[CS-FSLUG] fyi, migration the other way, linux=>windows

[Eduardo Sánchez]

On Sunday 14 December 2008 03.06.09 David Aikema wrote:
> Can't you people take some criticism?  Some of it may be invalid, or
> incorrect, but do we need to immediately call it "Pure crap, trollish
> nonsense."?  (If Linux has a PR problem, this may be a large part of
> it.)

Look David, yes I can take some criticism and I did it before, as I am 
taking it now from you. But I have little patience for people who is 
spreading just flamebait. This guy is clearly a troll, spreading half-
truths in order to be more inflammatory.

This is aggravated by the fact that the guy pretends to label his demise 
of Linux, with faulty arguments, as "a rational decision". If someone 
labels a choice as rational, one would expect to get a *rationale* for 
that choice, rather than insults, straw-men, and ad hominems (see the 
"brainless kids" bits).

We are, by no means, above criticism; but people must be willing to be 
fair in the objections. Otherwise, they are trolling. And this guy was 
being a troll.

>
> "I didn't read it all.....don't have the time and he's so far off the
> mark I couldn't read it anyway" isn't exactly going to satisfy the
> average person I think.

I did read the article, btw. The whole she-bang, right down to the 
Simpsons cartoons.

As I said in my message, I understand the man might be frustrated. But 
this doesn't give him a right to employ half-truths, straw-men, and 
other fallacies just in order to be inflammatory.

And finally, I confined my answer to this list, as food for your 
thought. I was obviously preaching to the choir, so PR is not a concern.

>
> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Eduardo Sánchez 
<lists at sombragris.org> wrote:
> >> The irrational "megafreeze" distro model, which binds each and
> >> every application to a fixed version for the whole supported
> >> period of a given distro release.
> >
> > And so? In Windows you are tied to a specific version too. You are
> > free to upgrade some apps... manually. In GNU/Linux is the same
> > case. Want a newer OO.o? Upgrade it by hand, just as in Windows.
> >
> > Verdict: Pure crap, trollish nonsense.
>
> I've seldom met a Windows application with more than one or two
> installation dependencies, whereas with Linux it doesn't seem that
> uncommmon to have dozens of dependencies for a given application
> (once the cascade effect is taken into account).  I think that this
> one is legitimate.
>
> (A lot of this comes from the problem of having no standard way of
> doing a lot of things.  e.g. I have KDE4 installed on a machine, but
> some of the apps that I use haven't been updated since KDE3, and
> since KDE4 is basically a complete rewrite that means that I need to
> retain a whole set of KDE3 libraries... and I haven't even gotten to
> GNOME applications, or other applications yet).

In Slackware I have yet to meet the dependency hell.

>
> >> The irrational "we must release every 6 months" mantra of the
> >> majority of non-enterprise distros. This way, most bugs never get
> >> fixed, while new bugs are constantly introduced.
> >
> > But some distros just release a new version "when it's ready".
> > Prime example is Debian. If you want something really bug-free, use
> > Debian stable. Slackware is very stable, too, and I use Slack 11 in
> > production servers and in one desktop with no major problems.
>
> Note his statement "majority of" and combine with his earlier
> criticism of it being hard to upgrade applications.  Most of the
> packages in Debian stable are aging.

I would dispute the "majority" bit. Take Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva and 
Ubuntu away... and the criticsm disappear.
>
> > ...
> >
> > Verdict: True, but a straw-man argument. Let's focus in a something
> > serious, not in a joke such as Red Hat.
>
> For enterprise apps it seems that a lot of time support is limited to
> specific distributions and even specific releases, and amongst such
> applications RHEL may be the most commonly supported.  From the
> enterprise side it's not seen as a joke.  If the company that some
> application comes from won't be supported unless it's running on
> RHEL, then you're probably going to be running it on RHEL.
>

But what are we talking about? Linux on the desktop, or Linux on the 
enterprise? He shifts the focus of his criticism when it suits him. For 
the desktop, RH is a joke. For the enterprise it might work, but them, I 
would recommend better choices, perhaps SLES or even CentOS.

Finally, please note that I wrote the response only here, so I was 
preaching to the choir, so there is no PR danger.

As I said before, please note: I understand the author might be 
frustrated. I also understad that he might have a preference for MS 
Windows. There is nothing wrong with that. I just take issue with 
employing fallacious arguments as a justification for his demise of 
Linux in favor of Windows, and labeling them as "rational".

Blessings,


Eduardo

-- 
Eduardo Sanchez, B. Th.
Traductor Público Inglés-Español
http://shadow.sombragris.org
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 I think the Vessel, that with fugitive
 Articulation answer'd, once did live,
   And drink; and Ah! the passive Lip I kiss'd,
 How many Kisses might it take--and give!

	-- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
	   

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