[SLATE.COM]: Linux is making me insane -- please, someone, correctthis dumbass

LINUX IS MAKING ME INSANE
Grappling with Ubuntu, the free, open-source operating system
by Farhad Manjoo

[url]http://www.slate.com/id/2202664/pagenum/all/[/url]

Key quote: "Nothing about Ubuntu is an advantage over anything
in either Mac or Windows—it has no more features, no better
stability, no greater speed. (Ubuntu crashed several times while
I used it.)"

On Oct 24, 1:08 pm, noj <n...@onset.net> wrote:[color=blue]
> LINUX IS MAKING ME INSANE
> Grappling with Ubuntu, the free, open-source operating system
> by Farhad Manjoo
>
> [url]http://www.slate.com/id/2202664/pagenum/all/[/url]
>
> Key quote: "Nothing about Ubuntu is an advantage over anything
> in either Mac or Windows—it has no more features, no better
> stability, no greater speed. (Ubuntu crashed several times while
> I used it.)"[/color]

Many of the problems appear to be those of a philosophical
nature: "it looks a bit like Windows therefore one does
XYZ exactly like Windows" is a conclusion one had better
well avoid while using Ubuntu, Gentoo, SuSE, or any other
Linux distro. For example, installing Firefox is not
nearly as trivial as downloading a self-installing .EXE
file and double-clicking.

There are also issues with drivers, apparently; the
above user had to burn 5 cds and spend hours before
he could get a working installation on his one system.
The reasons are presumably many.

Frankly, I'd *love* to see Gentoo (which is what I
use) be able to install software in my /home directory
using portage, if I'm not root, for example. Of course,
there are many issues here, some of which are related to
requiring system access for such things as /etc/ files,
and others relating to device access.

There are various issues regarding where a program icon
goes after installation. GUI-less system utilities such
as telnet, ftp, or ifconfig probably won't end up in
one's pulldown menus, for example; one won't see desktop
shortcuts, either.

As for "free"...Ubuntu is not free; no Linux version is.
One might quibble as to how one should measure cost,
of course:

- download costs, which for 740 MB over a 1.5 Mb/s link
might approach a dime.
- download storage costs, which for a 740 MB might
be a US quarter.
- user setup/training costs, which are very significant
for those who have never seen Linux, Unix, Ubuntu,
Gentoo, etc. before. An hour of time can easily cost
more than $100 US, and probably costs twice that.
- licensing costs. Unless one has certain software (the
only one coming to mind is MetroX, which was an offering
on very old versions of RedHat), these are generally nil.
- maintenance costs, which I for one can't quantify
effectively beyond the occasional newsbulletin of
certain large companies losing billions because of
viral infection, or defacement of their company website,
etc.
- upgrade costs, which might be considerable if a vendor
goes out of business or discontinues a proprietary product
one's business depends on.
- the freedom (libre) of modifying the source oneself,
which gets into NRE/QA issues, but also at least allows
one an emergency "out" should a vendor go belly-up.

One can now compare these costs with the licensing costs
one needs for Windows Vista (assuming it didn't come "free"
with the machine, in which case either the buyer, the OEM,
or both paid Microsoft, directly or indirectly).

The Ghost In The Machine wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Oct 24, 1:08 pm, noj <n...@onset.net> wrote:[color=green]
>> LINUX IS MAKING ME INSANE
>> Grappling with Ubuntu, the free, open-source operating system
>> by Farhad Manjoo
>>
>> [url]http://www.slate.com/id/2202664/pagenum/all/[/url]
>>
>> Key quote: "Nothing about Ubuntu is an advantage over anything
>> in either Mac or Windows?it has no more features, no better
>> stability, no greater speed. (Ubuntu crashed several times while
>> I used it.)"[/color]
>
> Many of the problems appear to be those of a philosophical
> nature: "it looks a bit like Windows therefore one does
> XYZ exactly like Windows"[/color]


This classic form of windummyism is going around quite a bit.

