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Perception of Linux Among IT Undergrads
iconian writes: "The Linux Journal has a story on IT students and their perception of Linux. One of the funnier myths perceived to be true is that 'Microsoft's technical support is the best in the industry and is superior to that offered by the Linux community.' It just goes to show how little real world experience students have. It's a bit disturbing considering they will be the next generation of technology workers."
I didn't finish my undergrad work yet, and took a job in the linux field. Love linux, hated learning crap MS propoganda in school, so I left... Will finish eventually, but not yet... Enjoying what I do way too much... :)
ps- First Post?
This is my Sig.
I'm hardly shocked. This is just the next generation of suits that I saw cranked out in the late 90s... mindless Visual Basic drones who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, the schlocks who got all As but couldn't think on their toes to solve real problems.
;-)
For the most part, we wouldn't hire them to work at the on-campus computer labs. They could never debug problems unless they had the manuals open, and even then... fat chance.
These are the future ineffectual middle-managers, the guys who got into computers because 4 years ago, they were told dot.com was the way to go... oops, sorry kids, no jobs for you! (*)
(*) unless your frat buddies get them for you, but we'll know that's how you got in, and we'll make you pay for it
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Don't get me wrong, I'm no MS lover, but do you REALLY honestly feel Linux has better techsupport than MS products??
Basically, in the past when Ive had a NT/2000 or MSSQL issues I've paid my $200 bucks and got it worked out... everytime. Its not free or fun, but generally MS's paid corporate support is actually quite efficient.
Anytime I've had a Linux issue I have basically been told to RTFM.
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
One of my interns at work is a CS undergrad, and I think he's pretty typical of the breed. Talks about Linux all the time to be 'leet, but still gave me a resume done in Word on his pirated Win2K partition.
Schools are a tough nut to crack for OSS, because students have no moral qualms about piracy and a lot of professors demand closed file formats for assignments to be electronically filed.
--saint
>One of the funnier myths perceived to be true is that 'Microsoft's technical support is the best in the industry and is superior to that
>offered by the Linux community.'
While I can not speak to using the pay-per-use support of the Linux Vendors, if you use Microsoft's Incident based support system, It is really really damn good. I have not contacted any other Vendors where you can call w/ a technical support problem and speak to the developers of the application at 11:00 at night.
Please do not flame... I am not saying that the Linux community provides bad support. In terms of free support services, they kick M$ ass.... I am only speaking to my experience w/ Microsoft's Pay-per-incident support....
You have a Windows PC with a subtle problem which is preventing it from running (possibly a trashed library or something similar). It contains several complex pieces of installed software such as Visual C++ that have had their configurations customized. Obtain a fix for the problem and return the PC to service with all configuration exactly as it was initially except for the broken bit now working. This is a pass/fail assignment, any discrepancy will result in you getting an F for the course.
Now do the same with a Linux box with a horked copy of bash preventing a boot.
As somebody that supports a product that runs on both MS and UNIX, I've run into so many techs for whom Microsoft is a religion. They'd rather stretch the limits of running the product on MS, instead of sticking it on a Sun box where it'll crank along, because MS is the only system they know in-house. So the product runs slow... and I look bad. But you can't fault them too much: it's all they know. I blame their CIO for not being more aware of what's going on in the world.
And don't get me started on what a useless certification an MCSE is. It was time wasted for me to get one, and I would maybe pay it passing glance on a candidate's resume if I were hiring someone.
They have the Internet on computers now?
The students felt that "The KDE/GNOME choice confuses most newcomers to Linux."
This is listed by the author as a "clanger", or repeatedly offered mistruth. I wholehartedly agree with him. As an experienced Linux user, I feel that the KDE/GNOME choice does not confuse most newcomers to Linux, it confuses nearly all of them, as well as experienced users. What the students should have said was "the KDE/GNOME choice confuses everybody".
I'm so tired of having to decide which featureset I want to use today. For C++ development I use Kdevelop, because of the nice C++ features like picklists for virtual functions. However I can't stand KDE's tendency to map its' own colors onto my X applications, nor can I take it desktop switching mode, so for casual web browsing I restart in Gnome. This means that I've had to memorize two control panels, two ways of resizing Xterms (I hate both their Xterm replacements), two ways of virtual desktop switching, etc. If there's anything that's important about the desktop metaphor it is that the metaphor must be intuitive. The problem with choice is that it requires you to gain knowledge in order to make an informed decision. To gain knowledge you have to spend time learning. When I pick up a lab instrument I don't want to spend time learning how to use it's desktop; I don't freaking care how it works. I want to use the instrument.
