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New York Times Staff Editorial Promoting Linux

Posted by chrisd on from the welcome-to-the-party dept.

cotyledon writes "Today's New York Times editorial (Free Blah-Di-Blah) describes Linux as good for consumers and good for programmers. It recommends "Government units abroad and in the United States and individual computer users should look for ways to support Linux and Linux-based products. The competition it offers helps everyone." This is the paper's opinion, btw, and not a guest columnist."

2 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Re:encouraging but superficial by chill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    MacOS doesn't run on cheap, available-everywhere, commodity, x86 hardware.

    Until it does, Apple will remain a niche. Period. The End.

    Hell, even SUN is getting in on the game!

    There are 100x the number of Intel-type machines out there than PPC-based. OS X would require a total new hardware investment, Linux does not.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  2. Re:It was a bad idea to begin with... by NamShubCMX · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I too often hear what "average users" are according to /. posters so I wanted to tell you a story.

    The story of my parents... :P

    They are definately what could be called "average users"... They don't know exactly how their computer works except for the few programs they needed, and don't want to know more. Even using a "totally user-friendly OS such as MS Windows", they often feel dumb when in front of the computer because it won't do what they want it to do, for most of the time.

    They didn't care about windows vs. *nix either, until I told them about Linux, which is what I run. They asked me the obvious question: What is Linux?. I tried to avoid "tech" talk with my parents because I know they hate it and it's really hard to always try to explain everything that seems so obvious to you because you spend so many times in front of your machine... So I just said it was an OS, like Windows, only better in my opinion, and that it's Free. Notice the capital F, instead of going all-tech, I started telling them the story of Open Source, Free Software, how MS is "evil" (they read the newspapers, they already knew that) etc...

    Well guess what, a month later they ask me if they would be able to use Linux, and ask me to install it for them.

    So what's the moral of that rather long story? I don't know, some folks care more than saving a hundred bucks... :)

    --
    We've always been at war with Eurasia.