Sun, 18 Oct 2009

Sometimes you have to hate closed systems

And for today, it came as a result of doing a clean install of Windoze Vista on my mother in law's newer Dell 1525 laptop. In short, it was an unfortunate experience.

I know I like all things Apple and that my home computer has been a Mac for 10 years and that I have "Think Different" posters in my classroom. I realize also that I'm a fan of the OpenSource movement and still wonder why not more people have some *nix system on their computers. I know this. But why the heck does installing an OS have to be more difficult than getting Plan 9 running on an eeePC?

My bigger problem during the install was getting the wifi card to work and apparently to do this you have to use Dell's special disc to install further drivers in a particular order to get the machine to work correctly. No out of the box experience, I suppose, for Windoze users.

And I think that is sad. I can install some version of *nix and a majority of the major players (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debianish variants, FreeBSD, PCLinuxOS, etc) all work out of the box. So, why can't a big huge company such as MSoft do the same?

And thus ends my rant.

2009 Oct 18 [] permanent link