A noob, without even an avatar is speaking.

Append:
Slartibartfast, what a cute nose.. I've never noticed before.

Yet I say the same thing about Linux. When I'm running Linux on my hardware, it works fine! n00bs!

It all comes down to hardware support. Hardware vendors typically don't cooperate with Linux developers so they're forced to painfully reverse engineer and write their own kernel modules, which unsurprisingly aren't perfect right away. In Windows though, you're not only paying good money for the system, but the hardware vendors typically write their own drivers for the hardware. There's no good reason for driver issues.

It's always theoretically possible that it's actually a hardware fault, but I'm not an engineer so I'm not the one to say. The computer ran fine all through the Vista days, while my colleague with an identical machine BSOD'd three or more times a day for nearly a year (ironically?, his computer seems to be fine now^[1]). I was fine with Windows 7 for a while, though I still experienced the occasional lockup, but ever since installing the release version of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate it's been unstable.

Myself and my colleague have opened up the case and saw nothing alerting... Fans and heat sinks all seem clear and there is no visible damage..

When I was running Fedora (8 and 9, IIRC) it had far superior performance compared to Windows XP, Vista, or even Seven. It booted faster, reach a usable state super fast, and just always worked. Things happened when I told them to. In Windows, startup takes forever, and it continues to be slow as Hell doing everything. If I could I'd so install Linux at j0rb, but sadly I'm predominantly writing ASP.NET here and "need" Visual Studio... I'm tempted to install Windows in a VirtualBox VM...

That process says nothing about anybody except for the people who were selected for the video after editing.

You could make the same video with people being fooled into thinking that Windows 7 was OS X 10.7 or a C64 was an iPad.

Yes, definitely. If Linux had official hardware support, things would be a lot different. Without it, it is actually quite a feat that it runs on so many hardware.

Wrong. The point is not to show that Linux generally is better than everything else. It is that people think Linux is something difficult to handle - and in fact it is not.

edit:
Let's face it that way: If you can find at least 10 total noobs in the streets (noobs, because they can't recognize that it is not Windows as they were told) that can operate Linux, how complicated can it be?

edit2:
Also I am not surprised that tons of noobs (and pros, I am not saying every maccy is a noob) swear that their shiny Mac is the best thing ever invented. Give Linux some lifestyle advertisement and sell a handful of hardware configurations that are officially supported and you will reach a similar echo with your Linux machines like Apple did with their Macs. Maybe you will need some aluminium housing that can make your HDD stay alive during a crash from the orbit or stuff to make people think your hardware is 1337, but in general, it works like that.

Mostly because I could only get a free student version for Windows. I don't quite remember if the Linux version was none-working or not there at all. If I'll still remember by the time the weekend ends I'll check if I can get a Linux version.
Though if you say your Linux version works only semi-fine then maybe I shouldn't :S.

Well, I can't really say thank you since that is not my nose, but rather it belongs to my dog
I've had it in my avatar since I can remember.

Actually, today i'm going to try out 9.10 netbook remix. My friend has a busted netbook and I told her I can get it booting unless the hardware is broken. Her windows wont load even in safemode.

anyone have pointers/tips??

I'm not suggesting it was faked. But it is contrived and edited.

I could just as easily have somebody sit down in front of my fresh Ubuntu install and do this:

• "See how everything is big and blocky? You just need to type xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1200 and everything looks great!"

• "Notice how the wireless doesn't work? First you have to plug in to a wired network and click on this menu item to enable proprietary drivers. If you select the first one on the list, it won't work because it's broken, but if you select the second one, it will!"

• "To listen to MP3 files, you just have to type sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras"!

• "Oh, and if you want to watch DVDs, do this: sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

The person would be wide-eyed and confused, wondering why he had to type in all of those "codes."

A more realistic study would be to take three groups of computer-illiterates, with each beginning on a different OS (Windows 7, Ubuntu, OS X) that has been preconfigured to avoid all of the above nonsense. Have them perform the same task on each OS without any help.

E.g., Log in to your e-mail account, open up the picture attachment, print it out, crop it, save it, and send it to somebody.

That would give you an idea of how easy each OS is to use. However, it wouldn't do much in the way of long-term usability:

• Windows suffers from slow downs and crashes (mostly) due to people running as a super user and installing crappy software.

  
  

• Linux suffers from being out of the mainstream loop... all it takes is for a single program or file or device to not be supported, and it's back to Windows. (The same thing can apply to OS X, but with Apple controlling the hardware, it's not as big of an issue.)

I find Linux Mint is better. It's ubuntu but with all the missing stuff added (like codecs and nvidia drivers) and a vastly improved menu system.

That's true. I am having this problem with Visual Studio. Fortunately, I will not be forced to use it in the future. For the rest of my programs I personally decided to ignore software/hardware that is not available for/working with Linux - and I am not missing anything.

Yeah, that's what I said; that instead of doing sudo apt-get ... you can just try and open an mp3 file and have the restricted codecs magically install themselves. (And yes, that's Totem, though it happens with previous versions as well.)

After a couple hours screwing around with stuff, I got all of my hardware on my macbook working (webcam is too slow for video)... that's better than usual. And wubi installed and works pretty good, so I'm happy to have a real linux system on my main machine to supplement the vm.