Spent another day installing Linux Mint and trying to configure it for my computer. The biggest problem was that Linux Mint was silent. Clicking on obvious things like "Sound," "Settings," or any of the many choices listed under "Hardware" offered no solution, only wasting time. Researching online, I couldn't find an easy way to enable sound on my motherboard. There are many sound-related add-ons available without any indication as to which one will install support for basic audio. A user could spend hours evaluating add-ons that are actually intended for other purposes. After browsing messages in one of many forums, I decided to install Alsamixer, but that didn't help. Alsamixer aborted without any message whenever I clicked on Preferences! It was recommended that users modify one of the config files for Alsa, and so I did, but that didn't help, either. Alsamixer was a no-go.
My sound hardware is not anything unusual, either. It's motherboard-embedded Realtek HD 5.1, which is cheap and pretty common among PC's. Realtek has been embedded in almost every motherboard I've bought since 1999. Clicking on the speaker icon on the taskbar revealed that sound was being routed to "Dummy Stereo," and yes, I know what that means. There was no option to reroute it to the real stereo.
A common problem mentioned by the Linux Mint web site is that one's installation DVD may be defective, due to the unreliability of lengthy downloads from their distribution sites. However, I verified the MD5 checksum using their recommended Windows checksum verification program. It seems to me that the installation process should verify its own integrity, prior to installing, and report an appropriate error message if anything is amiss.
Linux Mint couldn't print or access the scanner, either, and I was growing concerned about the amount of time it was taking to find the answers to my difficulties. Researching the silence problem alone took hours and resulted in no solution. Although I used a silent computer for a decade in the office, I can't imagine being without sound at home. The print issue I never got around to troubleshooting, because silence itself is a deal-breaker.
The chief problem with Linux, as I see it, is that hardware manufacturers, such as the one that made my motherboard, do not offer any drivers for Linux. The only drivers available are for versions of Windows. That's not fair to Linux users and complicates matters for Linux developers. My distro is maintained by just one guy. I imagine he works day and night already. Supporting all the millions of different hardware configurations is out of the question. Donations amount to less than $5000/month, which can only support one developer and no more. Contrast that with Microsoft, which has legions of developers, besides all the third-party developers that write drivers for Windows without Microsoft having to do anything other than grant or deny the official seal of approval. The game is rigged in favor of Microsoft due to market forces.
Other than the hardware issue, Linux Mint is great. It's well-designed and attractive. I was annoyed by a reviewer that griped about trivialities such as the desktop wallpaper or the splash screen. Those things can be changed, but they look fine to me. I thought the default look and feel of the desktop was superior to Windows. I liked the speed of the installation and the fact that the network configured itself. I was able to access the Internet from the get-go, which isn't true of Windows XP.
I noticed that Firefox was slow as molasses on chess cube, where chess play depends upon Flash. Something simple like dragging a piece is ten times slower in Linux Mint than in Windows. This sluggishness surprised me, because I was under the impression that Linux Mint 11 offered built-in support for Flash. Also, Firefox had a different look and feel in Linux Mint, and not a better one. I missed my navigation icons, such as Back, Forward, New Tab, and Home.
Linux Mint did not boot all the time, either, but only booted some of the time. That may have been due to a faulty hard drive for all I know. The boot time was no better than Windows XP SP3 and may have been slower even. I don't know why Linux users make the claim that Linux boots faster when it doesn't. During the boot, the screen stayed black and the hard drive light was off sometimes, which made me wonder whether it had crashed. It would be nice if Linux Mint gave some indication it was alive during the boot.
Clicking on "Help" in many windows resulted in an error message stating that help was not available. It is possible to research problems in the forums, but that is tedious because forums tend to be chatty and a bit random. Some people know what they are talking about, but some don't, and some of the information is outdated or applicable only to certain hardware configurations but not others. The tutorials and documentation tend to focus upon trivialities that would be significant to an experienced user. There are no tutorials and no documentation on the basics, such as setting up sound in Linux Mint. The new user is left on his own to fend for himself. Reading the manual didn't help either. Apparently the assumption is that the new user already knows what to do and that everything already works the first time.
If Linux offered an obvious path to configuring sound, printer, and scanner, then I'd be all for it, but it seems to offer me a crippled computer lacking much of the functionality I've taken for granted over the years with Windows XP. I don't think that situation is going to improve anytime soon. On Windows XP, I know what to do: visit the motherboard manufacturer's web site, download the drivers, and execute the installation packages. That is not an option with Linux and probably never will be.
I remember when New Egg used to offer a flavor of Linux called Xandros, but now only Windows 7 is available. After my experience spending hours trying to get any sound from my computer, I can understand why. Probably nine out of ten customers returned their Linux distro for a refund and asked for Windows in its place. Look and feel is important, of course, but the bottom line for an OS is hardware, hardware, hardware. If the hardware works, great. If not, then what good is the operating system? It's crippleware at best. Users want their stuff to work. End of story.
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