Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
If Linux could just get to the point where they seperate the operating system, the drivers, and the applications, so you can install old applications on new OS-es, new applications on old OS-es, and drivers would work for 15 years... I think that would make adoption skyrocket. (Many Windows Vista/7 drivers for old devices still work in Windows 10... in Linux, if a driver isn't open source, today's driver won't work on tomorrow's kernel.)
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To some extent, Linux has done that.
Old applications should run on newer Linux versions. New applications should run on older versions. What tends to be specific to whether an application will run is libraries, and whether the right libraries are present, in the correct versions. (Linux, properly speaking, is the OS kernel. I don't recall ever seeing an old app fail to run because it issued a system call that had been deprecated and removed from a more recent kernel.)
Drivers working for 15 years is likely unnecessary.
I run Ubuntu here, and chose it because it does the best job I've seen in a Linux distro of figuring out what it is being installed on, setting itself up, and Just Working with minimal user involvement. I'm a tech. I can
do the user interaction. But I want to spend my time
using the resulting system, not fiddling to
make it usable.
The usual pain points in getting Linux up and running are video and networking. Ubuntu detected my video card and used it, and detected my network and accessed it.
Now, I do have a vanilla setup. I am not a gamer, and don't have the pain of trying to get Linux to use all the features of the fancy high-end video card I got for gaming. The generic Linux video drivers don't support it, and I must install a non open source proprietary driver, assuming one exists. But if I
am a gamer, chances are near unity that I don't
run Linux. I run Windows because that's what games are written for and supported on.
Another pain point can be libraries mentioned above, and that's another reason for Ubuntu. The package manager does a good job of scanning your system to see what you already have, so when you choose a package folder installation, you get not only the package, but any dependencies it may have that aren't already installed. (Playing "The app failed to run. Why? Oh, version X of library Y isn't installed. Where can I get that?" gets old fast.)
I'm not dual booting at the moment. I'm in final stages of co0nfiguring a new desktop, which right now is Win10 only. That's not a hardship, as a lot ofd what I do is Windows-centric, and running Linux is "keeping my hand in."
But I'm also an old command line guy, and am set up to do that, with a tabbed terminal client in which I c an run CMD, TCC-LE, and Win21 ports of bash, tcsh, and zsh.
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Dennis