He's a Mac, He's a PC, But We're Linux! 508
davidmwilliams writes "Earlier this year the Linux Foundation launched a competition for budding writers, film makers and just general Linux enthusiasts to make their own grassroots advertisement to compete with Apple's highly-successful 'I'm a Mac' series of adverts. The winner has now been announced."
They should get... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been kinda surprised that with all the tech and science they throw around on that show, that they don't ever mention Linux.
i just bought a vista pc, with loathing (Score:2, Interesting)
I went down to microcenter in cambridge, ma, a half mile from mit and harvard. they don't even stock linux computers.
I do my taxes on the computer (so even if they make linux tax software, i have to import, or run wine) my kids use windows for gaming (so i have to know something about it to help them).....
I actually installed ubuntu under wubi on my last laptop: it worked fine: so what
why should i switch if there is ZERO incentive for me to use linux - i get absolutely nothing from linux that i don't get from windows; it is not easier to use, it is not faster, it is not anything that i need
until the linux community patents a new type of software that i have to have and it runs only on linux, I' wont switch, even tho the thought of giving more money to redmond makes me want to puke
Re:What does it mean to be Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
But The Great Unwashed Masses don't even know what Linux is yet.
The great unwashed masses don't conceptualize the idea of an operating system. This one of the reasons that Microsoft, with it's anti-competitive licensing, was able to gain a monopoly, because they controlled the pre-loads. Even when there was competition, consumers thought in terms of the total product rather than the composition of parts. You bought a Commodore {model name} PC, an Atari {model name} PC, an Apple {model name} PC, etc.
Of course this is perpetuated by the use of the term, "PC", to be synonymous with "a personal computer (PC) running the Windows operating system", which is free marketing for Microsoft.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux did its spoof [youtube.com] years ago.
Re:Good news, and bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Marketing fail (Score:3, Interesting)
The finalists are way better (Score:1, Interesting)
Check them out:
Linux Pub: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xceiMJSunIg [youtube.com]
Origin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1GYHQhqtbU [youtube.com]
Re:Linux - How "Free" is it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, for what it's worth I agree with you Dripdry. I tried out Linux on an extra computer at home and it really just felt like I was going out of my way to make a computer incompatible with the majority of what I want to run on it. Setting it up as a media server was such a frustrating experience that I ended up putting XP back on. Bam, done in under 10 min.
I don't like the idea of having to sift through internet forums to find features that should be documented more accessibly within the OS itself. You can't expect a layman to make the switch to some abstract ideal like "freedom" when they're going to lose convenience and functionality in the process.
No help (Score:4, Interesting)
Were they able to help you? Or was it easier to post your question to google and find someone else who had the same problem and found a fix?
I have been a Mac, a Microsoft AND and OS2. NEVER has customer service EVER helped with my problems. I guess easy problems that are easily solved are all the help lines are capable of. If it is an easy problem, heck, I have an Internet connection, I know how to type, and I know how to read.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
If you'd read the post that mweather was replying to, you'd know that mweather was referring to Windows.
This is why I always quote the relevant portion of the parent post in my replies.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, but I'm not a driveling whiny developer enthusiast that needs to have the bazillion levels of freedom that you need to hack the bejeezus out of your computer. I'm a burger flipper, a tire guy, a mechanic, a professional, or a housewife and I just want the stuff to work.
In that case, the bazillion programs available for Windows shouldn't matter -- only the few you need to work. Additionally, the lack of a need for antivirus, and the ease of keeping your system up-to-date and secure, should appeal to you.
In fact, even a package manager and a distribution should benefit you, in the long run. Choosing software supported by the distro means it'll be maintained, likely forever and for free. Using a distro like Debian or Ubuntu, which has separate stable and unstable versions, means that as long as you're on the stable version, all of that software is known to work together -- no "dll hell", no other strange cases of one piece of software causing another to not work.
I don't want to have to make a stupid decision about which distribution I should download
That's why we say "Ubuntu" and move on.
and I don't want to have to answer nine billion technical questions just to get it installed.
I'm sure someone can verify it, but I don't think Ubuntu asks more questions than XP. If you're a professional, you solve this problem by getting it preinstalled [dell.com].