Last I heard, one guy had used apt get without an
internet connection to try to fix a wifi problem
and then went around saying all kinds of nasty things
because none of the apt get commands worked for him.

I mean when and how are these windummies going
to get retrained so that Linux commands and mind set
is more reliably transferred to them so that they don't
end up making useless windummy mistakes and waste
everyone's time?

[color=blue]
> is a conclusion one had better
> well avoid while using Ubuntu, Gentoo, SuSE, or any other
> Linux distro. For example, installing Firefox is not
> nearly as trivial as downloading a self-installing .EXE
> file and double-clicking.
>
> There are also issues with drivers, apparently; the
> above user had to burn 5 cds and spend hours before
> he could get a working installation on his one system.
> The reasons are presumably many.
>
> Frankly, I'd *love* to see Gentoo (which is what I
> use) be able to install software in my /home directory
> using portage, if I'm not root, for example. Of course,
> there are many issues here, some of which are related to
> requiring system access for such things as /etc/ files,
> and others relating to device access.
>
> There are various issues regarding where a program icon
> goes after installation. GUI-less system utilities such
> as telnet, ftp, or ifconfig probably won't end up in
> one's pulldown menus, for example; one won't see desktop
> shortcuts, either.
>
> As for "free"...Ubuntu is not free; no Linux version is.
> One might quibble as to how one should measure cost,
> of course:
>
> - download costs, which for 740 MB over a 1.5 Mb/s link
> might approach a dime.
> - download storage costs, which for a 740 MB might
> be a US quarter.
> - user setup/training costs, which are very significant
> for those who have never seen Linux, Unix, Ubuntu,
> Gentoo, etc. before. An hour of time can easily cost
> more than $100 US, and probably costs twice that.
> - licensing costs. Unless one has certain software (the
> only one coming to mind is MetroX, which was an offering
> on very old versions of RedHat), these are generally nil.
> - maintenance costs, which I for one can't quantify
> effectively beyond the occasional newsbulletin of
> certain large companies losing billions because of
> viral infection, or defacement of their company website,
> etc.
> - upgrade costs, which might be considerable if a vendor
> goes out of business or discontinues a proprietary product
> one's business depends on.
> - the freedom (libre) of modifying the source oneself,
> which gets into NRE/QA issues, but also at least allows
> one an emergency "out" should a vendor go belly-up.
>
> One can now compare these costs with the licensing costs
> one needs for Windows Vista (assuming it didn't come "free"
> with the machine, in which case either the buyer, the OEM,
> or both paid Microsoft, directly or indirectly).[/color]

The Ghost In The Machine wrote:[color=blue]
> On Oct 24, 1:08 pm, noj <n...@onset.net> wrote:[color=green]
>> LINUX IS MAKING ME INSANE
>> Grappling with Ubuntu, the free, open-source operating system
>> by Farhad Manjoo
>>
>> [url]http://www.slate.com/id/2202664/pagenum/all/[/url]
>>
>> Key quote: "Nothing about Ubuntu is an advantage over anything
>> in either Mac or Windows—it has no more features, no better
>> stability, no greater speed. (Ubuntu crashed several times while
>> I used it.)"[/color]
>[/color]

#1 - The title has nothing to do with the article...
[color=blue]
> Many of the problems appear to be those of a philosophical
> nature: "it looks a bit like Windows therefore one does
> XYZ exactly like Windows" is a conclusion one had better
> well avoid while using Ubuntu, Gentoo, SuSE, or any other
> Linux distro. For example, installing Firefox is not
> nearly as trivial as downloading a self-installing .EXE
> file and double-clicking.
>[/color]

#2 - Windows are windows - PC, MAC, XP, Gnome, KDE... they all work
basically the same way.

[color=blue]
> There are also issues with drivers, apparently; the
> above user had to burn 5 cds and spend hours before
> he could get a working installation on his one system.
> The reasons are presumably many.
>[/color]

#3 - What I get from this the guy was burning from his Windows install
and was burning at too high a data rate for his media. Absolutely NOT an
Ubuntu (or Windows) problem at all. A user problem for sure.

