Once scorned, twice as nasty
There have been troll wars on the internet since the time that IRC was pretty much the only chat client available and 13″ CRT monitors were the latest thing on the market, but in recent years, the troll wars have started to become interesting. Sure you still got the odd idiot that couldn’t articulate a point if it had been his job for 20 years and he got a refresher course every 12 months, but these are not people, these really are trolls, they live under a bridge and everything. Anyway, aside from these people, there are troll wars going on all over the place, which are on relatively interesting subjects (To some).
I speak of course, of the troll wars pertaining to Linux vs Windows vs Mac. Now, unfortunately, Macs tend to get away pretty well in these arguments, because regardless of how much open source software they steal and how much they try to push forward the boundaries of Vendor Lock-In, they are still the under dog in comparison to Microsoft, so MOST people, tend to leave them alone. The troll wars that I am particularly interested in, are those that follow the blog posts of a certain Steven J Vaughan-Nichols (Or SJVN to most of us). You see this is a very seasoned journalist, who has got a LOT of experience in the world of I.T. and he has a tendency to make rather straight forward blog posts. Only this morning I read one on Windows 7 and how good it was, yet immediately after, I read another which claimed Ubuntu 9.10 was better and gave the reasons why he thought so, the post about Windows being good, had barely a bad word said in the comments, no Linux fans jumping in there saying how much Windows sucks or that it’s a crap OS, yet the other post, whoohoohoohoo out come the zealots, and then the defenders of the faith.
To me he’s in a pretty good position to make reasoned, educated postings about the ups, downs, benefits and disadvantages to various software and operating systems, he has experience from all sides, has been doing it all for some time now, and he gets paid to do it, for some reason however, not everyone seems to agree with me. These days, the second SJVN says a single word against an MS product, all hell breaks loose. Someone from the Windows camp will jump in and instead of simply refuting the claim against Windows, they will begin a whole toilet roll (Yes I said Toilet Roll!) of insults against Linux and why it sucks, why it’s a hobbyist OS, why no one should care about an OS (Then why are you bothering to post if you believe no one should care?) and of course a whole load of other crap about how Linux doesn’t upgrade properly, how the people who use Linux are all nasty 43 year old men who still live in their mothers basement etc.etc.etc.
Well you may be asking yourself the same question as most of us Linux users, I understand why Linux users are passionate, I understand why Unix advocates are passionate, BSD, Solaris, whatever flavour you like, their’s usually a reason to be passionate, the same goes for open source software in general, there’s a philosophy behind it, there’s even a moral high ground to be taken in some/many cases, but until now, I could not for the life of me think why, anyone would get passionate about Windows, certainly not passionate enough to defend it so much and so publicly. I think however, that I’ve finally cracked it, a lot of people get accused of defending Windows because they get paid to do it, well that may be true in some cases, however I would assume (Now this is never really a good thing to do, but we all do it) that MS would make sure, anyone they paid to make blog posts, counter posts, forum posts etc. relating to their products, would at the very least be able to spell, let alone articulate their point. Otherwise what would be the point in paying someone to do it? So I’ve come to the conclusion, that the people defending Windows, who cannot articulate their points, most of whom don’t even seem to know what their own point is, to articulate it, are simply people who have grown up using MS products, like many of us did, started to rip off Windows a few years ago, then got fed up with the whole “Genuine Advantage” thing and decided to try Linux, not because of it’s morals, or it’s background, or even for it’s stability or security, but instead, for the fact that it was free, and ended up having not a very good time. I personally did something similar several years ago, I got fed up with the BSOD, I got fed up with constantly having to re-validate my Windows XP machine because MS had invented yet another way of checking if your copy of Windows was genuine and yet again got it wrong. So I moved to Fedora Core (Can’t remember which version, 5 I think).
I hated it, with a passion. I hated Gnome (I still do), I hated the fact that my video card didn’t work (a problem that is now well in the past), my sound card didn’t work (Even though it said it did (this problem is also for the most part gone), I also hated that the look of the system in a graphical sense, just didn’t seem as polished, so I re-installed XP and made do for 6 months, before I tried Ubuntu, the hardware handling was much improved by this point, but the system still looked crap, so I started asking around and digging, to find a better desktop environment, what I eventually found, was KDE. I promptly installed Debian and ran that happily for 6 months, before long I was bored with how simple everything seemed to be, and had become curious about what challenges might be out there, I found Gentoo! 1 year and a WHOLE LOT OF BANDWIDTH later, I knew more about Linux than I had ever thought possible and I was completely hooked, my life changed however, and I no longer had time to wait for 2 days while KDE compiled on my AthlonXP processor, so back I went, this time to the KDE version of Ubuntu (Kubuntu).
