Re: Takin' a Break

[Michael Jinks <michael twopoint com>]

Bruce Richardson wrote:

> > As Arnold said, "I'll be back." <g>
> >
> 
> Limping and with a red gleam in your eyes, I presume (that's what happens
> when you take a holiday in Windows-land).

My thoughts on reading LL's post were similar.  I just hope, Lane, that
before you decided to take your break you got enough of a taste to be
annoyed by Windows when you go back.  I'm coming up on my second year of
Linuxville after three or four solid years of MS-land, and many of the
benefits of Linux are subtle enough that the newbie doesn't always catch
them right away.  I have to actually sit down at a friend's Windows box
in order to recall the infuriating inadequacies that drove me off in the
first place.

One of the first real things I remember learning about UNIX in general
is that a lot of its benefits can appear as problems at first.  I met a
good friend of mine when she overheard me at a party spewing forth about
how great UNIX is (yes I'm like this at parties too, it's a sickness),
and turned to me and said, "Could you explain to me why that is, because
all I know about UNIX is that it's case sensitive, and that's a pain in
the ass."  

I tried to explain the advantages of a case-sensitive interface (52
characters instead of 26 to me is a Good Thing), and more generally
about the flexibility and robustness of the UNIX design philosophy, and
that conversation has since been continued into the realms of Open
Source philosophy, system modularity, the general superiority of proven
design concepts. . . and today she is quite the Linux politico.  But she
is still running Windows because she hasn't been able to get a good dose
of the payoff that can come from all that nifty computer science.  To
her UNIX is still personally irrelevant.

Too bad, too, because she actually could gain a lot from it, unlike
someone who might be drawn to Linux just because some of us preach it as
the answer to all the world's problems.  And given the right hand up, I
don't think that there is anything intrinsically more difficult about
UNIX-like systems than about Windows, particularly after one advances
beyond novice level.

I don't know what your computing needs are, and all OS's are just
tools.  If what you need is a hammer and I try to give you a nuclear
reactor for free, I won't be doing you much of a service even though I'm
offering you a whole lot more than you asked for.  So maybe something to
try would be to take a look at what it is that you need your computer(s)
to do, draft that into a laundry list, and bring it with you when you
come back.  I've seen some pretty provocative threads on this list that
were started when somebody (usually a newbie or tourist) posted that
kind of spec sheet and invited the list to comment on how Linux could
meet their needs.  And after all, that is the way we should be doing it:
fit the tools to the needs, not the other way around as it so often is
in the shrinkwrapped software world.  You might find that if you phrase
your requirements in the right way, many of your difficulties will be
re-contextualized right out of existence.  Or maybe you'll find that
none of your needs or desires justifies the upset of switching
platforms.

-- 
<>   [O>X|==8  Michael Jinks: Enterprise Systems Engineer   <>
<>    University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division    <>
<> Searching for justification in a techno-ambivalent world <>
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