Linux community, please chill out.

[eddie]

Point one:
It was not so long ago that there were not machines with a gui. Remember Dos? When Ms windows first came out, I was dong computer support. You can not beleive all the complaining and the times I was verbally abused because people did not want to go to MSwindows. They especially secretaries wanted to stay with their keyboard intensive applications such as Wordperfect and the like. I see a parallel between that conversion and the conversion from Microsoft based products and linux. As we educated people about windows the fear of losing Dos faded away. That is what we need to do in the linux community. Windows ws anything but perfect and oh god the driver and hardware problems were tremendous, but they worked out. Most techs today have never the fun of worrying about irq's and ports since pnp came out.

Point two:
So you think that linux has issues. In a way Microsoft has had it's own distributions also. win9x, win2k, winxp, and etc. I will bet you there is a ton of software that will not run the same way on all these platforms if at all. Definately the drivers are not universal either. Same problems as linux has it's growing pains. I worked as a windows admin for years and in my duties was to install software on stand alone machines and client server software on servers. I can not tell you how many times I was thwarted because we had to buy special programs in addition to the main apps because there copyright issues on some the the support programs and drivers. Even then everything did not work. When a new version of windows came out we usually had to upgrade all the software. Oh god, the incompatibilies and the fudging I had to do to make things work. I remember when faster computers came out and the older programs would not run on the new machines. That was another nightmare. But software came out to aid in the issue. Not only the conversion of application software were there issues. I remember converting from novell to windows servers and all the novell menus that had to be converted onto shortcuts and batch files to get the server based software to work for Windows NT and Win2k. I could go on. Now the differences beween MSVista and MSWindows 7 from the older software. It has already been proven xp vm will not work right on certain versions of ms windows 7. Just more and more issues. So here we go again.

Point three:
It is a shame that people do not take the time to look through the repos, sourceforge, and other sites such as tucows to see what is available before complaining there is no software for linux. Since setting up our own web server, our biggest problem there is that there is so much software we have to spend a bit of time testing and then deciding which application to use.

Point four:

When was the last time you had an issue with viruses, spyware and the like on a pure linux or bsd box?

Take the time to educate.