Why I don't use Linux! 4293

Actually, Linux is the round peg. It's Windows that has all of those awkward corners that stick, jam, and break. But Microsoft has gotten everyone so used to breakage that they hardly notice anymore - they just reboot, reformat, and re-install.

OK, you've been griping about how nobody is addressing your points. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but let's have a go...

You must be unlucky. I dropped Linux into a couple of laptops that used to run Windows and they're running just fine.

I don't have a scanner so I can't speak for that. But I plugged one of the laptops' parallel ports into our laser printer and it works just fine. My wife's Windows laptop is plugged into the printer's USB port, and we're sharing the printer, no problems.

Go into the directory where you mounted it. The images should all be there as .jpg files; at least they are with my system. As to how to manipulate images, any standard file commands (e.g. cp or rm) should work just fine. You do know how to manipulate files on a Linux system, don't you? It wouldn't be any easier on a Windows box if you didn't know the file commands or how to use Explorer.

So don't mention Linux. Just about every ISP I've heard of acts this way. You can get the information you need (mail server names, DNS addresses, etc.) without revealing which OS you're using.

I don't do wireless; I'll leave these ones to the satisfied Linux users for whom it works just fine.

That's a browser issue, which happens just as often on a true-blue Windows box if you run a web browser other than Internet Explorer (Netscape, for instance). Are we to be held responsible for the actions of saboteurs? That's a perfectly appropriate word to use to describe people who create web pages specifically designed to break on any brower other than Internet Explorer. I happily browse all sorts of sites with Mozilla and Konqueror (or even Lynx if all I'm after is text); if somone is so bigoted as to create IE-only web sites, I'm not interested in going there.

These again are web page issues; see above. Personally, I can't imagine doing such critical functions with a browser that is as buggy and insecure as Internet Explorer. What's it really doing with the information you're typing in? Since the source code isn't available, you'll never know. But given Windows' tendency to report all sorts of activity back to Microsoft, do you really trust it?

Have them send you the stuff in an industry standard format, rather than one that contains all sorts of undocumented extensions that are frequently changed for the sole purpose of breaking non-Microsoft software.

Again, this is a web site design issue. It's their fault for writing nonstandard HTML.

Funny, I stuff any CD or DVD into my Linux box, fire up mplayer, and it figures out what's there and plays it.

I could go on even longer about how Microsoft products really stink. As a software developer, I could tell all sorts of horror stories about how much time I have to spend working around Microsoft's bugs, design flaws, and attempts at sabotage.

What it says is that most people are so brainwashed by Microsoft that they're totally incapable of functioning outside the playpen that Billyboy has built for them. It's not as if Windows is easier to use than anything else; it's just more familiar. But easy to use? Give me a break! I've seen people fiddling with Windows for hours, clicking here, clicking there, trying to get something to work. It's painful to watch. And, even more amazingly, they'll still claim that Windows is easy to use!

I have to admit, Microsoft's marketing is awesome. They can convince the average user that black is white, and they've probably got a couple of years' backlog of orders from Eskimos for refrigerators.

But that doesn't make their products better, except in the hallucination-ridden world of consumer perception.

-- I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way. X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855. HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!