It's a sad sad blog

The 'Debunking common GNU/Linux myths' article linked on OSNews turned into the usual pro/anti-Linux war fest in the reader comments.

Stuff like this always works me up, because windows users are accusing Linux users of things they deal with most of the time with as well. You have the usual argument that - Linux is only free if your time is free. While they are forgetting that a lot of time goes into configuring and installing your windows OS and tools as well. In most cases the Linux distro installs everything for you, so you have time enough left to fiddle around with settings, if you so desire.

Hardware support is another favorite, windows supports everything out of the box, if your box is not too old that is. I have seen to many perfectly working hardware turn unusable after upgrading to a new version of windows. And at the same time the driver model of windows turns out to be more hell then convenience for some people. They actually gave me a SoundBlaster Live! because the drivers were so crappy they could hardly use the card. I have a stash of Gravis Ultrasounds laying around, and recently I got a Miro DC30 video capturing card because there are no decent drivers available anymore. After assembling a new PC for somebody else, windows was unable to install because it required SATA drivers to be loaded from a diskette. Firstly, I had no disk drive in this PC, so I had to start a quest to find a drive on my attic to just get windows installed. Secondly, why couldn't this be loaded from a CD or something more modern? Great hardware support it is.

Let's not get into the spy/adware debate. How it's possible for windows user to claim they never have any problems with that, is beyond me. It is inescapable! Unless, you install a ton of extra software monitoring your registry, files, mails and network for virus, worm, spy and adware activity. Lets not forget to adjust some very bizarre and obscure parameters all over the place and the registry itself to lock stuff up some more, all things which normal users like my wife or parents can do on a regular basis, right.

So windows brothers, take a look in the mirror before you badmouth some other OS, I will try to do the same.