[CLUE-Tech] Enthusiasm for Linux

[Dennis J Perkins]

I abandoned Windows at home back in 93.  I was tired of the limitations 
in DOS and Windows 3.1, and moved to OS/2 2.1.  Say what you will about 
OS/2, but it was rock solid.  The only problems I ever had were 
hardware-related.  No 640K limit and a better designed API than the one 
Windows 3.1 offered.

I started using Linux in late 94 or very early 95.  It wasn't long 
before I was only using OS/2 for just one or two programs.  About two 
years later I finally removed OS/2 because I needed the disk space.  

I like the power that the Linux command line provides.  I like the 
graphical environments as long as I still have the command line.  I like 
what I can do with scripts.  Compare that with DOS's sorry excuse for 
batch files.  I've heard that Windows now offers a scripting language, 
but I haven't looked at it.  I like that I can customize Linux to do 
what I want, instead of what Microsoft or J. Random Programmer wanted. 
 I definitely don't miss the registry.  

At work I must use Windows.  No one at work understands why I like 
Linux.  And they are mystified why I wiped Windows off my new personal 
laptop and put Linux on it.  At work programs suddenly die for no 
apparent reason (Outlook is the worst offender for me at work).  Outlook 
will decide that there aren't enough resources available when I want to 
send an attachment.  (No, killing programs doesn't help.  Rebooting 
doesn't help.  Eventually the problem resolves itself and goes away.) 
 Printers that worked are suddenly inaccessible.  A networked drive is 
suddenly inaccessible by its name and I must use the IP address to get 
to it.  A new version of Windows comes out and my PLC programs won't 
run.  Once the install program insisted that an uninstalled program must 
be uninstalled first!  Word tries to be helpful and screws things up 
(Ok, how the hell do I turn that off?).  And there are viruses and 
worms.  IT emails the patch and tells us to install it.  Hopefully 
everything will still work afterwards.

 From an esthetic point of view, W2K looks better than Windows 3.1.  But 
XP looks like an amateur designed it.  Or whoever used to do layouts for 
Wired magazine a few years ago.  What will the next version look like?


Linux isn't perfect.  Someone told me that if God couldn't make a 
perfect universe, what hope do we have?  But it is not driven by 
marketing, so it does not ship with a log of bugs or with features that 
nobody will use, simply to drive sales.  If does what I want and I am 
not at the whim of some company.

Gates and his cronies like to throw out the word "innovation".  In their 
hands it is just a marketing term and a part of FUD.  But most 
innovation is evolutionary, not revolutionary, contrary to what they 
want you to believe.  And they can't hire all of the potential talent 
out there.  That means that most of the innovation is bound to take 
place outside Microsoft.  Take a simple thing like command completion. 
 It's been around for years and they still haven't innovated that.

If it looks like there is too much choice under Linux, you are looking 
at the problem from the wrong angle.  Look back at Windows.  Is there 
enough choice?  Or is the choice often limited to Microsoft?  Most other 
industries offer more choices... cars, clothing, restaurants, books.  Of 
course, those choices don't require much thinking.  So far, computers 
require us to think in order to use them.  But thinking is hard, so just 
tell us what our choices are.  And not too many choices, please.  For a 
supposedly democratic society, we seem to like binary choices.  Just 
look at elections.


Microsoft's high prices are probably limited.  Under Open Source, 
programs are becoming commodities.  Commodity items seem to have two 
things in common: maturity and pricing.  A mature product is no longer 
improving much.  What genuinely new and compelling features are new 
office suites offering?  If there aren't any, then why upgrade?  Because 
the document format has changed.  Why not insist on open document 
standards and refuse to buy anything that doesn't meet the standard? 
 Why should I pay $300 for an office suite when I can get an equivalent 
for much less?  Linux has a lot of commodity programs:  OpenOffice, gcc, 
GNOME, KDE, etc.  They work, and they work well enough.  What's more, 
many of them work better.

David L. Willson wrote:

>And from me, back to using Windows more than Linux, onaccounta the new job:
>- I miss Evolution, that didn't load images into email messages until I told
>it to.  Pornographic spam really loses it's teeth without the pictures.
>- I miss being able to SSH anytime, without having to download and install
>PuTTY first.
>- I miss having a real command prompt.  I miss being able to identify and
>delete any file that exists on my system.
>- I hate panicking when I realize that my AV software is a week out-of-date,
>and someone just shared their love with me.  Conversely, I miss laughing
>when I get a copy of a neutered Outlook virus, and I get to ~read~ it.
>- I miss being able to bug out to a shell session and kill damn near ~any~
>runaway job.
>- I miss /etc.  I hates the Windows registry.  HATES IT!
>- I miss being able to mount ~anything~.  I hates NTFS ~and~ FAT.  Hates
>them, we do, eh Yoda?
>
>K...  That's enough for right now.  The retarded command-prompt alone is
>enough to drive me crackers.  I go onto a Linux box, I type 'dir', I get
>something.  I go onto a Windows* box, I type 'ls', I get nothin' useful.
>Why can't I mount my EXT2 partition from Windows*?  Why can't I do a
>loop-back mount and create a filesystem within a file?  Is that really so
>hard?  K, I'll stop now.  <pant, pant>
>
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