:27 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Orthogonal to the point, but... their shitty excuse for a terminal emulator makes working with even a real Unix-style shell environment very painful.
Linux a "toy operating system" Posted Sep 14, 2009 10:42 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
*Very* yes.
This always seems absurdly over-engineered to me, but I tend to install Cygwin so that I can use an xterm.
I then do any scripting in Python. I don't even *especially like* Python, but it has simple and fairly well-designed bindings to damn near everything you could want, which makes it the best Windows scripting environment I've tried.
FUD at Best Buy Posted Sep 10, 2009 23:01 UTC (Thu) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]
Calm down dear!
Why do you still persist in worrying about marketing nonsense from Redmond? Linux, *BSD et al are - by license definition and community commitment - nearly immune to that bollocks. I say nearly because there is probably a method that might cause real damage in some way but this is not it.
I don't think we need care that someone else might point out some home truths mixed in with rubbish and FUD. If someone else does not decide to try Linux because of some retail chain that sounds like our PC World in the UK's advice then fine.
Stop frothing at the mouth when someone tries to do protect their interests using their marketing clout. If this is all we have to fear then that is not exactly too worrying.
So, get a grip and do the right thing - back up your friend/girlfriend/neighbour/garden gnome's PC/laptop/S390/XBox and pop Linux onto it, and then support it/them.
Show them how it's done and stop bloody whinging.
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