FreeBSD and hardware??

[Jerry McAllister]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 03:49:40PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

> >
> >This is nonsense. The Windows interface itself is quite limited and not
> >very powerful.
> 
> as KDE and Gnome and others.
> 
> 
> >when Win/95 came out being an OS/2 user at that time. From what I have
> >read even the user interface of Mac OS X is much better that Windows
> >although they have a much smaller market share.
> 
> so why it have a much smaller market share?

Because MS wrote restrictive contracts with companies trying to
sell PCs saying that if they wanted to put MS on any of their
machines, they had to put it on all of them.   So, immediately
every single PC that was sold ran some MS.   Most people went
with the flow.  It was an easier business decision than trying
to buck that current.   This action should be considered totally
illegal in the USA and probably many other countries.  It is 
restraint of trade and forming a monopoly.   Kodak lost a big
case with similar ramifications many decades ago when they were
refusing to sell film without including processing.  But, the law 
cases against MS tended to be centered around including stuff 
like IE in the OS and making it difficult to switch to Netscape
or other browsers.   Forcing the OS on everyone seemed to fall off
after the "settlement" (more like winding down) of those cases and 
now some PC sellers who still sell XP or Vista will sell you a 
machine with something else or even nothing.   But, the damage is
done.   People/businesses have put a lot in to MS-Win, not only
buying it and hiring large support forces to get it to work, but
also in staff training and acquiring other products to function
with it.

There are plenty of people who are happy to just stick with MS and
not think about it any more - just like businesses stuck with IBM
and never listened to any other vendor back in their glory days.
They will not be the ones who go to the trouble to read enough
about FreeBSD to find this Email list and post questions about it.

When someone goes looking for something OTHER than MS, then they 
are out of that MS fold and are searching for something better, not
just for MS by another name.  FreeBSD IS better.   Some portion of
those will look at it and decide to forget it.  So what!?  That is 
their problem.   But, it is completely non-helpful to keep chanting 
the 'it ain't MS' mantra in the face of people who are looking to 
get away from MS.   That is really 'DIS-ing' then to use a fad
term that has fallen out of popularity.

It is reasonable to caution people that FreeBSD and other UNIXen
have a fairly steep learning curve.   But, that is not an
inpenetrable impediment.   It is just part of the job of moving
to something better.   Anyone serious about finding a good
alternative will take on that challenge willingly.   

It is not reasonable to continue to throw up unnecesary barriers
to people moving to improve themselves.

////jerry


> 
> >Anyhow, of course you
> >can fully replace Windows with a unix(-like) system and a suitable
> >desktop enviroment (e.g. KDE, Gnome, XFCE). It depends on your specific
> >requirements and if applications exist which do what you need. But
> >saying that GUI's under Unix are per se inferior is just spreading FUD.
> >Leave that to MS. ;-)
> 
> after being one of sponsors of "easy" linux distributions and desktop 
> environment (RedHat), microsoft now can say the truth that it's crap.
> 
> >
> >Just a small example, how limited Windows really is: Even today it is
> 
> you don't have to tell me this. as all unix "desktop environments" are.
> because this style of computing is limited by general.
> 
> 
> In technical university nearest me there was (or is) a guy that when 
> teaching students unix he said:
> 
> ---
> Don't use windows. Not because it crashes, not because it's buggy and not 
> because it's damn slow. But because it learns bad habits, that are then 
> almost impossible to get rid of.
> ----
> 
> For me the best sentence about it.
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