After all this switching, you might think I’d stay with just one distro, but you’d be wrong, I’ve switched back and forth between Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS for years, trying a few others along the way but not as a serious desktop option. Over the last 12 months I’ve been pretty solidly Kubuntu, without even considering any other distro or any other OS, I’ve tested Win7 both on hardware and virtualised, and yes, I must say it’s pretty good, but I still can’t bring down my terminal with an F key (Yakuake), I can’t simply turn on wobbly Windows or transparency or the desktop cube, I can’t rely on it being stable or drop to a command line if the system freezes up, I can’t just reload the X-Server if that freezes, I can’t install new programs, upgrades or drivers without rebooting, I can’t leave it running for 3 weeks and then go back to it and have it be responsive, the list of things I can’t do on Windows of any flavour is huge, the list of things I can’t do but want to on Linux, is limited to one thing and one thing only these days, and that’s run Adobe CS4!
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Yep, Debian and KDE, dead simple and stable, even with the Testing or Sid branches of Debian. I cannot say that I’ve had a good experience with Kubuntu however.
Yeah it’s worth pointing out actually, that the reason I like Kubuntu, is because it isn’t AS polished as, say, Debian Lenny with KDE. Debian makes me work to get firefox installed, or my NVidia drivers installed, because of their “FREE ONLY” policy, which is fine for them, but makes my life unnecessarily hard, in areas I don’t always want it to be hard, Kubuntu on the other hand, is somewhat the red-headed bastard step child of Ubuntu, it doesn’t get anywhere near as much love as the Gnome release, but it still gets all the latest releases for KDE SC and I still get access to the Ubuntu Repos, for the latest and greatest releases of other software too, not to mention, that Firefox and NVidia are a piece of cake to sort out too, although I still use the latest NVidia driver, downloaded from nvidia.com instead of using the built in hardware drivers installer.
PR people really do this kind of thing and the nastier they are the more they discredit the sites they attack. It costs the site money to host, takes forever to load up in people’s browsers and completely ruins the conversation. They post the most vile and offensive things imaginable. Normal people are run off.
Here’s my investigation of trolls on Slashdot. It comes with quotes from people like Bruce Perens who heard of this kind of work going on while he was at HP. Things have gotten a lot worse since then with companies like Visible Technologies.
And out come the trolls, I mentioned Windows in my article, so a man called Darryl decided to post a couple of comments here, which really proved my point and the point of twitter above, unfortunately each of the two comments, although relatively well written, were longer than my original blog entry and after reading through them made absolutely no argument whatsoever against what I said, nor, as an IT engineer for many years now and a software developer for even more, did I agree with any of it, forget Linux, I’m talking professionally dealing with Windows. In the interests of keeping on point, trimming down the comments length and since I hate troll wars, why on earth would you think I’d allow trolling posts on my own site? N.B. This comment post, is actually shorter than either of Darryls.
He is allegedly both an engineer and IT, whatever that meant, he IS IT? I find that unlikely. In addition to being both an engineer and IT, he is allegedly a professional, and apparently, according to Darryl, it is imperative that after patching/updating a system, or installing new software, that you reboot, in order to “test it”, now I personally have never heard anything so un-professional, rebooting as a test? Are you kidding me Darryl? Rebooting is NOT a fundamental part of IT and NOT doing it should NOT get you fired, and rebooting is NOT a test, testing it is a test, rebooting is a requirement with Windows for installing something that plays no part in running the actual system (A new game), and kernel upgrades and the like on Unix OS’s! Testing, yes, that is a fundamental part of being an IT engineer, btw just in case you’re wondering, I have been building computers, writing software and fixing them for over 15 years now, I AM a professional IT engineer and Software Developer, if you are too, I’d like to meet the man who trained you and point him to “Windows for Dummies”.
