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Free Geek Robbed
Ellen Wilson writes, "Portland, Oregon, non-profit Free Geek, which turns old PCs into Linux boxen, has been robbed of about $4500 worth of hardware. Portlanders are asked to keep an eye out for suspicious sales of Ubuntu laptops." This blog post has some details of labeling that could help to spot the stolen laptops. BoingBoing picked up the story and added that another local outfit, the Independent Publishing Resource Center, which supports Portland's zine scene, had been hit on the previous night.
I was playing in a band and we went on tour. We stopped in Birmingham, Alabama. After we played we were waiting for the follow up bands to finish and someone broke into our van and stole my laptop and someone else's laptop. They stole 2 of our cell phones too. I figured wtf, I'll call one of them. The robbers actually answered the phone and after about 30 minutes we convinced them to bring us the laptops back. We met in a dark alley and walked slowly with our hands in the air while on the phones to each other. I held up a couple 20's with some 1's and we did the swap. When I booted my laptop, it went into recovery mode as though someone turned it on, saw the linux boot up screen and thought, "wtf is this crap?! Jeez... I can't sell this... Hmm... the phone is ringing." and decided to try to get money for the crazy system from the owner.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
It is too bad you got graded a troll, but this is an honest question:
First off, we use Linux because it is the only possibility. Free Geek distributes over 100 computers a month. All of these have Ubuntu and Open Office (and many other programs) on them. How much would Windows XP and Microsoft Office cost to license for each computer? 500 dollars each? That would add up to 50,000 dollars a month. Free Geek doesn't have 50,000 dollars a month, period, and if we did, we probably wouldn't choose to spend it on software license fees. It could also be possible, I suppose, to beg for some sort of non-profit site license, but that would require a very strict accounting procedure. At Free Geek, the operating system is installed over the network. To install Windows, we would have to move to installing from master CDs, which we would then have to keep under lock and key, and keep a strict tallying of where systems were going. In addition, while the situation with hardware at Free Geek isn't what it used to be (the original system specs were for medium range Pentium-Is, which could only support Debian), it is also true that Ubuntu runs on our available hardware the way any Windows Operating System couldn't. Next year, we will probably be sending out systems around a Gigahertz with 256 Megs of RAM...something that Windows Vista will almost certainly not run well on.
Second, even if somehow Microsoft said we could put out as many computers as we wanted for free, I have never seen evidence that Windows is intrinsically simpler than Linux. Yes, people are used to it. But it is not like there is some awesomely hard concepts that Ubuntu Linux throws on the average user that Windows does not. Yes, working in command line is hard (but not something that I haven't taught dozens of people to do in a half hour or so), but on a modern distribution, you are only working on the command line for certain special uses. The things that you are going to fix on the command line are not things you are going to easily fix in Windows, either. Anyway, I have seen many people, many of them quite marginal in terms of education and past experience, pick up the simpler side of Linux in a few hours. I have also taught dozens or hundreds of people,from the age of 12 to the age of 82, many with no computer experience, how to take apart and rebuild computers, and how to install and use Linux on it. Yes, some people still prefer Windows afterwards, but I have yet to see a gigantic reaction of shocked incomprehensibility to Linux. It does take some effort to learn, but it isn't impossible.
Basically, the only real reason people change over to Windows from a Free Geek computer is to play games.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.