Quote Originally Posted by Werner P. Schulz View Post
90% ("ninety" at position 1:45 within the video) not 99%.
Thanks for the correction Werner.

However, I think his 90% is just as much plucking numbers out of thin air as my "99%". In fact, my critique was letting Klaus off easy.

If you recall the early days of Knoppix (and of Linux, to a great extent), one of the main goals was to make linux accessible and usable to those with old legacy PCs. I remember complaining to Klaus about this when he first stopped providing a floppy boot option, and again when he no longer allowed the creation of a persistent image except with the USBflash install.

There are certainly still millions of PCs in use (I have two running here right now, half of my in use PCs) whose BIOS doesn't support booting from USBflash, or from USB at all, for that matter. Knoppix has become seriously crippled on these systems, since neither configurations nor installed applications can be saved when booting from the LiveDV or LiveCD.

I wouldn't be in the least surprised if just these systems make up 10% of all PCs still in use today. And it is, for the most part, their users who particularly need access to a reliable, trustworthy, and free OS.

UEFI has been around for a few years now, and it is so arcane that the top technical support person at a nearby Staples outlet (a major Canadian computer retailer) told me categorically that it would be impossible to boot from any external device on the ASUS laptop I had just bought from his company. He was dead wrong, of course, but I had brought the K7.2 LiveDVD, and his top computer savvy sales rep spent 45 minutes trying unsuccessfully to boot from it on an ASUS laptop with the UEFI BIOS (one version later than the one on my laptop).

I haven't had time to listen to the second half of Klaus's lecture yet, and I hope he addresses this issue adequately. But it's a faint hope...