For background - I'm a hard-core Unix Administrator (professionally) for the last 15 years (supporting SGI Irix, HP-UX, Solaris, RedHat, VMWare, etc...) who's mantra is "GUI's are for lazy people" and approach tasks from the concept of "what can you do when the system is down and you're using a VT term".

However, as much as I hate to say it, each time I try switching my home systems to Linux there is always something seemingly simple (in Windows) that after days/weeks researching I can never get working, so I go back to windows. Wi-FI? Forget it. Winamp replacements to listen to streaming audio? Forget it. Gnome3 desktop on dual monitors to work right? Forget it. Yes, I've tried lots of different distros, but I always eventually find SOMETHING that I can do easily on Windows that I can't do with Linux (and lets not even talk about games).

I can't even imagine trying to explain to a novice about device drivers and how to find, install, and make sure they work. Oh, you are trying to get your WiFi/Sound/Video card working? No, you have to search by the chips it uses, not the brand name. How do you find that? Depends on the distro which tools you can use. How do you add new software? Well, check your dependcies ("What are those???"), make sure those and their respective dependencies are installed ("How? Depends on your distro what tools it has...") and then install the app you want. Oh, it requires a kernel patch to work?

  Gimme the damn Windows install disk.....

Yea, and us old-hat Solaris Admins are left to mire in the bog that is now Oracle/Sun post-merger with many of our clients sick of their new [lack of] support so much so that we now have to port entire data centers over to RedHat and realize that all those years of Solaris experience on our resume will soon mean nothing... Thanks USA/Oracle!!!!

Nah, I'm old-school. I never claimed expertise in Perl, just use it on occasion. Awk is my weapon of choice because "Back in my day that's all we had, and we LIKED it that way"....

By the way, never seen memory referenced by Kilowatts before - is that the current draw of the vacuum tubes in use?

Sure, I've written lots of tools, but I never had to use a compiler for them. Shell scripts are all you need. Awk & Perl are the closest I come to programming languages generally speaking.

No, it's simpler than that - Developers and Applications people never bother with (or even think about) start/stop scripts, so after a reboot none of the applications are working (or working right because dependent applications aren't running) and they all blame the Unix Admin when after a reboot everything doesn't work right and expect us to fix their messes...

Stupid lUsers.......

Sounds similar to Dell's MediaDirect...