[mdlug] Putting together some FUD-dispelling points

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Michael Corral

> Wow, the wintrolls accomplished their goal: getting you to waste your
> time trying to win them over. My question is, why even bother?

 I'm not trying to win *them* over. When that stuff comes up in other
contexts, I just want to be able to point them at something to help
*others* see through the crap. A little time invested now to save plenty
of time later.

> 1. I think it's better to stay as distro-agnostic as possible when
> discussing the benefits of Linux. I thought you way had too much of an
> Ubuntu emphasis, only one mention of Suse and no mention of Fedora.

 Ubuntu's what I'm familiar with. I like it. My examples come from there
'cause that's what I'm using. However, I tried to be fair to other distros.

> 2. The 'Linux is "Too Hard To Use"' section is a little bit unfair to
> Windows when discussing debugging app crashes. A lot of applications
> in Windows do write useful information to the Event Logs, which are
> easily viewable in the Event Viewer. A lot of Windows users don't know
> about the Event Viewer, but then again a lot of Linux newbies don't
> know how to debug Linux apps either.

 I've seen a lot of completely useless binary dumps in the Event Log, too.
More often than useful info. And the two main problems I've had on Windows,
file corruption and video driver crashes, I couldn't find anything useful
in the event logs at all.

> Also, you say "My wife uses Linux to read email, surf the web, do
> word processing, watch amusing videos, etc.",
> but didn't you just post to the list recently about how your wife was
> giving up on OpenOffice and wanted to go back to MS Office? :)

 Yes, I will be updating that. And it turns out Crossover wasn't enough
for her; she had trouble with copy/paste and some things were sluggish.
Surprised me, given the reviews, but oh well. I've picked up the cheapest
possible Dell and it'll run her Office stuff. In some ways it works out
well, I'll have the whole Linux machie to myself. :->

> 3. The link "Linux only follows the work of others and does 
> not innovate."
> <http://ingles.homeunix.org/rants/fud/follower.html> appears 
> to be broken.
> I'm getting a 404 Not Found error when clicking on that.

 Yup, haven't finished that one yet. You can see I've been wasting
every waking hour on this. :->

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                                (313) 227-2317

  "Certitude is not the test of certainty." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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