The GNOME/KDE choice is annoying. Honestly I don't care which one goes away, I just wish one of them would.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I work for a corporation doing production support for large scale internet systems based on M$ technology. I absolutely agree with the statement "Microsoft technical support is superior". Why?
1) Whenever I have a SERIOUS problem with the guts of something run by microsoft. I have actually had them custom write a fix for me for the OS.
2) At the end of the day, I need someone to strangle. Am I going to go tell the CIO of a Fortune 500 company that some hack coder added something to the kernel that screwed us?
3) I know EXACTLY who to call. Who do I call for a Linux issue? Redhat? IBM? Who did I buy it from? Who is supporting it?
Redhat has done wonders for the industry. But I need ONE vendor to contact for ALL my issues who has deep expertise in all aspects of the software. I can't go to Linuxcare or any third party. I want to be on Linux...but I am running these systems on Sun and M$ for just this reason
This will probably get modded as flaimbait or something, but here goes...
From a corporate perspective, IRC is very, very far from legitimate or reliable tech support. Same goes for usenet. People want a phone number that they can call and get an answer RIGHT NOW. Or if they don't get one RIGHT NOW, they want to know that a technician is working on the problem until it's solved.
There's very little of such support available in the world of Linux right now. RedHat is getting there, and LinuxCare used to be on its way.(they're gone now, right?) So yeah, in the realm of Tech Support with capital letters, MS blows linux away.
But you're right. I get answers faster through IRC and/or USENET posts than though MS tech support almost every time.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
You're comparing Microsoft corporate support offerings to random hobbyist support offerings.
Wait, wait, for my next trick, I think I'll compare the support you can get from your 20-year-old son for Windows to a Red Hat corporate support plan.
It would be wiser to compare the support from an actual Linux company, such as Red Hat or IBM, to that of Microsoft.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I have a different version of "day" and "night" students...the day students are those who were mentioned earlier (just in it since they thought they could make money out of it...), they know nothing and end up dropping out. The night students are those who actually know how to program and know how to make a computer work. These are the ones you want to ask.
If you smell what The Ranj is cookin!
Does it mean 'fix it for meeeeee! wah!'? If so, Microsoft stomps the hell out of Linux. Their whole _concept_, including for developers (see Visual Basic), is for there to be inner circles and outer circles, in a centralised authority structure. You can have teams of Microsoft insiders working themselves into ulcers for you if you need it- you do NOT get control, ownership of the product, or the final say. Guys like Ballmer expend HUGE effort into making sure the MS insiders ARE still willing to sweat blood to assist J. Random Developer (i.e. hold their hand, wipe their nose, fix their problem). If not for this huge effort ('developers developers developers developers!'), you would be unimaginably screwed dealing with them. The dependency relationship is based on an immense effort on Microsoft's behalf to be the caretaker.
They could stop at any time (Ballmer dies, new CEO is bean counter or something) and it's worth considering just HOW hard Ballmer tries to keep the monolith centered on the needs of certain customers. HE knows that the natural reaction is to screw the customer, get lazy and stop providing good service since you've got them locked down anyhow.
By comparison, if 'technical support' means 'give me the power to do it myself', it's tough to beat Linux, simply because you can get ownership of so much (for all practical coding purposes). For many projects it's easy to get full disclosure of source code. You get to fork off versions if you have a need- you get to incorporate other people's stuff into yours if you follow the licensing rules- there's no 'inner circle' to it at all, and so people get snippy if asked to behave like they are an inner circle. It's 'RTFM' because they know you have just as much capacity to fully acquaint yourself with the situation as they have- and they are not hired to help you, they produce things and you can TAKE them and HAVE them to do with as you will, again with full disclosure. The idea is to take advantage of that.
The interesting comparison here is that this time, if anything drastic happens to Linux, your ownership of your parts of it, and your access to information and your effectiveness, are quite unchanged. It's not a dependency relationship, more like a forced self-sufficiency relationship. You get no support in dependency, but you get resources for self-sufficiency (including legal ones- the licensing) that you flat cannot get from Microsoft.
The question becomes, what sorts of programmers are more relevant and useful to the world? Ones that seek dependency relationships, or ones that seek self-sufficiency relationships? I think there's something to be said for each, but you're a hell of a lot more likely to find cutting edge stuff in the latter camp- which will be pretty unpolished, but that's normal for innovation.
