On Friday 30 July 2010 12:45:51 pm Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
looking at the so-called web statistics, they seem to be counting hits from various types of OS - this would hardly reflect market share.
true ... but its better than assuming.
More Ubuntu users are frantically crawling the net to solve their problems, does not imply that there are more ubuntu users than all the other distros put together.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
who searches sites hosted by wikimedia for ubuntu related problems?
this is not a question of 'think' - it is a question of fact. Every single person I have seen who has migrated back has done so on only one issue - hardware compatibility. And I know any number people who keep dual boot for the same reason.
Have they tried suse or mandriva and had better results?
I bought a netbook with Suse for my daughter - gave it to her and said probably sound, movies, wireless and tata indicom wont work, if they don't give it to the lab for the geeks to tweak - but everything worked out of the box.
have you tried booting a ubuntu live cd(probably no cdrom so try a live usb stick)? Since you got it with suse all the drivers (for the wifi) are already installed by the manufacturer. On ubuntu you might have to follow the prompts and get them installed. Oh and don't forget the nonfree codecs for sound and video(this more of an ethical issue than incompetence of the distro).
Hardware problems that effect ubuntu will usually affect other distributions using the same software versions. for example my Pc at home has a intel D101GCC motherboards one of the few intel motherboards with an ATI graphics card. rite from ubuntu 9.10 onwards ive had problems with the graphics drivers they simply don't work. this turns out to be because ATI decided to drop support for my gfx card from its newer drivers and Newer versions of Xorg do not support the old driver. A friend of mine had the same problem with his old Via graphics card. Problems like these are not distribution specific.