The Myth of the Operating System Install

I would like to take a moment to discuss a serious issue and that is this:

Operating Systems are hard to install.

Unless you are dealing with a libc6 issue or installing Gentoo onto a 16TB SCSI server server, you will not run into big errors installing your OS. Below is a basic quiz on XP/Ubuntu/OSX. More complicated installs, will of course be more complicated. DUH! However, for the most part, most grandma users will not be running 5 partitions on their hard drives, so let’s look at this. Which OS installer asks you to do the follow:

Read and agree to an EULA.

Choose partition and filesystem.

Select region and language from a dropdown menus.

Select your keyboard. Hit Enter.

Name your computer something snazzy such as ‘POWERRANGERS’. Note: You may NOT use that as your computer name, I already took it. .

Setup admin/user passwords.

Select date/time.

Click FINISH.

This is a fundamental issue that bothers me to no end. At the very core of every OS, they all do the SAME thing. The difference, and the fun, and the reason why people stick a PARTICULAR OS is not what it can bring to the table in terms of world shattering innovation, but the IMPLIMENTATION with which it approaches OS issues that matters. On the levl of Firefox, or Pidin, or editing a picutre, NOBODY worried about IRQ or the 4th layer of the OSI model. That is not for the average person to consider or contemplate. IF they want to learn, and discuss such matters, there are plenty of places to learn about such matters.

Watching youtube videos however, wont change much better WIndows and OSX. And it shouldn’t. So when I hear people say ‘Installing Linux is hard’ or ‘OSX is so stupid’, I have to stand back and disagree with these statements.

goodbye.