> The world is not just Gentoo. Have you actually used a mainstream distribution in the last few years?
If you call ubuntu mainstream. I ended up buying a laptop with linux pre-installed but before that I was considering switching a Dell and Sony laptop and was a bit put off by comments of people doing it before me on forums listing the features that would work and that would not work.
> Try telling my mum: "you need to compile your own drivers".
> was a bit put off by comments of people doing it before me on forums listing the features that would work and that would not work.
I have known wifi to be a problem, upon install. But that's more down to a licensing issue, rather than the inability of the OS to cope. Plugging in an ethernet cable and installing any non-free drivers -- via a friendly GUI -- have always fixed any such problem for me.
Well yes Ubuntu is very much mainstream. I experience the whole problem more as a consequence of the documentation fragmentation.
It seems it's expected of the user to be willing to RTFM to various degrees depending on distro. That seems to be most practical way to ensure the continued confifurability of each component, so I guess the question comes down to
How much modularity do you really want to be maintaining?
What worked for me is to pick a set of tools after trying different combinations and learn those well.
Really happy with arch+xfce as clean and fast Dev machine.
If you call ubuntu mainstream. I ended up buying a laptop with linux pre-installed but before that I was considering switching a Dell and Sony laptop and was a bit put off by comments of people doing it before me on forums listing the features that would work and that would not work.