Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
There is another point that many computer enthusiasts often miss, especially with regard to printers and camera's. 'Normal' people often buy a printer or camera because it can do some "special" stuff, such as print onto CD's, create calendars, or photo-albums, or whatever. The catch is, you need the manufacturer's software to do this if you want wizards and automatic stuff and templates and all that. This software is available for Windows and Mac only, most of the time; sometimes not even for Mac.
Believe it or not, but there are a lot of people who *WANT* to use the manufacturer's software (or even need to, because they don't have anything else), and when running Linux, they'll hit a brick wall.
*After the Ubuntu setup wizard...*
"OK, nice. The test page works. Now where is my calendar creation program mentioned on the box? Hm. Maybe it's on the CD."
*Pops in CD*
*Double-clicks setup.exe*
*** ERROR ***
* Hear a cry of despair and a dying wail as the user flings himself and the computer out of a fifth story apartment window *
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That is very true, and as you observed, that may very well be a problem on OSX as well. My point remains, which is that it is either uninformed or disingenuous
for the post I replied to to indicate that "linux has driver problems" for this reason.
It is also either unobservant or disingenuous to keep on trying to tell people that you need to go with the OS that enjoys support for the applications you need... when they keep on trying to explain that they agree with you already (and incidentally always have).
Once again -- "this software doesn't support linux" is a valid complaint, and is also very different from essentially "linux doesn't work".
Although I have to say, I don't think your average printer-bundled OCR/calendar/album/cd-print/whatever programs are going to be very good compared to the dedicated programs that already exist, some of which are available for linux.
Whether the average luddite
thinks they need the brand that came with the printer is of course another story entirely.