On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 17:55 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 17:36, ryan wrote:
i infer from some of your previous comments that you're looking to run CentOS on your desktop machine (since you're talking about DVD drives and Xine and so forth). if you want a pleasant desktop experience where things Just Work, i'd recommend you buy a Mac like Bryan said. running Linux on the desktop is a painful and laborious experience, and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. it's a different story when you're talking about server applications, though...
I have Linux running on a Desktop machine, and 2 laptops. Installing, updating and using Linux on them has been great and not at all a"painful and laborious experience".
For the technically savvy, and those who aren't afraid to learn, Linux is an excellent desktop OS.
Yes, but for many things you take for granted under commercial OS's like playing music and videos you'll have to do some non-obvious and legally questionable things to do the same on Linux.
---- 'legally questionable' is in my opinion overly dramatic. The fact is that there is restrictive licensing issues which packagers don't distribute with GPL and similar licensed packages.
Perhaps a better way of looking at these things is that the open standards are supported out of the box and the non-open standards have to be added after original installation for those that wish to use proprietary and restrictive licensed software.
Craig