According to Darryl all I said in my article was that Windows was full of BSODs and that Windows was crap. I don’t think I actually said Windows was crap once, I didn’t mention memory leaks either, although I should have, and I mentioned a BSOD because the day I wrote the article, my mother in laws computer did exactly that, all because a USB based Internal Card Reader was buggered, worth pointing out too, that when I booted with a Linux Live CD to check if the problem was hard drive related, not only did it boot fully without complaining about the Card Reader, but it was actually able to make use of the damn thing too, Win XP just did BSOD after BSOD, but apparently Darryl hasn’t seen one for years. An I.T. engineer, that hasn’t seen a BSOD for years, have you been working with Linux Darryl? I was working with Macs for the last year and stable as they are supposed to be, I’ve seen plenty of Mac Equivalent BSODs there this year too, the only kernel panic I’ve seen this year on a Linux box, was when I deliberately built a very very very risky one, just for fun to see if it worked!
One last thing, “using the GPL to publish software means that software becomes un-maintained, bug fixes slow down, users don’t want to program”, blah blah blah, typical WinZealot rant there, the GPL allows lots and lots of people to deal with the code, so in your scenario, if Adobe breaks, you need to ring Adobe support, have you ever rung adobe support? It’s not fun, believe me, if however GIMP breaks, not only can you go straight to the DEVELOPER (As in not an idiot in india, manning a phone, but the actual programmer) for help, but you can go to other developers in the community, you can go to beta testers in the community, you can get help on a mountain of forums, compared to just ringing adobe, waiting for hours, then days, then getting no where in the end at all anyway, because they can’t change the code after it’s released, so you’ll have to wait for CS5 and hope they did a better job, or should your problem be Windows based, then you won’t get past the first idiot in India.
Ok Darryl I’m going to try and keep this short mate, I’m not publishing any of your 7 comments from last night, because
a) there are 7 of them,
b) you’ve become such a huge troll in them (Clearly without even realising it) that you wouldn’t fit under the harbour bridge in Auckland,
c) I can’t be arsed to deal with you properly, I’m headed home to the UK today from NZ,
d) I notice you’re australian, which explains a lot (Kidding I love aussies, but had to get one more NZ > AU jibe in before I leave),
e) none of your points make much sense at all
f) If you really are a 46 year old, retired IT engineer with military experience, then something has happened to your brain, because you’re OBSESSED with having an argument with me, about something you CLAIM not to care about.
g) I’ve done a little more than put pieces of PC’s together, one of the companies I used to support was Chrisco, now if you’re in Australia as your hostname suggests, you’ll know who that is, their IT is in Sydney, but they require a multi million dollar server room here in Auckland, I maintained it, all of it, not just servers, but the networking side and the on-floor side of it too, I don’t solder chips to PCB boards, but the person I know who did do that in the 70′s currently has knowledge up to a Pentium II and that’s about it, so why would I be bothered?
h) I’m sat at home writing blogs and not working full time in IT because I’m going back to the UK, so I gave up work a little while ago to help my partner and children re-arrange our lives, ready for the flight.
i) You haven’t actually addressed anything to do with what I posted, at ANY point in ANY of your comments, you’re just flaming, not what I expect from a 46 year old IT Engineer.
j) The reboot example you sited, was a one off bug, with an RC release of an OS, which majorly affected the functioning of the OS, so of course a reboot was required, because it was a work around, typically to install that driver, you can just click “install” in Ubuntu’s built in installer, in this case, you couldn’t, you also couldn’t drop to a virtual terminal to stop the X Server, so a reboot was in deed required, BECAUSE to perform the operation at all you were booting the system to the equivalent of Windows Safe Mode.
k) Finally, you have absolutely no interest in debating anything, or talking about salient points, you’re only goal, is to discredit me, and insult Linux, and disrupt this threads progress, which because I have replied to you, you have done, now bugger off and go do some fishing for crying out loud!
Darryl, go take something to calm yourself down, you seriously need to relax, you have issues, that are not with me.
firstly;
“I dont care that much about OS’s I do care about accuracy and how the zealots of Linux are damaging the community”
PLEASE go back to school and learn how to NOT contradict yourself in the same sentence.
lastly;
“It better to shut up and have people think you’re a fool, than to open you’re mouth and confirm it.”
Coming from the man who has now tried to post 14 comments, to one article against my now 3 replies, you are a troll, a spammer and I genuinely do not believe you would get the security clearance required for Military work, because you can’t shut your mouth long enough, and you’d likely argue with the generals. Now you post another 10 in reply to this one comment, while I go get on a plane.