| > I'm surprised you can't see that this counter-article is just plain old FUD. Content-less emotional manipulation - just the kind of thing that I hate to see on HN. You answered none of the points in the article itself, dismissing the entire thing out of hand with an acronym describing a concept that you provided no evidence actually applied to any of the arguments. > It should be a no-brainer that an operative system that is free, open, democratic, well documented and consisting of over 50,000 quality software packages---Debian, for example---is better than an OS which isn't any of those things. No. I've been using Linux as my daily driver for over a decade (and have spent far more time using it than Windows), and gotten a few other people on it, so I can say that, for actually getting things done and software just working, Windows is far better than Linux. An operating system where you have to struggle to get things done is a bad operating system. Linux isn't "democratic", either - Linus Torvalds controls kernel development, and the userspace components have wildly differing development practices. Nor is it "well documented" - Linux-related documentation is generally terrible to read. Technically correct? Sure - but that's not "well documented", that's an encyclopedia. Neither can you say that those "50,000" software packages are "quality" - the vast majority of open-source software that I've seen is buggy, under-documented, incomplete, and difficult to use. (I mean, so is the vast majority of proprietary software - but that software being "also bad" doesn't make OSS software "good") > Of course software is (also) about ideology. [...] well then obviously you have picked sides. Please leave your manipulative speech out of HN, and don't try to drag me (or anyone) into your idealistic flamewar. Microsoft is a company that is predatory towards its users, and that's why I recommend Linux despite all of its problems. Pretending that it has no problems, or is technically superior to Windows, and then piling on inflammatory dialog, does nobody any good. |