[CALUG] Linux choices

[Clinton Ebadi]

Eric Bassett <ebassett at tenablesecurity.com> writes:

> See, here's the problem with Linux...  this argument could go on for
> days over which distro is the best... which one offers what, and so
> on and so forth.  My suggested distro?  Windows, it works fantastic.
> Complain all you want about it, but it works 99% of the time right
> out of the box with an immense amount of hardware support.  I've
> built and run many Linux distros and each one has its quirks that
> take a good amount of time to hammer out especially if there are
> hardware gripes.  There's an old saying...  Linux is only free if
> your time has no value.  Sorry guys, I have better things to do with
> my time.

Thanks for violating the RFC2822 maximum line length with your broken
email client! I've reflowed it here so I don't anger the Internet
gods. :-)

Mark these words, they are of your eternal salvation:

 UNIX sucks. Windows sucks. Everything we use now sucks. Even the
 mythical OpenGenera sucked (yes, I have used it fairly
 extensively). Anything that does not suck is a good ten or twenty
 years away despite us knowing how to make things not suck a good ten
 or twenty years ago. As soon as you bring the commercial sector into
 the picture they choose the worst possible solution because it "works
 now." Much like the rich man they have chosen immediacy and shall
 suffer in the long run for this. Unlike the rich man, however, they
 have caused us all to suffer along with them.

Personally I've had nothing but trouble with Windows. Hours and hours
spent trying to figure out the most asinine things. For example, once
upon a time I had to setup a very simple tunnel from my GNU
workstation to a laptop running a Windows only VPN client that then
tunneled to the office--I gave up after spending three days attempting
to do something I could do blindfolded on a UNIX machine.

On the other hand, I haven't spent more than an hour configuring a new
Debian system in about eight years. I last edited a file in /etc on my
workstation in 2003! And that was only to add a modeline for my SGI
monitor that didn't report its 1920x1200 mode in its EDID.

But of course, every OS sucks. Everyone has different hardware and the
quarks are blipping about making things break for no reason. Maybe one
day we'll be running Hurd/Coyotos with software written in Haskell and
nothing will break... until then it's all the same crap with a
different set of difficult to use commands and broken user interfaces.

Great sophisticated equivocation of /free/ in your last sentence btw
;-)

-- 
<captain_krunk> ntk is currently using "telnet fyodor 25" to send email