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Linux Users Are Spoiled
Dozix007 writes "NewsForge carries an interesting
article
on how spoiled Linux users are. It sites examples such as the
availability of wide ranging software packages that Microsoft can't hope to provide.
Microsoft has to be careful about what kind of application software it
ships with Windows. Microsoft reps sometimes point to Linux
distributions and ask why they can get away with shipping stacks and
stacks of applications without getting in trouble. The answer to that
one, of course, is that the Linux distributions give you a choice. You
aren't locked into one particular application. Most Linux distributions
include several choices for most program classifications; even
single-CD distros usually include several Web browsers and email
clients."
As far as i know, there is no legal agreement between manufacturers and distributions and software vendors that disallow a competitors application to be installed as well. I believe this is the entire problem with the wintel world. For example, dell cannot ship a dual boot system, nor can they ship firefox on the windows platform. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Not to be YAGZ (Yet Another Gentoo Zealot), but one thing I love about Portage (and this applies to RPM/apt-get based distros to some degree) is the easy availability of up-to-date packages in a single location. With Windows, it would take all of a day to browse around the Internet and update my programs; with Gentoo, a simple "emerge sync && emerge -UD world" keeps my system cutting-edge. Microsoft couldn't hope to match this ease, simply because of the relative lack of free/GPL'd apps for the Win32 platform.
The key thing about Linux distributions is that there's more than one, and in fact if you're not happy with the Linux kernel you can go with BSD...
In Windows-land, Microsoft makes the kernel, Microsoft makes the one and only window-manager, Microsoft selects which apps come in the one and only distro, and nearly all of them are Microsoft-made apps anyway.
That's the difference. A Linux distro is the blending of the Linux kernel with a set of tools that use the kernel. And from the most basic use of a kernel, the shell, there's already several to choose from. There's several window-managers.
It's okay to bundle when you're in a COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT... that's the one thing Microsoft seems to be forgetting.
The programs packaged in a distribution are from different vendors, hence there's no monopoly here. Nobody would sue Microsoft if they would ship Apache and Mozilla with Windows.
- no difficult choices during setup (pre-configured PCs)
- no need to read difficult manpages and other such stuff
- most hardware just works out of the box
- no need to choose between distros
- no need to choose between multiple software packages that do the same job, just differently
Yes, Linux comes with a lot of software that Windows doesn't . However, you can easily download most of it (in fact, Cygwin makes this almost trivial).
No, the reason I feel spoiled as a Linux user is that, in the past 9 years, I have not had a single virus, trojan or worm, and I've never needed software to deal with or prevent these.
Further, in that time, I have never seen a pop-up window I didn't specifically request, and I haven't given a second thought to spyware or adware. These things just aren't part of my life, thanks to Linux (yeah, I know, non-IE using Mac users can make the same claim).
I usually take this for granted, but every once in a while, I sit at somebody else's Windows machine and realize just how fortunate and yes, spoiled, I am.
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