by Diekan » Mon Sep 10, 2007 10:04 pm
He's an idiot. 98% of the board knows he's an idiot. But, that's beside the point.
Getting WoW to work in Linux is a bit tougher than changing your wallpaper image. Just because it's something that's been accomplished since 2005, doesn't mean it's easy. The first distro that it was installed on (way back then) isn't the same as it is now. Kernels are upgraded and changed, new distros come out, vendors release new chipsets with their hardware, applications get upgraded, new applications come out.
Installing and running WoW on a Linux box isn't just a matter of popping in your disk and clicking "install." You've got to make sure you have a good emulator, that your video card is working properly, that you have all the correct fonts installed, that you have your sound configured properly, that you have the right versions of everything you need. Then you have to configure your emulator, configure your video card configuration file, so on and so forth. Despite Harrison's lack of any self-esteem (hence his know-it-all attitude), in reality he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. If he were oh so wise and bright (as he wants us all to believe) he wouldn't be a 20 something, unemployed, college drop out living with his mother. Now would he? This is why he makes me laugh when he posts... it is on topics like this that really and truly show just how completely clueless he really is.
I think certain distros are lacking in documentation. Ubuntu has one of the best community boards I have seen. Over something like 3 quarters of a million posts on every conceivable topic you can imagine. The boards alone are exponentially better than any telephonic technical support you get by calling vendors like MS and Dell. That's Ubuntu though. The SuSE boards are shitty, incomplete, and horrid to get any information from. You ask a question on the Ubuntu boards and you'll have 10 replies in a couple of hours with more suggestions than you would care to try. Ask a question on a SuSE board and you'll be luck if you get a single reply in 10 days.
This disto is very nice indeed. All the free packages (Open Office, Gimp, XMMS, etc) notwithstanding, I have MS Office, Photoshop, WoW and a couple of other MS only programs installed through Wine and working smoothly.
Even with Ubuntu there IS a learning curve and it DOES demand time to learn. But, with the information available (through the boards and other sites) there's really no excuse for anyone literate not to be able to install and run it.
The actual install took roughly 15 minutes. After which I was looking at the desktop, had Internet access and could use all the included suites (Office, so on). In all actuality, installing SuSE wasn't much different. The install of SLED took about 30 minutes and I had access to everything 'out of the box.' So, while Tikker might be right on some points, I have to disagree that Linux is still out of reach for the average computer user. I say out of reach, because again I will say there is a small learning curve (learning where things are, how to install new programs, so forth), but if you can read this post, then you can run the non-server distros of Linux.
Where it does get a lot more difficult is when you decide to start running graphically intense games like WoW. Then the learning curve gets much steeper and you'll need to spend a lot more time learning and reading.
As for the average user. If all you're interested in doing is surfing the web, sending emails, playing with images, listening to music, working on a document or two - you don't need Windows. You can do all that the moment your Linux install finishes, for the most part).