[NCLUG] Re: Thoughts on Linux Users

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 05:14:22PM -0700, Paul Hummer wrote:
>>   2. You've probably had a "not-too-good" experience using Windows.
>Only as many as my "not-too-good" linux experiences.  However, using 

I've had way more "not-too-good" experiences with Linux than with Windows.
Of course, I've used Linux a few billion times more than Windows in the
past decade.  I've probably directly used a Windows machine less in the
last decade than I use a Linux machine in a day...  I'm fairly sure that
over half the Windows seat-time I've had in the last decade is just
applying updates and rebooting...

>I think many of us are picky.  I don't know how many times I've written 
>or modified a tool or utility that was already available, merely because 
>I wanted it to do it my way.

Yeah.  That reminds me of one of my first experiences as I was switching
over to using Linux.  At the time I was doing HP-UX system admin for my day
job.  The ksh there used Esc+Esc to do what we now call tab completion.  I
had a small HP-UX workstation at home, but it was aging.  So I bought a PC
to run Linux on.

Now, at work these were production systems dealing with millions of dollars
worth of financial data...  I couldn't just go around installing bash to
get tab completion.  And Linux didn't have ksh at the time.  But switching
from Esc+Esc to Tab was really binging me over, man.

I played around with trying to set up readline or whatever it was at the
time to switch Tab completion to use Esc+Esc, but it worked very poorly.
So I grabbed the source and hacked it until it worked.

I remember distinctly the feeling of power I had, being able to get rid of
this one significant pain-point.

Another similar situation, which people have brought up without knowing I
worked on it since then, was when I was ripping my CD collection the first
time.  This was probably back in 1997.  I was using grip, and had around
600 CDs to rip.  I started thinking about the workflow of ripping these CDs
and realized my efficiency could go way up if:

   At the end of ripping a disc, the tray would eject to give me a cue that
   the CD was done ripping.  I didn't want a pop-up on my screen, because
   that's more annoying than just ejecting the tray, plus if the tray is
   open I can just pull the disc instead of having to wait for it to eject.

   When a new disc is loaded, detect it and if there is CDDB data for it go
   ahead and select all the tracks and start ripping.

So, I went from having to fart around with the GUI interface to something
that under the normal circumstances just required feeding new discs in and
it would take care of everything else for me.  A huge time savings.

Since submitting that patch back to the grip project, I have had several
people say "Did you know that grip has this autorip mode?"  :-)

>>   7. And you simply "hate" the idea that jack-booted software police
>>      can enter your business and steal you machines off your desktops,

This is not 'Nam, we have rules.  Whether they're the Copyleft or your
Windows licensing agreement doesn't matter.  If you don't pay the
appropriate licensing fees, and get caught, you pay higher fees...  Doesn't
really impact me, so I don't worry about it too much, but if you're going
to use the software, pay the price.  Or pay the other price.

Sean
-- 
 The only people who have anything to fear from free software
 are those whose products are worth even less.  -- David Emery
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability