Not so angry response to "Eight Years Later...and Linux Still Sucks"

I read this (http://www.tipsoftheweekonline.com/linuxsucks.html) and this (http://www.tipsoftheweekonline.com/angry.html). First off, I don't believe people like rmerrick would have contributed anything of importance to the community. And they are definitely not the kind of geeks using Linux. They are the kind of people who intend to behave like geeks or nerds but end up behaving like jerks.

I understand the frustration that you experienced. And I can totally relate to that. But it is really not the fault of Linux. You faced exactly 3 problems

1) Monitor detection and configuration
2) Unable to play proprietary file formats
3) And problems with uninstallation which was due to the proprietary file formats issue. A problem nevertheless.

I agree that 1 and 3 are problems. Although the 3rd one does not qualify completely. Have you used synaptic? I always found the Ubuntu's Add/Remove should be replaced with Synaptic Package Manager. But telling that "Linux" totally sucks is very misleading. Your comment should instead have been "Ubuntu sucks for me.". I have been using Linux for the past few years and it has its fair share of annoyances. But guess what nothing beats the annoyance of a virus/worm/spyware on a Windows machine.

Let me share the incident which prompted me to switch to Linux. Note that I was always an open source fan for its economic reasons and I was okay doing open source on Windows. I am not one of the raving fanboy type of guys. I am not an illiterate computer user either. I've been working on these things since my school days. I always used to log on as restricted user in Windows for the fear that Windows might catch a virus. I diligently updated my antivirus periodically. I keep changing my passwords. I make sure that my Run/Runonce/Startup menu items are clean. I was kind of paranoid about it. But this one day, I got a media player with my korean DVD drive which required administrative access to run. Not to install... just run. So I used to run that in the adminstrative mode using the RunAs command. Safe - I would presume as this is the only application that runs with the elevated privileges. The player software when closed used to open an instance of IE to check for some stuff.. (for updates I guess) and close it in the background. Unknown to me, IE had somehow got infected and through that my whole system had been compromised. It affected all my executables on my drive. Some of my programs started behaving in a funny manner. I did not notice this until I ran python. The infected executable when run would actually run the virus and would create the actual executable image with a file name of extension .hwd and create a new process. I would have two processes running for each infected executable. The module names for the processes were executable.exe and executable.hwd. Before I knew it, the virus had completely blown away my windows installation. Not one of my executables were sane now. I tried cleaning them but PandaAV was not much help and it got infected. I forgot the name of the virus. :-( Thats when I decided that I would switch to Linux.

My initial experience with Fedora Core 4 was horrible. I had to do everything myself. RPM this. RPM that. Broken dependencies and what not. But I had been through hell with Windows which made this a cakewalk. But I ultimately got frustrated with Fedora and decided to try Ubuntu 5.04. I guess it was called Hoary Hedgehog. The installation was very pleasant and synaptic and apt-get was really cool. I upgraded to breezy after that and haven't looked back. So my statement would be "Fedora sucked for me" but "Ubuntu is great for me." I had no problem connecting to the universe and multiverse repositories to get the ugly plugins. The folks in the community are quite helpful unlike other communities that I have interacted with. You should probably try a linux distribution like Linspire. It is lot more polished than Ubuntu and would definitely solve your virus and worms problem. Linspire has legal codecs to play proprietary formats. You even get the benefit of real customer support. Before dismissing Linux of completely, I would suggest that you have a look at the existing distros, give it a spin and give a fair assessment.

I guess, I am really in the mood of ranting this evening.

Is piracy good for Microsoft?

I was watching this video on Cranky Geeks and they were talking about Romania and piracy. The story is covered here.

"Software piracy has many negative economic consequences, such as local software industries being crippled by competition with pirated software from abroad, and lost tax revenues and jobs from the lack of a legitimate market," said the BSA report.

"These costs reverberate up and down the supply and distribution chains."

I was not surprised. I find this it was extremely immature and stupid on the part of the government. I am from India and I can relate to this. The government and people here are equally immature and stupid. I believe that we are painting ourselves into a corner. What appalls me is the ease in which we can get pirated software vis-a-vis their open source counterparts. We can get pirated software from friends, or a walk on SP Road or any of the PC assemblers. But to get the latest versions of open source software and its documentation in terms of books is an extremely costly affair. If you don't believe me visit Gangarams or Sapna Book house and look at the price of linux distros there. I do not believe that technical superiority is responsible for the liberal presence of Windows operating system in Indian homes. It is due to its easy availability of pirated software. System assemblers know Windows better than Linux. The people who get it buy computers for browsing, surfing, watching movies and playing games. And not to mention the uncles and aunties fiddling with worthless astrology software that runs only on DOS (yes! you heard me. DOS!!!) and Windows. Probably we must make such astrology software for Linux and make it available on Live CDs for all these maamas and maamis to try it out.

I have some friends who are Indians living in India and yet buy Windows XP Home licenses. Can you believe that? They definitely are the minority. They are statistically insignificant. And some of them do have a Ubuntu installation safely tucked into one of their partitions. They were actually sold on the fact that Microsoft can actually track you down and sue you for using pirated versions of their software. But when that does happen, then the whole country has to be worried. IRCTC's website does not work well with Firefox. I book my tickets most of the time with IRCTC. Indian airlines' website does not work well with firefox. ICICI's website has just started working with Firefox. We are actually glued on to windows. I cannot find a single indian music site which works on flash audio like www.odeo.com or www.pandora.com. My favorite is www.musicindiaonline.com, which hosts an ActiveX control. I am not against Microsoft but I believe that it is not an economically viable alternative for us as a nation. I strongly believe that India is better off with open source software. Wine is not the solution. It will only worsen the situation. What we need is cross platform applications.

Microsoft will not bother about piracy in India as it is generating a huge talent pool and establishing a base of future customers. These customers are already trained on Microsoft software. So the organizations that hire them run Windows. Even the Java schools have a starter program for the computer illiterates and they start of with Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Why don't they start of with Ubuntu or Linspire? Why dont they teach them the Google life. I am not against Microsoft or Windows. I am against the fact that we think it is smart on our part to pirate software and use it while all we are doing is increasing the liability on our employers and India Inc., as a whole. Open source software can solve most of these problems. With increased broadband penetration and web increasingly becoming a platform, we must get away from IE and ActiveX as far as possible have cross platform technology solutions.

Both Windows and Linux have their advantages and disadvantages depending on the kind of applications that you try to run. I feel Linux is better for me. It has been over 2 years since I switched to Linux as my primary operating system and I have never looked back. I wish others could see this in the same light as I do.