<snip>[color=blue]
>
> There are various issues regarding where a program icon
> goes after installation. GUI-less system utilities such
> as telnet, ftp, or ifconfig probably won't end up in
> one's pulldown menus, for example; one won't see desktop
> shortcuts, either.
>[/color]

#4 - Whereas in Windows everything ends up on the start menu so it
eventually doesn't fit on the screen anymore. And once you learn that
the package manager will tell you where every bit of that 'app'
installed to... that's better than Windows in my book.

The funny thing is that it's actually not a bad article. As much as
the author seems to try to prefix every paragraph with a poke at Ubuntu
he ends up saying that it's got him intrigued enough to keep an eye on
it. The author is right, Ubuntu does have a way to go, but only in a few
areas. But what Ubuntu lacks in user-ability, Microsoft and MS software
houses (not Windows) quadruple with over-user-ability - software that
takes more software to get rid of, registry cleaners, defrag (a
non-interactive game), etc. I'll take this little Underdog no problem.
The Author is not a dumbass, he is the poster boy of the typical PC
user. Ignorance is his (typical user) problem. He, like many, doesn't
care/want/need to know about the inner workings of any OS; they just
want it to work when they are using it. This proven by point #3 above.

<snip>

--
Norman
Registered Linux user #461062

After takin' a swig o' grog, noj belched out
this bit o' wisdom:
[color=blue]
> LINUX IS MAKING ME INSANE
> Grappling with Ubuntu, the free, open-source operating system
> by Farhad Manjoo
>
> [url]http://www.slate.com/id/2202664/pagenum/all/[/url]
>
> Key quote: "Nothing about Ubuntu is an advantage over anything
> in either Mac or Windows?it has no more features, no better
> stability, no greater speed. (Ubuntu crashed several times while
> I used it.)"[/color]

Sounds like a flatfish nym <grin>.

The sidebar about burning the CD properly was funny:

[url]http://www.slate.com/id/2202664/sidebar/2202980/[/url]

Every time I tried to install Ubuntu, it seemed, I would get stuck at
a different point in the installation process. I clogged Google's
servers trying to track down the problem; eventually, I found a few
forums that warned that I had to pay attention to how I'd burned the
Ubuntu installation CD. It turns out that you need to set your CD
burner to work at its slowest possible speed in order to avoid any
data-writing problems on the disc. After I did that, the OS installed
perfectly.

Was he burning the install CD on a crap hardware, or on a crap OS using a
crap burning app?

I invariably get comments from people who are irritated that I didn't
mention Ubuntu as an alternative. I usually dismiss them in much the
way I shrug off fans of third-party presidential candidates. I've run
desktop versions of Linux in the past, and I've found them to be as
pleasant as Ralph Nader\u2014the OS was difficult to install and
learn, and there wasn't enough available software to make the switch
worth my while.

Yeah, /he's/ ready to try a new OS.

Put down a another check-mark noting that there are some noobs who will
have trouble installing an operating system:

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhad_Manjoo[/url]

Who would have thought?

But, in the above, he does say something that's pretty true (except,
I'll bet, for the last sentence):

Once the OS was up and running, I ran into more snags\u2014though to
tell the truth, these troubles were more my fault than the operating
system's. After years of using Windows and various Mac OSes, I kept
approaching Ubuntu as if it were one of those systems. It took me a
while to get adjusted to its unique way of doing things\u2014and once
I figured out those special ways, things became a lot easier. For
instance, at first I had lots of trouble installing programs. The
current release of Ubuntu ships with a Beta version of the Firefox
Web browser, and I wanted the final version. So, like any Windows or
Mac user, I went to the Firefox site and downloaded the latest
version. But when the files appeared on my computer, I didn't know
what to do with them -- there was no setup or installation program,
nothing I could double-click on to get it to run.

--
The Great Movie Posters:
SEE a female colossus... her mountainous torso, skyscraper limbs,
giant desires!
-- Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (1958)