[KLUG Advocacy] A user leaves....

[Robert G. Brown]

...but I wonder, from his narrative, if he was ever really "here".

I contrast his mentality and history with my own, and there are some
fairly deep differences. I'd also like to know what this guys does
for a living. Don't worry, it all ties together.

Cutting to the chase for a second, I don't think this guy is wrong;
but in order to make that claim, one has to appreciate his point of
view. I'll get to that in a bit, too.

This year I celebrate 30 years of involvement with computers. At this
time in 1972, I was playing with programmable calculators in high 
school. Six months later, I was programming on a real computer. In
those days, "read computer" = "mainframe", and the computer I used 
was many miles away, connected to a Selectric terminal by telephone
lines and an acoustic coupler. Operating systems, rebooting, reinstal-
ling, and so on were things OTHER people worried about, not me. I had a 
hard enough time writing my own programs, and making sure they worked
right.

The bulk of my career has been spent this way, essentially. I've 
inhabited a number of mainframe installations, commercial UNIX
and VAX systems (and others, like DEC-OS, Xerox CP-V, and CDC OSes)
and (compared to the career as a whole) have spent fairly little 
time in the M$ world. 

In all of these environments (save the last), the notion of changing 
the OS in any important way, or rebooting the system, was planned out.
It was done over memos, mail messages, phone calls, and meetings, 
Usually for many days or weeks in advance of the event, generally with 
the degree of formality used in open-heart surgery or a manned space 
mission.  No one was kidding around about this stuff, since everyone 
involved pretty much knew what was at stake.

Personal computing, BY DEFINITION, is the antithesis of this. One
old mainframer I know defines a personal computer as "A machine that 
can be turned off and no one else will care". In that sense, most
of the machines here are not personal computers.

I believe the author of the article has had almost exclusive exposure 
to personal computers, and he writes very much from that point of view.
In the M$/Wintel world, product shopping, re-installing, and rebooting
is EXACTLY what you do! If you want to install a product, WHY NOT reboot
your PC? See the above definition... if no one cares, why should the
user? It is simply another step in the installation process!

The same thinking applies to the OS itself. Did you make a mistake in-
stalling things, or leave something out? No problem, just wipe it 
all out and reinstall, right? This was the thinking with DOS 3.1, when
re-installing was a 5 minute proposition without a lot of choices. I
will surely agree that this mentality has persisted for far too long.
I know that reinstalling my (one) MS platform here takes almost a full
work day, and I've also been told (by a third-degree blackbelt M$ guru)
that if I ever want to hear anything but MIDI from my soundcard again,
I would have to reinstall, from scratch. Don't beleive me? Do the re-
search HE did, then come back and tell me a better way, this checks
out completely.

But I digress; the mentality persists. In a closed-source, binary-only 
proprietary world, you have no choice BUT to product shop. If something 
doesn't meet your needs, there's no source to hack, no compiler options 
to modify, and so on. It's either all there, or it's not, and if it's 
not, you have to move on.

The Registry and install wizards are engineered to minimize the know-
ledge level of the users, and in general the system is dumbed-down 
enough to work as a consumer product. Sure, some drivers come along 
a bit faster at first, since the commercial manufacturers are all 
working to contract, but once something has satisfied economic market 
demand, development stops, often with only a fraction of the flexi-
bility and utility of the underlying system being used well.

The product hopping takes on what I sense are rather crazy propor-
tions. I know people who have dumped fairly stable configurations 
because one app didn't have some feature set, but it was available 
on some OTHER OS, with a particular upgrade level, so they "just" 
re-installed (and sometimes had to purchase) EVERYTHING to get that 
feature. Someone pointed this out to me last month, and I felt like 
I was looking at the mosaic plate my daughter made in summer camp... 
that was some EXPENSIVE little plate!  Well, that was some EXPENSIVE 
toolbar! this guy had to go buy a new OS, a new office suite, and a 
different video card to really use this right.  I was amazed.

Overall, a lot of what's been said here, and what he wrote, is indi-
cative of this mentality... a consumer mentality... short attention 
span, unwillingness to really stick with something long enough to 
learn a number of things well, and some fairly glaring blind spots, 
which persisted due to lack of interaction with others (how many 
LUG meetings did he attend, or even seek out?), and simple ignorance.

There are also some interesting hints that this fellow is NOT 
quite as foolish as this might show him to be. He makes some 
fleeting reference to "the house server" (not a dignified gentle-
man in a morning coat, either), and the existence of IPCop hints 
at the home network. I don't think a lot of "Joe Six-pack" types 
are that connected, so this guy knows more that he explicitly lets 
on. So I wonder how deeply he is into this stuff. He says he's coming
back to Linux again, and even has a target distro to start with for 
next time. Doesn't seem terribly mainstream to me.

Finally, I wonder what he does for a living. I know what I do... 
I compute!  I do this in a number of settings... as a financial 
guy, or a scientist, or maybe to lay out presentations well, or 
toss the results across the net, one way or another. This means 
I internalize what I do, and take it fairly seriously. I wonder 
if he has the same relationship to computing that I do, but I bet
he doesn't. I also hope he *does* have that relationship to what-
ever he does, and I'd like to see his reaction to a similar article
about his profession and tools.

The point is not that whether I'm "offended" or "angry" about this
article, but that I believe he has much more limited (and different)
expectations and requirements about what he wants to get out of his 
interaction with computing and software. I think he looks upon this
stuff as much more of an appliance that I (or "we") do. If he's a
Dentist, I sure hope he doesn't adopt that attitude about teeth,
gums, drills, or fillings.

Now, does he represent a more mainstream attitude toward computing
that I (or "we") do? I think so. Does this also mean that his observa-
tions about Linux are correct? I do **NOT** think so! I believe most
of what he is saying does NOT apply to current distros, nor is his 
exposure to any one (current) distro deep enough to be a really good
critic. I think a lot of his problems would be solved by learning a
little, and sticking with one distro a bit more. I also believe that 
this is EXACTLY the kind of person that benefits, perhaps more than
any other, from LUG support. He's one reason we're here!

I would like to know when/if/who will write a reply (not really a 
rebuttal) to this article....

						Regards,
						---> RGB <---