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Some weeks ago my father got one of those dialers (and one or two virus) in his computer, i don’t know how and i don’t even care. I wont make a post about how to delete a virus or stuff like that….. The thing is that this incident consumed me some hours of troubleshooting and eventually more hours formating and reinstalling the box. How was this time wasted ?

- FIrst of all i brought to my house only the box (no mouse, monitor, keyword etc….) so i spent like 30 minutes trying all the mice in the house to find that none of the usb or ps/2 mice were working in windows xp (yes a simple mouse, all those mice were working on linux boxes). I finally got an old mouse working and could continue.

- Formated the box and reinstalled os, 1 hour or so….

- Installed drivers and and upgraded the os 1 hour more.

- Installed office antivirus, antispyware, antiadware…. 2 Hours

As you see “Windows just works”, but no operating system is perfect, not even linux. That’s why like 2 months ago i wiped an opensuse installations cause it was doing some weirds things (nothing big, but i was too lazy) so i grabbed my ubuntu cd and reinstalled the os. In one hour i was finish with a new system everything working, office suite and stuff….

So i wonder why people keep saying that “Windows just woks” when it dosen’t…… (and this was just the installation, caused by something that in linux dosent even exist)

Finally, it will not be fair (for all of you that think that Linux is not ready for the non-geek people[2]) not note that my father a 51 years old layer uses both Windows and Linux.

[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=968

[2] http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070913/linuxs-free-system-is-now-easier-to-use-but-not-for-everyone/

Bruce Eckel (from the fame of “Thinking in Java”) posted this that later Guido replied here, beyond the discussion of py3k one thing got my attention,

(Talking about breaking language backward compatibility)“And the Java designers should certainly take notice, especially because the people they are so worried about offending with language incompatibilities are still using Java 1.1 with no plans to change; they aren’t even paying attention to these discussions. In the meantime, Java continues to ossify, pursuing its endless quest to produce the perfect program through static type checking, by adding more and more. The good thing is that people are finally beginning to see that static type checking is useful in small amounts and intrusive in large amounts (although I suspect this realization won’t reach the main group of Java designers for years to come). The bad thing is that, in the meantime, we get abominations like Java “generics”; via daily use people are finally beginning to see what I tried to explain years ago — Java “generics” are far more painful than helpful, just like checked exceptions.”

That got me really happy cause i’m quite surrounded of people that think that Java is the shit and i think it’s quite far from being it…..

This it’s really a step forward, well a big one, i wasn’t expecting this some weeks ago. It’s a pity that lenovo dropped ati cards some time ago. Either way this is just the begging and will cause a lot of movement on the market so lets wait and see what happens.

EDIT: Also on phoronix they are doing a follow up on this story.

Matt Kohut (Lenovo Worldwide Competitive Analyst) made a quite controversial blog post asking readers why waste your time using linux on a laptop ? and he realized how far away of the reality he was. So now he is asking which distro should be preinstalled on a thinkpad, so go and vote!