I really try to work with Linux, and for the most part it works ok. However I have issues with things not being stable and being difficult to get to work in a simple way.
With Windows everything almost always "just works". In addition, things are relatively stable, and when things do crash I may not know what caused the crash but it rarely happens again because I can avoid the condition for causing the crash. With Linux (ok, I don't use any of the directly end user centric distros (Arch, with KDE4.3) so I have myself to blame, but still) I can often cause crashes with subtly different effects just using the system as intended. And I still don't know what caused it!
One example is KDE and multiple desktop sessions with different users. It *should* work very simply, but every time it has caused window manager problems that forced me to at least log out and back in. Also, strange window manager behaviour in the second session.
So, you say, report the bugs! Sure I may do that - if I ever find the time to produce valuable bug reports. In this forum I can bitch and moan about problems in a slightly unstructured way, but it would be worthless as a bug report. I would like to help but it's difficult to find the time. I mean, I shouldn't even be writing this, I should be working!
Oh, and Adobe's flash plugin. Unfortunately they have basically monopolized dynamic content and media on the web so the closed-source plugin is completely mandatory on a desktop system. However, the Linux version crashes a lot - once it took down KDE, and once it *completely* locked up the whole machine. Comparing to the Windows Vista and XP computers I use my Arch Linux desktop crashes noticeably more frequently.
I'll continue to plug away at this, but it'll be quite some time before I can let me dear wife use it daily.
(You may wonder why I don't use Mint or Ubuntu or something similar? Well, I just got stuck on Arch since I could easily get a home server running with it, and Arch is so easy to manage. Desktop support is a bit trickier to get right it seems - but apart from the crashes it was easy to get up and running the way I wanted it to)
With Windows everything almost always "just works". In addition, things are relatively stable, and when things do crash I may not know what caused the crash but it rarely happens again because I can avoid the condition for causing the crash. With Linux (ok, I don't use any of the directly end user centric distros (Arch, with KDE4.3) so I have myself to blame, but still) I can often cause crashes with subtly different effects just using the system as intended. And I still don't know what caused it!
One example is KDE and multiple desktop sessions with different users. It *should* work very simply, but every time it has caused window manager problems that forced me to at least log out and back in. Also, strange window manager behaviour in the second session.
So, you say, report the bugs! Sure I may do that - if I ever find the time to produce valuable bug reports. In this forum I can bitch and moan about problems in a slightly unstructured way, but it would be worthless as a bug report. I would like to help but it's difficult to find the time. I mean, I shouldn't even be writing this, I should be working!
Oh, and Adobe's flash plugin. Unfortunately they have basically monopolized dynamic content and media on the web so the closed-source plugin is completely mandatory on a desktop system. However, the Linux version crashes a lot - once it took down KDE, and once it *completely* locked up the whole machine. Comparing to the Windows Vista and XP computers I use my Arch Linux desktop crashes noticeably more frequently.
I'll continue to plug away at this, but it'll be quite some time before I can let me dear wife use it daily.
(You may wonder why I don't use Mint or Ubuntu or something similar? Well, I just got stuck on Arch since I could easily get a home server running with it, and Arch is so easy to manage. Desktop support is a bit trickier to get right it seems - but apart from the crashes it was easy to get up and running the way I wanted it to)
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