Why *nix guys hate Windows
by Stii
On my way to work this morning I had to stop at my friend’s place and pick up his two beautiful Labradors’ piles of crap since I got home too late last night to take my son to do it. Not an ideal start to a day. When I got to work, the morning took a turn for the worst when I had to help someone with a strange error on a Windows machine.
The poor bloke came to me for help. When he opens MS Word, a message saying “Insufficient memory or disk space. Cannot open font” graced the screen. How arb… After mucking about for 30 minutes just trying to find my way in Windows again (it’s been a significant while) I ended up taking somebody’s advice and inserted the Office install CD and run a repair.
Low and behold it worked! How very clever of me to listen to someone else’s advice. Job well done. The world is right again, or is it?
I had this very unsatisfying, empty feeling of total unaccomplishment. That, my dear friends, are why Linux/Unix folk hate Windows.
It is quite a feeling of achievement fixing a Linux issue. Hacking your way around until you’ve sorted it out. It takes a certain level of skill and require you to think and apply yourself to a problem which is very satisfying once you solved the problem. Any fool can insert a CD and select the repair option, reboot after repairing and Voila! the world is round again.
Now I just know that Windows pundits will harp on about how easy it was to fix the problem. Sure. I’ll admit it, it was so easy a monkey on a typewriter could fix it with his feet. My problem is that I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place. If it happens again will inserting the CD work? What if it doesn’t work next time? It’s a simple case of I started out with nothing and still got most of it left.
I can go on and on and on. Bottom line is that we hate Windows not so much because it sucks, but because it leaves us feeling empty and dumb while we should feel smart. Then again, it could possibly be that I simply had a shitty start to the day…
When something goes badly wrong on Windows and the normal fix does not work then you are in big trouble, might as well re-install.
Yes, when something goes badly wrong on *nix you are in trouble as well but it can normally be fixed with some sweat and tears and leaves you with a real feeling of HELL YEAH Linus, take that.