On linux

A friend recently forwarded me Neil Stephenson's essay "In the beginning was the command line". It includes, among other things, an amusing comparison of operating systems as if they were car dealerships. MS windows OS=station wagons, mac is a nice sleek eurosedan, and BeOS - it's an old essay - is a Batmobile. Linux is...well, see below.

I read this years ago and found it vastly entertaining. I even printed it out and had it in the bathroom for "quality time" reading. It was well worded. Persuasive. And I believed it. (well, mostly)

Re-reading it this time, with the jaded eye of a few more years of pain..err, experience, I particularly like this bit:

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

HA! In a word (or four) I beg to differ.

Just like the M1 abrams, linux requires a dedicated team of specialized technicians to change a bloody tire. The literature states that they never, ever break down but in reality they do. (however, given that they're usually run by said highly trained technicians this troubleshooting is not seen as a drawback, but part of the fun of driving the beast!)

You can drive them on most roads, but you do need a drivers manual at hand at all times, and it contains such cryptic instructions as "if the street is composed of < 64% composite asphalt mix with a 3/4 minus gravel substrate at a 3' depth you will incur a 20% damage likelyhood to the road as well as wear the ball joints prematurely. Recommended procedure is to install track upgrade 3.41, but make sure you're running wheel guidance rods 2.11 (the titanium coated pre-graphite charged ones) else you'll completely burn up the gearbox and the treads will fall off and the tank will blow up."

The keys are in the ignition...if you can find the frickin' ignition. The control panel is covered in lights and switches that let you control every last bit of the innards of the beast and keep you informed of the relative humidity of the thermo-coupled rheostat junction...which is located right next to the speedometer. But instead of reporting speed, it has the rpm of each individual crankshaft and you're expected to extrapolate that (on the fly, in your head) to actual speed since you might be running the .301 diameter driver wheels or the .278 driver wheels...

Put your grandma in one of those and ask her to drive to church. What do you get? Smashed roads. Fire hydrants knocked off. Terrified pedestrians. And one ticked off granny.

(and %diety% help you if she found the main bore's autoloading mechanism and accidentally let loose a few sabot rounds...)

Don't get me wrong. I like the M1. It totally rocks. It's an unparalleled piece of modern weaponry. In it's context it totally rocks.

I like linux. It is absolutely appropriate for certian kinds of folks, in certain kinds of situations.

But use one as my daily driver...you know, when I just want to be able to drive on the local interstate and get to work? Maybe if I was a complete military nut, owned my own UNIMOG and restored tanks for fun. But otherwise, no.