You'll find less innovative software coming out of the dependency camp.
My university (one of the top in the US, supposedly) just started teaching the intro CS class (for non-coders) using C#. Why? God only knows. They used to teach it in Java- they switched from Pascal very early on, which was probably a bad choice. But now Java is superbly well-documented, and becoming an industry standard. C# may become an industry standard, but only because MS is behind it. So now that course is essentially Windows-only. (The standard data structures and systems programming courses are, of course, still done on Unix- by now, of course, in the form of RedHat 7)
There are quite a few people who push Linux as the best and only solution. These people are dorks. However, most of us react more strongly to MS products being pushed as the best and only solutions because:
- MS software pricing is an obscenity.
- Linux companies haven't used illegal coercion to make their products the market leaders.
- Until recently, people did not choose Linux-based solutions simply because they had the word "Linux" in them.
- the possibility of single-vendor lock-in is virtually nonexistent for Linux.
I work part-time in tech support here, and I cannot tell you how annoying it is to have to deal with all the Microsoft fanboys who think Windows is the final point in computing evolution. These are techincally astute students, among the brightest in the world, and incapable of dealing with anything that doesn't have the Start menu and Explorer. For my part, I'm glad I'm studying computational biology, where MS products are by and large recognized as utter garbage. If Windows ever becomes the platform of choice for serious scientific computing, I'm going to law school instead.
I think its more down to the motivation of todays students. In the old days people were forced to use command lines and if you came across a problem you used any reference material you could find to get the problem solved. Now days most windows faults can be solved by just a few clicks of a mouse and if that doesn't work, in goes the remaster cd. If they can do the job without having to learn very much then why bother learning dos. Its not very suprising that most students don't use linux....they is indeed a GUI but to get it working perfectly you need to start tinkering under the bonet.
;-)
IMHO
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
It's easy to get confused about Linux distros if you're on the outside looking in. You've got different versions of the kernel and different distros of the OS with different versions of each distro.
One thing that Microsoft definately has is better marketing, which translates into a better understanding of what versions of their products are current, and which ones are outdated.
What's more current, RedHat 7.2, Slackware 8.0, SUSE 6.4 or Debian 2.2? What kernels do each of these distros ship with, and what's the latest kernel any of them can reasonably run?
No, it's not hard to figure out which Linux distro is the latest and has whatever features you require. It does take time, though, and patience if you're new to Linux. Microsoft removes the time and thought required to shop and support their products (or at least, that's the rumor).
As much as the Linux zealots dont want to admit it, there are some very serious usablity, support and attitude changes that need to be made before Linux goes anywhere.
1) Support
Still not good enough. The fact is I can still solve problems faster using MS resources that with Linux ones. MS resources are also dumbed down a degree, with a fair bit of hand holding. This is opposed to Linux where you need to be technically proficent.still overall. Not good enough. Support and documentaion does need to be clearer because the point is, MOST of the users will take one look and scrap Linux.
2) Attitude.
Drop the 1337 crap. Half the Linux zealots know fuck all about computers. STFU becuase your an embarrassment. And the true elites, maybe a dose of reality might help bring yourself down to a level where your approachable to the newbies. The fact is somethign like XP is much easier to use than Linux. It's your attitudes that drive newbies away "RTFM!!" PAH! Hand hold the newbies once and they wont fucking EVER go back to MS.
3) Usability.
Here is an example. Ask a newish computer user to add a network printer then connect to it. Firstly in Windows, then in Linux. Now see the confused looks first, then with a touch of do this, they can. Then ask them to do it again without help. Windows, they will guess their way. Linux will be NO FUCKING WAY. Simple shit like that is not dumb enough to do in Linux yet!
Unless I have those three issues solved, Linux aint going anywhere. Wake up and see it for yourself.
Most commercial software has a two-way communication between QA and support. Last I checked, the people on #linux didn't have direct and constant access to the bug-tracking databases for each and every linux application that popped up.
There are some development efforts in linux that have good 2-way communication like that - abiword, for example. But for the most part, there's nothing comparable to the relatively few players you have to deal with in the commercial world.
I was really disappointed with this article. I was hoping that the author would explain some ways that Linux could fight the "only-for-geeks" perception. Perhaps he would even have a suggestion for how we could introduce Linux more easily to junior system administrators!
