Sometimes I just don’t have the time for it.
I realize that some of the reason that it takes me so long to get anything setup in Linux is that I am not a Linux guru, but it is also just plain hard and time consuming sometimes, and I consider myself reasonably competent when it comes to working with *nix OSes 😉
Once a box is setup, it is great, will run forever, doesn’t need in the way of maintanance other than to keep up with security patches, but that intial setup always seems to take forever, specifically when I want to do something in the laptop/desktop/user realm.
For example, I have a Linux print server that I setup, and I added a new printer to it the other night. Took me 5 minute to set it up on the Windows machine, took over an hour to setup on Linux. Find the RPM, oh wait, this is Ubuntu, that doesn’t work. Find a version with src, try to compile, doesn’t work with my version of cups (missing cups-config, I have cupsconfig, but that does not do it). Figure out how to make an RPM work on Ubuntu, install all the different things that are needed to make that work, and the install still does not work. Dig through what the RPM installed, find the .ppd file, unzip it, upload it through the web interface, now it works.
Network cards. I know, I should figure out ahead of time if the thing is supported, but when I am putting something together from a bunch of scavenged parts, that is not in the cards. I installed Fedora Core the other weekend, spent more or less the whole blankity blank weekend trying to get a PCMCIA network card, a USB network card, then a different USB network card, to work. It did not help that USB was not working out the box, and it took 3 hours or so to work through why that was not working.
At some point I gave up on that for a bit, and tried to get the sound card to work, and that would not work either…
Once I got those working, I was going to have to install and get working the UpNP music server, and that was likely going to be an adventure in itself, I am sure.
Again, freely willing to admit that a Linux guru could probably have had it up and going immediately, but I am not, but I am competent, and a pretty good Googler, so this stuff should not be impossible.
I finally gave up and installed Windows, and 1.5 hours later, I had sound working, I had network (with any of the 3 different NICs), I had the application humming along, ready to go, and WORKING!
Like I said, I really like Linux in the abstract, when it is already setup and configured, and as a server, but in my experience, using it for things in the user space that require things like wireless networking, sound, graphics, that sort of thing, I just always seem to strike out.
Please don’t kill me for being critical of Linux, I really tried 🙁