I want to have that feeling that there is a company that I can blame,
That would be Dell, who is providing you service, if you followed the above option.
I need to have the feeling that there is a group of people that may benefit from my purchase,
That, I really don't get. Since it can be free, why would you need that? If you get it as a product, with someone to blame (the Dell option), then Dell and Canonical both benefit, and some portion of your money goes directly to improving Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is coming the closest to being a product and it's goals are commendable but it is not a mainstream desktop PRODUCT and never will be.
Why not? Putting PRODUCT in all caps (and bold) doesn't make it a valid point. Your actual points here, I think I've refuted.
Just because it's free doesn't mean it is going to be good and just because it costs a lot of money doesn't mean that it's evil.
This is true. However, the fact that it is free, in a truly level market economy, would mean that anything that costs money would have to come with a lot of added value.
As it is, the closest competitor, in the sense of something for which most software is compatible, might be Solaris (and other commercial Unices), but Solaris was recently open sourced -- Linux dominates that market. OS X might count, except their GUI is so proprietary that a truly native OS X app can't be much more easily ported to Linux than a Windows app can.
I'l probably get modded a 0 flame bait for this
I really hope mods stop falling for this tactic.
Hey, mods, I'm about to say something that people might not want to hear! Some people might mod me down for it! You'd better mod me up to compensate!
I'd have modded you overrated, but I actually have something to say.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
My conversation would go a little more like this.
Joe: "So... where do I get that free windows?"
You: "Well, I've got this morally ambiguous copy of WinXP: Pirated edition, or an actual free OS named Ubuntu."
Joe: "Right. So, where is this free one?"
You: "Here, I keep a spare copy in my backpack with all my other useful discs."
Joe: "Cool, so what do I do with it?"
You: "How about I give you a quick demo, you can try it without installing it and decide if you like it or not."
Joe: "Cool"
10-30 minutes later..
1.) Joe: "Nah, this Ubuntu thing just isn't for me and I don't want to go to State, PMITA, prison."
2.) Joe: "Cool, I love this Ubuntu thing!"
3.) Joe: "Nah, this Ubuntu thing just isn't for me. But I'm also cheap in the wallet and morally casual in nature."
You:
In case of option 1, direct to nearest store to grab windows and remain uninvolved hence forth.
In case of option 2, give my copy of the cd to Joe and burn myself another copy later.
In case of option 3, give my copy of the cd to Joe and burn myself another copy later.
The choice is ultimately his, and I do not care if he chooses to run Linux or not. At least I laid his options out for him though. My ultimate goal is to get Joe what he needs for his situation, under his circumstances, and I do not care what means I take to achieve that.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
Why should I recommend Ubuntu. Is it the right distro for everyone.
No, but it is popular, and it is better than Windows.
Popular, in open source, tends to correlate to goodness, except in extreme circumstances. This is because popularity doesn't just attract consumers, it attracts developers. This has both the indirect network effect Windows does -- anything that works on Linux, you can bet someone's grafted it onto Ubuntu, and either thrown up a package or written a howto -- and it has the more direct effect of speeding development on anything Ubuntu considers a core technology.
It's essentially this: Worse is better. Why recommend Linux, and not BSD or Solaris? Because Linux is popular.
After all, someone can always fork Ubuntu -- monopoly and monoculture does not mean death in nearly the same way as it does in proprietary software. Ubuntu cannot go out of business -- Canonical can, but Ubuntu will be forked and live on, as desktop Redhat was reborn as Fedora, as Netscape became Mozilla -- Ubuntu itself is a continual fork of Debian.
That, and Ubuntu does have commercial support (Canonical, Dell), it has desktop Linux pretty well done, and better than most others, it's based on Debian (I think RPM is icky, so I don't like Fedora)...
But mostly because it resolves that question. And it resolves the GNOME/KDE question, in much the same way -- you just use GNOME. If you want KDE, that implies you know enough to make your own decisions, so there's Kubuntu, and Xubuntu, and ubuntu-minimal + whatever your favorite WM/DE is, and there's always other distros, forks, and third-party repositories.
Personally, I use Ubuntu, but that doesn't put me too far off to help Ubuntu people -- it's all the same repositories anyway.