But no, he lists the (common, cliched) reasons that Linux isn't fit for the desktop, and then goes on to deny them, point by point. He then throws in a little Microsoft-bashing, which makes the article seem less like a helpful "Where do we go from here?" and more like a "Linux rocks; I don't understand why everyone isn't using it" rant.
Case in point: He cites the "infamous reliability" of Windows, then says: "it has become okay for a PC (running Windows) to crash once a day (or more often)." Since when? And since when does a non-9x OS from Microsoft crash more than once a day? I run Windows 2000, and it doesn't crash. If it crashes, it's a hardware problem. Applications crash, sure. But no one has yet solved the application crash problem. Windows NT and XP have about the same reliability. Uptimes of 5-100 days (which I have seen with Windows 2000) are perfectly fine for workstations, most of which get turned off at the end of the day, regardless. As much as I hate some of the features in Windows XP, I am still encouraging people to upgrade to it if they use a 9x-based OS. Folks, no computer should crash more than once a week, and you don't have to run around saying "Use Linux" if you want that type of reliability.
The author then goes on to quote students who say "Linux is seen as a geek's OS. Programmers love it and that puts everyone else off." But instead of explaining how Linux can be more friendly to non-technical users, he cites the "anti-Linux FUD campaign coming out of Redmond". Microsoft or no Microsoft, Linux vendors and programmers are just now realizing that ease-of-use matters, even to technical professionals. Instead of addressing this need in his article, he points fingers at Microsoft, which isn't productive.
One final comment which really irked me was his response to the following complaint: "The Linux command line is hard to learn and use." He responds with "No, it simply is not." How does this comment address the real issue? If your students feel that the command line is hard to use, give them a training manual. Better yet, sit down with them and explain that the command line may have a steeper learning curve, but show them how much more powerful it is!
Let's be honest: there is a lot of FUD in the computer world, made worse by those who think they know what they are talking about. "Windoze crashes constantly. Linux is too hard to use." Instead of regurgitating the same old excuses, let's figure out how to work with these problems. Fight FUD with education, not with more mindless flaming of the supposed "enemy". If your friend says that the command line is too hard to use, don't blow him or her off and say "No it isn't! See, all you have to do is pipe it to wc -g." Instead, sit down, start from the beginning, and explain the benefits of your method of working!
That is what the author should have done with his students.
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These are not the system administrators or NASA programmers of tomorrow. They're getting a 2-year tech degree and then they'll be on the news bitching about how there are no good jobs in IT.
I see a lot of posts here claiming new students only know about AOL, MSN, Office XP, etc. Can you blame them? When Mom and Dad by them their new Dell Optiplex GX150 with a TFT display, does it come with Linux on it? Of course not.
.doc files). If other colleges start creating policies like this, that might just cut down on the Microsoft-centric atmosphere.
When I first came to MIT, I knew about Windows and MS Office. That was it. Was I criticized for running Windows? Was I sneered at by zekr1t n1Nj@ Haxxor dudez who were running Linux or NetBSD? No. Instead, someone suggested (nicely; not by saying "Try running a _real_ OS") that I give Linux a try - If I didn't like it, I didn't have to boot into it, and I would only have lost 300MB of hard drive space (those were the days). I was given a RedHat 4.0 network boot disk and the IP address of an NFS server, and I installed Linux. My friends were willing to help me learn things, and give me pointers. There is a community mailing list that people who use Linux can subscribe to and get their questions answered by other members of the community who've been using Linux for much longer. The people on this list didn't get annoyed or flame if you asked dumb questions, nor did they gve you snide "MS sux" remarks if you inquired how to mount a Windows partition in Linux. Because of that environment, I am now a competent Linux user, administrator, and halfway decent developer. You can't expect students to rise to that level if you only offer criticism.
And can you blame students for using MS Office formats to exchange files? The media rarely mentions Linux without saying "hackers" and "computer crime" in the same sentence. Ignorant website developers and system adminsitrators think Microsoft Office is the only answer. I've even encountered people here at MIT who refuse to accept PDF documents, saying that they don't want to deal with the extra effort required to open them. (Who hasn't heard of Acrobat Reader?) In order for this bias to change, colleges need to foster an environment in which Microsoft Office is not the only format for exhanging documents. The campus computing environment here runs on a variety of platforms, including Solaris, IRIX, and Linux, so by default all course-related documents have to be in a format accessible from all platforms. This is accepted for the most part, and materials appear in HTML, PDF, and PostScript (though StarOffice has given some people an excuse to distribute
Education is a key point in this topic, and colleges are a good place to start. I would venture to say that the majority of college students who only use Windows do so not because of choice, but because they are unaware of the alternatives, or because the alternatives seem daunting and unnecessary. These perceptions have to change before more college students will start using Linux.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
while 90% of the students arguments where false it is important to note that they:
1 - Don't have any exposure to non-MS technology
2 - Beleive everything they read in MS PR
3 - Beleive that crashes and unreliability is a fact of life and unavoidable.
