Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg flirts with Ubuntu

He seemed reasonable as these opinions go except his main example criticism, the touchpad. Testing on a laptop he therefore rules out those using a mouse with the laptop which I do because I don't get along well (including under Windows) with touchpads (especially wanting my third button) or that it also runs on desktops where the prime issue he mentions vanishes.

All it says to me is that Dell responded to the enthusiast market with Ubuntu-equipped PCs but didn't do a lot of testing to see how the OS actually performed on the hardware.

One thing Microsoft does, supposedly, is extensive focus-group testing with so-called "real" people who come in and try out the software to shed some light on what's wrong (or right) with it. It's probably time for the same kind of thing in Linux.

But the "take-away" for me from the Mossberg review is that hardware vendors need to pay as much attention to compatibility with Linux as they do to compatibility with Windows. However good or bad Windows is, you can't deny that hardware vendors MUST pay attention to it. (I'll try here not to mention all the various pieces of hardware I have or had that DON'T work with my Windows boxes, even though they're supposed to.)