Despite this Mac people insists getting Linux to work is "hard" when it mostly works out of the box on any hardware. Amazing.
This kind of divisiveness is not necessary. Clearly you have some dim folks in your midst.
And of course, today a stock distro kernel has more drivers in it than Windows or OS X, so it is a long time ago that you're talking about.
Linux is harder than OS X to get running, when you follow the OS X EULA.
Download an ISO and install it.
I think you will be surprised. Pop the disk in after burning to a CD/DVD. Click "install", reboot and you are done.
Doesn't matter what your hardware is... it will install and work.
Other than getting a computer with a pre-installed OS, it really can't get much simpler. Modern Linux Desktops do not require you to do anything but click the "install" button. You don't have to mess with partitioning, packages, etc. You can understand absolutely nothing about Linux and install it easily and use it easily.
It's not like it doesn't work, it worked fine 90% of the time. But 90% is not enough; when even Half-Life 2 is completely unplayable (on hardware which easily runs it in Windows), something's wrong.
And to touch on your gaming comment -- actually, Valve has found the same games perform better on Linux using OpenGL than they do on Windows. So much so, that they were surprised at how well they performed. So much so, that many many other gaming companies are now re-releasing and/or planning future releases on Linux. The day of Linux gaming is here...
Sorry, these issues were experienced by me this year. On hardware that is not defective as it works flawlessly on Windows.
>They have all been solved, especially in the major distros.
No they haven't. It has not been fixed. Neither my GPU issues nor my Audio issues have been fixed.
>A current version 14.x of Ubuntu, or version 20+ of Fedora will work "out of the box" with zero tweaking.
It was running out of the box. It just didn't work properly.
>And to touch on your gaming comment -- actually, Valve has found the same games perform better on Linux using OpenGL than they do on Windows.
Yes, I know. OpenGL works, and all that. However, the harsh reality I have found is that the graphics drivers didn't work properly and frames would be delayed (not elongated; delayed) making Half-Life 2 unplayable under both WINE and natively.
Valve has (figuratively) bet the house on Linux as tomorrow's gaming platform... and I'm confident they would not have done so without Linux being ready for prime-time.
As a note, don't game under WINE. WINE is great for applications and such, but a game designed to run on windows won't work quite right even on WINE. But, if you install the Native Linux Steam client and have Steam download/install the Native Half-Life 2 for Linux... I assure you, it works flawlessly... as-does all Source games now, Unity games, Unreal games, CryTek games (or at least they can be ported native now).
Phoronix seems to assure otherwise. It feels like every day I read about a minor performance bump with RadeonSI and then a 10fps regression. The proprietary drivers are clunky and don't seem to play nice with my multimonitor setup. Needless to say, my attempts on Ubuntu 14.04 this year on my very standard i5 3570K / AMD 7950 rig have not been very successful. I had this one awful text rendering bug (artifacting) with both the proprietary and apt-get open drivers. Only when I compiled Mesa from Git did I fix it. Taking a step back, running Hackintoshed OS X felt more reliable in the 3D graphics department, and I used it for over 6 months before dropping back to Windows 7 full time.
I wish, wish, wish to use Linux full time. I really do. I'm sure if I had older/integrated graphics hardware my problems would disappear. Unfortunately I need dedicated hardware to drive a dual link DVI (Korean 27") and two more HDMI/single link DVIs.
I'm sure the driver support will come with time. Maybe around the time Wayland/Mir take off. I'll be waiting. My MacBook is my rock, of course.
I echo this 100%. Even after significant tweaking it wasn't smooth enough. I can handle lower FPS than Windows, but delays, full blown glitches, flat out incompatibilities just rule it out for me.
Not sure how it can be any easier other than getting a computer pre-installed (which you can now too, but, admittedly not as common as I would like). I mean, you have to put a disk into some hardware at some point and click some install button...
Buy an Ubuntu certified laptop (http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/) and then tell me that the 3d graphics won't work on Ubuntu.
VMWare, for one, have been able to do this for quite a while with the effort of ~1 mouseclick.
Edit: Not sure if troll or not?! Getting Linux to run as a guest in Xen 0.0.1 probably took some work, too.
Unless things have recently changed, this is factually incorrect. It might work on OSX, but that's not really the point, is it.
For whatever reason, you may want to be able to run a general purpose X86 OS on your general purpose X86 hardware, or general purpose X86 cloud/cluster.
For instance, getting OSX to run in a regular ESX cluster (for testing, etc) can't be done wtihout immense amount of hackery, and probably requires custom kext-files, injected on another machine before dumping the image and what not.
At this point poor compatibility is just that. I fail to see why someone would try to sell that as something good.
Nobody's selling OSX as a "general purpose X86 os" for "general purpose X86 hardware" though. It's an OS for Apple hardware. It just so happens that the current versions run on x86_64 CPUs.
(Plus I don't think there exists a license allowing OSX to run on a regular ESX cluster. So if it breaks, obviously you get to keep both halves)
You're looking at a Porsche and bitching that it sucks at offroading. Well, yeah. That's not what it's for. If you work offroad and need to carry cargo, a Porsche is not the vehicle for you, but that doesn't mean it's a bad car.
Your comparison would make more sense if it was about making a car made by Porsche drive on roads not made by Porsche. Which everyone agrees is absolutely reasonable.
What you're trying to sell me is the idea that poor compatibility is a feature? It was designed to have poor compatibility despite being built for a standardized platform, so that makes it a porsche?
When I try to get OSX running in our VMWare cluster so that we have clonable, snapshottable machines for testing and debugging and it takes a week of effort not getting it working, you're telling me that's a "feature"?
Yeah, sorry. I don't buy that.
I'm not one of them, BTW. I've got my MacBook Pro for toting around, my Windows desktop for gaming, a Linux box for streaming, sharing, and storage, and an Android phone for phone stuff. Each of them does what I need it to. Horses for courses.
But there are plenty of people whose use case is "I need an OS that works as soon as I unbox the laptop." For those people, compatibility is not an issue, nor should it be.