To the downvoters: The fact is that among SL folks the clearest way you spot a noob is that they are running the Linden Labs' client. Everyone else is on a third party one in part because, well Linden Labs is better at many things than building clients for their system. The two biggest viewers seem to be Phoenix and Firestorm, probably followed by Imprudence and a few others.
Interesting. If "noobs" have an inferior experience because of the LL client, they will not come back. If the hope is for the community to thrive and grow, perhaps the existence and superiority of third party clients should be more apparent. Seems the nobody else commenting on HN was aware of this.
I think you are right about this. In fact I would say it is likely a major issue in LL not getting a much larger user base.
There are a couple big problems with LL's clients.
The first one is that while they are LGPL the range of supported hardware, particularly on Linux, is vanishingly small. This means for most systems, it might work or it might not. If you ask for help you get a reply like "your video card is not supported. Sorry."
Again, it might work and on Windows it often does. On Linux it is another story. Often it works until such a point as there is a minor update and then framerates drop to maybe 0.5 to 2. Again, unless you have an nVidia or an ATI card, you are on your own.
The other, third party clients (many of which are open soruce) are often better in this regard. I have never found that sort of problem to occur with a third party client though some of them have stability issues on some platforms.
I think LL more or less figures that since there are enough other open source clients for their network they really only have to do enough to get people started, but often this doesn't work. So I think that the poor initial user experience may be a big factor here, where it is a factor.
Imprudence has the best reputation regarding stability. It has been a while since I tried it though.
On Linux I have had the best luck with Phoenix. I found Firestorm to be unstable on each of my systems. There are some quirks relating to music/media tracks due to library versions the software was compiled against, but solutions are readily found there if you run into them.
Imprudence is outdated these days, unfortunately. You'll find that a lot of avatars and content don't display properly with it these days because of mesh upload and other new features.
To the downvoters: The fact is that among SL folks the clearest way you spot a noob is that they are running the Linden Labs' client. Everyone else is on a third party one in part because, well Linden Labs is better at many things than building clients for their system. The two biggest viewers seem to be Phoenix and Firestorm, probably followed by Imprudence and a few others.