4 - Are unaware of goings on in the rest of the computer world.
And these are the people who are supposed to be our future computer experts and are more knowledgable than the common joes. God help us all.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
There is quite a problem with the active linux users thinking that they are almighty and superior. Personally I use both windows and linux and I have no problem answering questions for either OS. Both are a complete pain in the ass to use.
If you have a problem with windows, you can call up your neighborhood 14 year old and get the problem fixed with a pepsi, if you have a problem with linux ... you can _try_ to get a support package or find a local lug to help you out, but that's not as conforting.
The only thing keeping Linux alive right now is LUG's and their support for newbies. I have found that even inside LUG's you will find the egotistical types who want the user to "Learn on their own". My only problem with telling them to learn on their own is the simple fact that if they're question is "I don't have man pages installed what do I do" ... and you answer RTFM ... you just lost another linux user and their influence on other users.
For every one user you convert to linux ... they will convert three more ... it works for drugs and religions ... so be it ... it will work for linux.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The fact that Redmond and Cupertino engineers have already ported (most of) the Office technology to Mac OS X indicates that a port to the X Window System would not be too difficult.
He should add this to his 'clanger' section.
The ease of porting Office to OS X has nothing to do with the ease of porting Office to X Windows. Microsoft has had a version of Office on Mac for years. The OS X environment has two sets of APIs for programmers: Carbon and Cocoa. Cocoa is the native OS X set of APIs. Carbon is a translation layer that maps the APIs from Mac OS 9 and below to the correct function calls on OS X.
The ease of porting Office to OS X is due to the engineers at Apple who created OS X.
Fight FUD with FUD!
J.J.
So then there should be efforts somewhere on writing really good documentation
More importantly then this, there needs to be a ceneral resource with all of this good linux documentation in it.
Google is nice, but can lead to having to wade through out-of-date information.
Microsoft have msdn, technet and the knowlage base, and these are all great resources. Linux needs something similar, so when you have a question you have one place to go, and you know you will get a resonable answer.
It's hard to believe that students going to extra effort would all fail if the teachers had useful projects that taught real computer science concepts rather than procuct familiarization.
One of the common complaints about higher education is the lack of true education. Especially in computer science, "education" amounts to brand training. They don't teach programming-- they teach Visual Basic. They don't teach networking-- they teach setting up MS-NT servers, and configuring Cisco routers.
90% of computing is crap. Then again, 90% of *everything* is crap. (Apologies to Robert Silverberg.)
Colleges cater to those who will pay the bills. It ain't the students. It's the corporations who can afford to give professors $100 just for a favorable mention during a lecture of their products. (Helloooo, Microsoft.)
We live in a fucked up world. Fortunately, it's less fucked-up than ever before.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
um, i think you're school has a name issue... any CS department that teachs VB and setting up MS-NT servers has an identity crisis... That's Computer Information Systems (CIS) or Management Information Systems(MIS) or some other similiar critter and belongs under the Business dept or something. CS is about theories and taught at a fundamental level... something that CAN'T be done with MS products (in general). You learn C/C++ to solve problems on a Unix platform. My CS dept, a respected and perhaps one of the better ones in the US, didn't teach any MS-specific stuff.
Nosce te Ipsum
I've long been against the futility of "Certifications" and "technical colleges." You absolutely come out of those with good, workable skills. The problem is that the computer industry changes so fast that workable skills in a technology become useless pretty fast. The *ability* to learn and integrate new things is what's important, and a more rounded education can accomplish that a lot better.
Besides, no matter their proficiency at a certain skill set, the employees still have to learn how to be good employees, something they're going to get a better chance at working those low level university IT jobs then they will slaving away over a Cert. And 2 years later, they'll be doing it again, at the employer's cost. On the other hand, a well-rounded employee is going to be constantly advancing his skill set.
