Fighting the "legacy" reputations of GNU/Linux, seventeen years later

Those old myths do persist, but it seems to me they're kept alive by so-called "tech journalists" and "analysts" and other personages who get paid to pontificate with no requirement that they actually know what they're talking about.

I've seen this from consultants, too, who are intent on continuing to sell Microsoft. They are so afraid of change it's next to funny...not funny, but next to it.

Quoting:and other personages who get paid

Or who make money off of people having to return Windows computers to the shops tiem and time again. My partner's sister has a Windows computer, won't let me even demonstrate Linux to her, in spite of the fact that my partner uses Linux. Why? because the bloke that sold her her computer, and who make money from her when fixes virus and other windows related problems, told her that Linux would be too difficult for her to use.

Well, it's her money, and if she wants to waste it like a sucker, so be it.

(And you can tell her I said as much.)

OK, rosy-eyed geeks --

There is another little problem:

Not all hardware works when it comes out. There is still room for ouchies, though they do get fixed.

Cases in point: 1. My Epson R380 Epson provided a driver (yuk), but it was months before Gutenprint, the REAL Linux way, did.

2. Ralink 2561 wireless

Worked for long time with ralink's driver, stopped due to kernel changes. Went to new stack, 2.6.26 dropped throughput to 100k, good again with 2.6.27

3. Realtek 8187B --

Worked for a while when I specially compiled a patched version of driver from mfr. Got rid of device. Windows driver should work with wrapper, but -- that's cheating.

4. Pinnacle HD 800i --

With upgrades from linuxtv.org, am able to use it in mythtv, though signal strength readings are 0, remote is still a task, and fm radio doesn't work. For what it works, this card works reasonably well with Myth, whereas the WIndows software is supposed to be crap.

One of the great things about OpenBSD is that the project has a huge list of compatible hardware (like this one: http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html).

And the developers aren't in the habit of dropping support for devices just because they're a few years old.

I expect that Red Hat/CentOS/Scientific also keeps supported hardware in its kernels for as long as its releases are supported.

The problem is the "desktop"-focused systems that spend so much time trying to add new hardware that they let older hardware drop out/break all the time.

My Gateway laptop, for instance hit a sweet spot with the 2.6.18 kernel, in which the noisy CPU fan was managed with no user intervention. Since then, I've had to drop a line in /etc/rc.local to make it happen. That's OK for me, since I know what to do, but anybody else with similar hardware would run a live CD, find out that the CPU fan is blasting away unabated, and retreat back to the relative silence of Windows.

When FreeBSD actually managed this fan better than Linux, I would have become a convert, but since that "management" evaporated on day 2 of use in every install I tried, that was not to be.

Having wireless not work (and not work with WPA) is a major hurdle.

FOSS operating systems are better than ever, but what Linux especially seems to lack is a detailed list of what will and won't work with any given system or kernel.