Saturday, August 2, 2008

/me is lazy

Wow, haven't posted for a while here.  Lazy bastard, eh?
 
I was just reading an article in APC, which is unusual in of itself in that normally I wouldn't buy APC with your money.  It's corporate, slick, can't make up its mind whether its aimed at the technology terrified, hackers, gamers, business or enterprise users, and half of it is ads that the buyer is paying for.  On the other hand, the 12 month subscription is a work freebie so meh.  :)
 
The article was bullshitting on about lack of support for older OSs, as owned by the classic cling-to-Win98/ME crew - usually on the grounds that the thing is a Celeron 500 with 256MB or RAM and a 99% full 10GB drive, and frankly it can't run anything else.  The APC columnist's brilliant answer?  Use Linux!
 
Would someone please take the Linux zealots of the world out and shoot them.  I will admit that I have dabbled in Linux briefly, both installed and live versions, and I've never lasted very long.  Frankly, XP does everything I need a PC to do, with acceptable stability - not that crashes still aren't bloody annoying.  Even Vista can be bludgeoned into something resembling XP once you turn most of the (in)security crap off.  In the meantime, my interest levels in learning commands like "tar -c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote 'dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg' " compared to telling WinRAR to save my archive to a remote directory using click navigation, or "mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share" compared to using the Windows shell (or even, dog forbid, a command line "net use share: //path" command) are roughly at the same level as getting my genitals pierced.
 
Ye olde wannabe Amish Win98 owner is as much a candidate for Linux as I am for an old Cray-1.  Both are so far beyond our respective needs that it's not worth the time to learn to take advantage of the environment, and we simply want to be able to do what we want with the minimum aggravation possible.  This doesn't seem to be something that your average Linux zealot understands, they're too busy either thinking they're anti-corporate rebels or "being in control of their PC" - which means taking twice as long and ten times as much effort, apparently.
 
I like the concept of Linux, but there's a Dilbert catroon that summarises it perfectly; an engineer sits in front of his PC muttering "I'll make the command easy to remember, like CTRL-ALT-F4-DEL.  And if they forget that, they can just edit the source code in COMMAND.COM.  Perfect!"
 
Linux is an environment built by geeks, for geeks, who like being geeks, and don't mind the geekiness of something interfering with actually trying to achieve something with it - as long as it's geeky.  That's fine as a toy, but in the meantime the rest of the world just wants to get on with it, you know?  Quite to the opposite of the common saying, most people just want to arrive at their destination as quickly and hassle-free as possible; the journey, far from being part of the experience, is actually a pain in the arse.
 

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