Comment 575 for bug 1

I regret that I have to agree. I've been in IT for about 40 years, and have just decided to have a play with Ubuntu Linux on an old system box. No problems installing from the downloaded CD, but things just don't work out of the box.

"Video mode not supported" on my monitor during the boot process (I think there's meant to be a splash screen there). That I can live with, but would scare the unsophisticated user.

"Failed to construct test pipeline..." on when trying to get my USB sound card to work. The forums (fora?) are very useful here, but again the "normal" user would be completely at sea. With Windows, it just worked.

And looking through the forums and help files, getting a wireless LAN to work needs a couple of doctorates. I've not dared try. Again, it just worked with Windows. (That ndiswrapper isn't included with the distro doesn't help - how can one download it without access to the net?).

The forums are very helpful, but the solutions usually tell the user to issue commands as a sort of magic spell, without any guarantee of their success, or how to regress if they fail. Personally, I'm very cautious about issuing commands (especially with sudo) unless I have some understanding of what they do.

For any Linux to get a foothold, things just have to work out of the box. If this needs manufacturer support in providing drivers, that's where effort should go. Although this forum is dedicated to Ubuntu, and it's the only one I've tried, I suspect that many of the problems occur with other distros.

To sum up, Microsoft.Windows has many faults, but manufacturers are prepared to invest effort into overcoming them, which makes it possible for unsophisticated users to buy a box in the knowledge that most things will work OK. Linux is still too geeky to make this possible. Some large customers can afford the effort to use it. Small ones can't, so they won't.