It used to be that a cert was an easy road into a job. But lately in the market it seems that certifications can be more of a dead weight if they don't have any practical experience behind them.
he could get in serious trouble for giving away sensitive information about the product
True. In fact a good friend of mine used to work in the Exchange support group, and apparently Microsoft has a private knowledge base, almost as big as the public one, of bugs that are not to be disclosed as bugs under any circumstances. If one of these secret bugs is thought to be the culprit, the tech will just say, "I'm talking out of my ass, but let's try this..." or "maybe something goofy like this will clear it up," or (wait for it...) "it just does that sometimes."
It made me want to puke when he told me that.
Of course, who's to say HP doesn't do the same with HP-UX, or IBM with AIX? At least you can look at the source to Solaris, so they can't truly hide bugs.
The article itself is mildly interesting, although it basically comes down to sending uninformed students to read all the FUD they can find on both sides and seeing what sticks. And the author doesn't seem to understand what Linux being free really means, and is wrong when he corrects his students about the cost of Windows. (If a PC costs the same with and without Windows, it is effectively free (beer) for you, even if someone ultimately pays for it.)
But I thought the most interesting thing was this bit:
Then the first shock came: someone blurted out, "nearly everyone who used Linux last year went on to fail their project". It came out that a number of individuals were missing from the final year due to failing the project element in year three. When I probed for the root cause of the project-failing problem, I got my second shock: "Linux is too hard to install".
Uh, hello? Anyone see anything ominous about that anecdote? It seems odd to hear that account and decide that the problem is that users need to be convinced that Linux is easy to use.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Sigh. My point is that an awful lot of companies, and even more individuals think that tech support will solve all their problems for them. That, my friend, is clueless. This attitude is based solely on accountability. Many people who are In IT For The Money (MCSEs, management, etc.) can't take responsibility if things don't work. What do they do? They use tech support as a scapegoat. And the companies that provide said support typically have very little capability to do so. It's there for the illusion of reliability. Ask some people who have dealt with microsoft support how many times the solution is "reboot, if that doesn't work do a reinstall". These clueless companies can't rely on usenet or irc because the management won't accept "sorry, things aren't working and I did what some anonymous dude on IRC said to do" as much as they will accept "sorry, things aren't working and I did what Jack Schmeckler, senior Microsoft Tech Support Weenie, said." In both cases you're just as fucked because things aren't working. Yet somehow, if you pay for support and don't get a solution it's ok...even though often you get far superior support from the geeks on irc and usenet. That is my point.
And FYI I couldn't care less about linux becoming mainstream. Yeah you heard me. Fuck mainstream linux, it blows. I've been a user since the days when all you had were a boot and a root floppy, and everything else was do it yerself. I like it like that. When you have mainstream you cater to the intelligence of the average person. That leads to things like microsoft's glorious products. And all this "it's the desktop os of choice...for the masses!" bullshit has been creeping into linux distros too. Have you seen the stuff they have on new "mainstream" linux distros? Yeah they work out of the box with a cutesy x installers and all this other cruft, but god damn if it isn't more trouble in the long run than burning a minimal copy of debian and building the software you need, as you need it.
This is the only part of the article I disagree with. X Windows is slow. Period. I don't get anywhere near the responsiveness and speed with X-Windows on my PC that I get with Windows. As much as I love developing and playing with Linux, the slow speed of the GUI ticks me off more than anything. I don't see how anyone could not realize how much slower Gnome is then Windows, and then indignantly yell that it's a myth when someone else observes this fact.
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Microsoft has all the trappings of technical support. Call this 1-800-number. We have operators standing by. We employ more programmers than any other PC software house. We advertise that we have support.
But the reality, when you really have a problem, is a less glitzy than the hype. Wait on hold unless you pay extra, be told to reboot, be told to reinstall the OS and apps in a new magic sequence, that it's a hardware maker that has the bad software driver, that the fix will be in the next Service Pack, etc.
Linux OTOH has very sketchy official sounding support. Sure, 1-800 numbers for some paid-for distros, but if you ask Linux users, the vast majority get help out of the bazaar.
And the surprising reality is just how successful such a support model can be. Someone in Germany with the same video card posted his XFree86 config file to Usenet. Go figure!
It's a strange difference. On one hand, being told that you have a designated and well-described support channel that practically turns out to be unsatisfying in many regards, and on the other hand, being told to stake your critical need for help and assistance on a to-be-determined random unidentified stranger in an amorphous mass of users that practically turns out to be more satisfying than you ever expected.
No wonder many people are confused.
"Provided by the management for your protection."