Daily Archives: February 9, 2007

Linux has an image problem

By | Published: February 9, 2007

Or rather the people who use it do. This picture was pasted in the #lugradio on freenode today. It’s a parody and extension of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” Apple marketing campaign used heavily in the USA and now popularised in the UK with top comedy sell-outs Mitchell & Webb.

I’ll admit, it’s a funny photo. The PC (Windows) guy looks “normal”, he’s wearing a smart business suit, clean shoes and sporting an inoffensive haircut. The Mac guy is clearly more casual, more comfortable in a t-shirt & slacks,

Posted in Fun, Linux, Ubuntu | 15 Comments

No I will not fix your Vista computer

By | Published: February 9, 2007

I have previously blogged about my gentle refusal to help windows users with problems on their computer.

However recently I have been getting extremely frustrated with Windows to the point where there is just no fun in diagnosing and fixing problems. I get almost no satisfaction out of reoslving Windows issues. I can forsee more requests coming in as people buy new machines, or upgrade existing hardware to Microsoft Vista.

So I have decided that rather than helping some friends & family, and not others, I will do the decent thing, and not help any of them if they choose to install Vista. I think this gives me a nice cut-off point, beyond which I have no responsibility for providing assistance.

Of course, if they install Ubuntu (or any other Linux variant for that matter) I will go out of my way to help them, and will of course continue to encourage them to do that.

Posted in Advocacy, Linux, Rant, Ubuntu | 11 Comments

Wireless on Windows can be just as painful as Linux

By | Published: February 9, 2007

Last night I got a call from my father in law. He recently bought a new laptop and wanted to get it on his wireless network. Rather than talk him through it over the phone, I went round and helped him directly.

I wont go into the details, because it’s not remotely interesting, suffice to say the Acer wireless and wired LAN connectivity tool is a pile of crap compared to network manager under Linux. The user interface is slow, bloated and inconsistent. On a brand new dual core laptop, it takes almost a minute at times to decide to do something as simple as bring an interface up. Anyway, enough of this.

Posted in Linux, Rant | 2 Comments