On 16/01/03 Lloyd Zusman did speaketh:
> So to me, the differences between Windows and Linux fall into three
> categories:
>
> 1. Quality -- Unix and its descendants such as Linux are robust,
> 2. Religion -- Many people in the Linux world (me included) are
> 3. Fun -- For a programmer, working under Unix tends to be
I'd have to say that those are the main reasons why I use it. My degrees
are in Physics and Computer Science. I've loved computers ever since my Dad
brought home a 286 with a massive 20Meg harddrive, running at a blistering
12MHz, with a CGA monitor running DOS. He told me what not to do with it, and
within a week I knew it far better than he did.
I suffered with windows 95 for long enough to know that software just
didn't have to be so crappy. At University I was introduced to Unix in the
form of Solaris boxes in our lab, and I loved it. When I ended up on an
internship with a major Telecommunications Co., working in a Unix development
environment full time, I finally decided to put RedHat 5.1 on my PC. After
ignoring the moron at Future Shop who told me that you couldn't dual boot a
PC, I dual booted it just fine between Linux and '95. It didn't take long
before I was using the Linux partition more and more.
I work mostly in Perl, writing system and web-based code, so I'm mostly
Unix agnostic, but I prefer Linux. Even the proprietary Unixes have lagged too
far behind, and I constantly found myself building open-source software on
them just to have a comfortable environment.
I work strictly on Linux now, which is a dream come true. I converted to
Debian a while back because I found RedHat far too sloppy, and Debian had a
reputation of being the best. It hasn't failed in that, even if there are many
elements of it that require a major overhaul. My wife is a programmer as well,
and while she's not quite the hacker that I am, she's become very happy with
Debian, which she finally tried after cursing at her NT box and looking at my
Linux box happily humming along with 3 digit uptimes. She won't even use
RedHat now if offered, because she says she can't live without apt-get. I
agree.
Debian and it's policies have an integrity to them, an attention to detail
and workmanship that is so lacking everywhere else in the world today, where
everything we use was made in some sweat-shop by children in a third-world
country. Most companies don't seem to care about quality anymore. I'm proud to
advocate Linux, and especially Debian, as an example of what a product should
be, and of what all products could be if people cared enough about doing a
good job.
I tried some of the latest windows offerings a little while ago, just to
make sure that I was still making the right decision, as if reading /. wasn't
enough to convince me of the morality of the choice to fight M$. Within two
days I'd downloaded every ported *nix app I could find, and practically turned
it into Unix because the native tools on winblows suck that badly. I'm quite
happy to just use Unix, which, while it may have improvements to make on ease
of learning, 3rd party support, standards for the desktop, etc., is at least a
solid foundation to build upon.
To all those hackers out there working on Linux, I say thank you. Please
continue to add to it, as I strive to myself. Just don't subtract. As long as
I can give a fancy interface to my parents to use, but still fire up IceWM and
bunch of xterms for myself, I'll be happy.
Mike
--
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier@digitaltorque.ca>, GnuPG pub key: 5BC8BE08
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort." -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to Unix
HTML Email Considered Harmful: http://expita.com/nomime.html
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