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On Sunday 26 September 2004 17:38, Neil Williams wrote:
By your measure,
No... The point is that having won the race[1] to make a better development cloud, pulled ahead in the race to make better software first with the operating system, then with the network and some server applications, and now in a few areas with the general purpose applications[2] it is now highly desirable that preinstalled copies go around. The installation routines have become good, SuSE installs more friendly than Windows, Debian installs better with less fuss[3] than Windows, but this is in a big sense off the point - reinstalls are what users do, installs should be done by loading a zillion standard copies of the OS plus base applications (or in Hill house Hammond's Marseilles supplier's case a couple of hundred special to purpose program suites on the standard image) onto hard drives in the manufacturer's factory, which are then built into PC boxes, and then do a bit of stuff when first switched on. So, how hard it is it to generate preinstalled hard drives for a standard PC device? (Asus Terminators are £299 incl a blank 20Gbyte HDD... what price loaded to go?) and how does one make those marketable by a channel, which might be in shops or in a supplier of office automation to professionals...? So... lets see some standard kit that doesn't have a Windows tax and a standard load (cut it _down_ and then down some more, and then rely on apt-get to impress) ready to go from a stack of cardboard boxes and with a phone number for support. [1] it isn't a battle. It was won when MS moved from saying "Of course you have to spend more on our stuff, its better and you always pay more for better stuff" to "actually our stuff you pay for is cheaper overall than the Libre[4] variety and we've bought a study that doesn't say it isn't". [2] specific special purpose applications don't count - they depend only weakly on the environment they run in for their virtues. [3] imagine the irritation of having to turn your laptop over half way thorugh the install to read the serial number of the OS, stuck to the bottom, and do it more than once at a go ... an irritation absent from reinstalls of Linux. [4] of course they didn't, they said "free", but they no longer sell on quality they sell on price and since we can drive costs down to theirs the channel can sell better for the same cost. -- Adrian Midgley Open Source software is better GP, Exeter http://www.defoam.net/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.