Wal-Mart Offers Linux as Windows Alternative (2003)

Re:Wal-Mart Offers Linux as Windows Alternative (2003) by scythe on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @09:25PM (#15234716)

The fact that sometimes things in the Linux ecosystem just break is pretty daunting for any company that wants to make money selling Linux boxes. For example sound was good for a while and then PulseAudio happened and it was terrible; these days PulseAudio is supposed to be okay, but if you were selling laptops in 2007 and the sound on those laptops broke in 2010 you've got a big problem on your hands as a vendor. It's difficult to insulate yourself from because you don't know which hardware is going to break tomorrow and you might not be able to fix it but your customers probably quite reasonably want to upgrade their computers. Even PC-BSD is not immune when, for example, KDE 4 is released.

Apple owns the software that runs on their computers. None of these problems will ever happen to Apple. This has been around:

https://endlessos.com/home/

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Re:Wal-Mart Offers Linux as Windows Alternative (2003) by eadmund on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @11:07PM (#15235194)

> Apple owns the software that runs on their computers. None of these problems will ever happen to Apple.

None of my Classic software runs on a modern Mac. No PowerPC software runs on a modern Mac. I think those problems do happen to Apple's users.

The one company which does take this sort of thing seriously is … Microsoft. I hate using their OS, and so I don't, but I gotta respect them for that.

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Re:Wal-Mart Offers Linux as Windows Alternative (2003) by scythe on Thursday September 14, 2017 @02:11AM (#15245357)

That's entirely beside the point. I was 't talking about what happens to you, as a user. I was talking about what happens to Apple. Apple knows when its stuff is going to break. System76, in some ways, may not always know. That makes it hard for them to provide guarantees.

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