I'm just saying that it would be easier if the 'competition' made a competitive product.
There are competitive products.
Every man and his dog knows that no operating system is perfect, all have good points and bad points.
Yup, nothing's perfect
People like you and me can install things like Linux with little or no problems but Joe Average obviously cant which is why he prefers to pay for an OS that really installs itself.
Well Joe Average can go and install RedHat or Mandrake
By the way, yesterday I installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 (my first contact with the FreeBSD world). I daresay the installation process was easier than I expected. I daresay it "installed by itself". Of course maybe that's because I've installed a number of OSs till now and it might seem normal. I don't know :P
However, one thing a linux user should know how to do is compile. It's not hard. On most cases it is
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
password:
$ make install
Still it's not what a user wants to do. I got no problem with it, but Joe Average would. IMHO Linux should never get any easier, just to please Joe Average. Linux wasn't created for Joe Average. If Joe wants to use Linux he should get some fundamental understanding of stuff. Yeah that's a lot to ask I know, but that's just me :P
Arrive on a boxed CD,
Come with free support from the vendor,
More or less install itself without asking the end user to find things like video card model numbers,
Automatically detect internet connections and install drivers for them,
All of the above except no.2 are true for distros such as RedHat and Mandrake. However the support you get isn't from the ones publishing the distro, but from the ones using it...
