Linux as a desktop
Now granted I'm an I.T. engineer so it makes me biased and sometimes people may think I don't realise the problems people face with Linux. Not true though.
The other week I installed a dual boot for a customer on his laptop, the customer was 75 and has now stopped using the Windows section of his hard drive all together. He figured out everything he needed to and is loving every minute of it.
I tried to re-install one of our company laptops the other day, a fresh load of XP and then a dual boot with Kubuntu, I couldn't get past the XP installation for over 2 hours because no matter what I did I couldn't get it to load the SATA drivers for the hard drive. I would get it to load them initially from a USB floppy, then it would boot the Windows Installer and decide it needed the disc again, but the problem then became the Windows installer couldn't find the USB floppy in the same way that the bios had and it couldn't see the disc. Anyway long story short I eventually Got Windows on the laptop and spent another 4 hours installing drivers and updates and patches, when it came to the Kubuntu installation of the laptop I literally put the disc in, clicked a few buttons as and when told to and 25 minutes later rebooted into a fully patched, fully installed and working Linux installation, no hunting for drivers to make shit work, no patching with a service pack and a whole bunch of other software patches. It just worked.
As for installing Virtualbox on a Linux machine, you obviously didn't even try, it comes in the repos for almost every distro out there, downloading it from the sun website and installing it isn't difficult either, they provide an RPM FFS! CentOS is FAR from the best thing to use when starting out with Linux anyway, it makes you work far too hard for little reward, a distro like Ubuntu would be a far better choice, you have the command line at your fingertips when you need it but you can do almost everything you need to from the GUI.
Oh and Bill Gates WAS a programmer, however he didn't invent DOS or Windows (MS didn't even make operating systems, until they ripped off several people who had already written some and sold it on to IBM, yet retaining the copyrights to something they didn't write), go read about CP/M to see how Mr Gates got started with operating systems, then read about IBM offering a deal to the author of CP/M where he had to give up all his copyrights, then when he turned them down, took a worse deal from Gates who kept all his copyrights to something he didn't even write.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
