Linux. Beware of false friends…

A man with a very dodgy beard comes out with the following headline on the Guardian Technology Blog: A Gibbon beats Leopard. The sub-headline says: Canonical has released the latest version of its Linux distribution, Ubuntu. It’s easy to install and use. Why don’t more people use it? So that’s what he means. Ubuntu have … Continue reading “Linux. Beware of false friends…”

A man with a very dodgy beard comes out with the following headline on the Guardian Technology Blog: A Gibbon beats Leopard.

The sub-headline says: Canonical has released the latest version of its Linux distribution, Ubuntu. It’s easy to install and use. Why don’t more people use it?

So that’s what he means. Ubuntu have a new version, Gutsy Gibbon, whose release date was 7 days before Leopard.

I’m not saying that it beats Apple’s next version of OS X, aka Leopard

Actually, Kevin, that’s exactly what you said. In your headline. Look.

Kevin is a special kind of technologist. He’s installing Ubuntu 7.10 onto what he describes as an “old first-gen PowerBook”.

Now that is amazing. I’m amazed it installs on a PowerBook 100 which shipped with a 20 MB hard drive, 2 MB RAM and a screaming 16 MHz 68000 Processor. That’s right, 16 MILLION cycles per second. Holy shit!

Joking aside (and guessing he means a 4-500 MHz G4 Powerbook). Kevin is doing Linux a disservice perhaps by stating a headline like that and then backing out of it in the first paragraph the way a learner driver reverses out of your front passenger wing. The only way Ubuntu beats Leopard is in the date of release? Say it isn’t so???

Though his article seems to rally support for Linux, he professes to prefer the file manager in Windows, complains about how long it took to get DVD codecs and had to downgrade his Window Manager because GNome and KDE were slower and less stable than Mac OS X. He gripes about drivers support for Linux describing it as “a return of the bad old days of Windows with insufficient driver support” and adds that though it’s come a long way, “It still is work, but not as much as it used to be.”

Look out Linux, with friends like these…

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