I feel his pain.

I feel his pain.

Posted Mar 30, 2012 22:55 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: I feel his pain. by rdmelin
Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)

Yes I can work around this. Simply by removing Network Manager and installing WiCD. But why should I need to when this hardware has worked with previous versions of this same distro for years. And how can linux newbies be expected to jump through this kind of hoop to make friends with a new OS experience.

This is the question people asked for year WRT new version of Windows (which often breaks support for old hardware). And the answer is obvious: buy new hardware with new version pre-installed (or you can buy hardware with old version pre-installed and coupon which guarantees free upgrade). This is not the problem.

The problem is this approach does not work in Linux. Compare Windows 7 (End Of Life 1/14/2020) with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (End Of Life April 2013 (Desktop) and April 2015 (Server). Note how you still can install most programs on XP including MS Office 2007 or MS Office 2010 (because it's still supported, obviously) but with Linux the only sane way to get net graphic editor or new office suite is to upgrade the whole OS!

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