Thats not your fault, its Brothers. Not all printers are going to work in Linux, simply because most printer manufacturers only support Windows.
It's not Brothers fault. Consumer demand decides what gets supported. Don't they typically support MacOS as well?
Actually, I've since learned that Brother does indeed support that printer in Linux, and has published .deb and .rpm's for their users. So, I guess its really more that the OP doesn't know what they're doing ..
Microsoft's desktop supremacy hasn't been down to "it's got a nice, easy to use interface" for at least 20 years. Rather, Microsoft is (or was, in the pre-post-PC world) everywhere because of (a) licensing stitch-ups with hardware vendors and (b) network externalities: get into Corporate IT departments with Office, then people will want (or need) to use the same OS at home, and then you can strong-arm hardware vendor…
> desktop is now irrelevant I disagree completely. Why don't you write all your books on an iPad? It's not the tool for the job. In my opinion 20 years from now, assuming we don't have cortical implants or similar, people are going to go to work and sit down in front of a monitor with a keyboard and a mouse. It won't be so different to how people worked 20 years ago. MSFT completely agrees with you. The see the Zeitg…
At some point in time desktop was a must-have to get any meaningful work done. Especially a windows desktop. whatever the work may be. today thats not the case. In fact, lot of work cannot be done with windows desktop anymore. We need windows only to access windows specific legacy software, that enterprises are still using, such as outlook, excel, powerpoint etc. It is the IT groups in large companies that is holding the fort for microsoft. But, how long they can defend microsoft? Probably not much longer. Still intel is a major partner for microsoft. With ARM 64 bit coming in 2014, intel faces steep competition. ARM and linux go way better than ARM and windows. IT guys will eventually probably disappear foreever.
Dirty little secret: most people aren't content creators, even for values of "content" such as discussion topic comments.
I think that's the point. While ~10% of computing devices are keyboarded, traditional machines,.. >>10% of content is created on them; which makes them hardly 'irrelevant'
I compose the large majority of my hacker news comments on my nexus 4 phone.
I've been using Linux since Redhat 4.0, whatever kernal version that was. I've always been a "desktop" user but very much know my way around bash and can throw together pipes and scripts. Last week I setup a fresh Ubuntu box in our office, on a fairly new Dell PC in order to view a webinar. I wanted to show off Linux (ended up looking like a moron.) Flash issues on Firefox rightaway, no matter what I did it would not…
I don't see these issues, odd that our experiences are so different.
Microsoft's desktop supremacy hasn't been down to "it's got a nice, easy to use interface" for at least 20 years. Rather, Microsoft is (or was, in the pre-post-PC world) everywhere because of (a) licensing stitch-ups with hardware vendors and (b) network externalities: get into Corporate IT departments with Office, then people will want (or need) to use the same OS at home, and then you can strong-arm hardware vendor…
Irrelevant to watching movies and listening to music chatting with mates and generally using a computer for the purpose of entertainment maybe? Because the real work needs a real computer. One with a keyboard you can type on, a screen which can show some decent amount of information, printers and mice and compilers and more than 2GB of ram. There are more computers than ever in play, their numbers have been eclipsed…
Again, it need not be a "windows" desktop. you can do seriuos work with Linux or Mac desktop. And you may be more productive as well.
The main point might be that your parents aren't technical people (whatever that means), and the laptop was set from the start (they never had to care about hardware compatibilities). We did a similar thing with my inlaws, leaving an ipad behind to facetime with their grandson, and recently they called because they couldn't see their new mails anymore (their provider changed the imap servers), they also happened to m…
"their provider changed the imap server" "learning english" Funny, I had to fix a very similar issue with my french in-laws IMAP just yesterday. Just for science, are your in-laws French and using Free.fr as an ISP?
They could have been as well, my parents are in France with orange, and they don't seem happy either.
I think that's the point. While ~10% of computing devices are keyboarded, traditional machines,.. >>10% of content is created on them; which makes them hardly 'irrelevant'
I compose the large majority of my hacker news comments on my nexus 4 phone.
And what percentage of your total content creation output is that?
What do you mean, nobody uses Linux? At my Uni, in CS you couldn't not use one *nix or another. All the classwork happened on some timeshares.
That sounds like it should be really. As far as I know, this isn't the case for Dutch, French and Argentinian schools (the ones I have experience with, or know someone that has experience with).
When I was student in France, in a "grande ecole" it was all Windows. When I did an Msc in a standard university (Jussieu), they were using Ubuntu. This was in 2005, maybe it has changed...
Both my parents are 60+. My mom is perfectly fine using Ubuntu on my old x61 for email, browsing, and YouTube. To be fair she could probably replace it with a tablet if it weren't for the fact that she visits a lot of flash sites (Chinese TV streaming sites). Likewise my dad is on another Ubuntu machine at home. His work needs access to some software / printers that can't be run via Wine so he's stuck with Windows th…
I'm actually considering buying a tablet for an elderly relative, an iPad would have been ideal were is not for the fact that it cannot stream flash, they watch news clips and things and so that is a deal breaker... so Android it is!