A Foray Further

Fedora seems a nice product, but, coming from the ease of installation that is the Windows environment there are still major gotchas for the average user.

1. Simple things such as syncing my Palm Zire via USB – won’t work out of the box, plenty of suggestions on the web, no immediate solution.

2. Although MySQL seems to be running, I can’t get the Admin module to run. Downloading it from the MySQL web site as an RPM fails due to dependency issues.

All in all it’s a pain. I’m sure that with some hard work researching the problems I may resolve one of them, but it’s still dark days when a Palm PDA won’t work, even with persuasion, never mind just plugging and playing.

I’m no technophobe, but I’m not willing to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to resolve problems that shouldn’t really be an issue any more.

Microsoft on the desktop is definitely a case of lower TCO for all users, regardless of personal OS preferences or predjudices. Until this changes Linux will remain at the fringes, used by a minority of dedicated users who value following their preferences over their time.