[LAD] Forgive me, for I have sinned, or: toss your Macintosh, as fast and wide as you can.

[Len Ovens]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2017, Neil C Smith wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 10:52 AM Louigi Verona <louigi.verona at gmail.com> wrote:
>       And in my experience, proprietary systems are generally much more
>       stable than floss, and are less likely to fail suddenly and without
>       warning.
> 
> 
> ha ha ha ha ha ha ha .... oh, wait .. you're serious?! ;-)
> 
> There's a reason I use FLOSS, and it's because my personal experience is
> absolutely the opposite of this.

+1, our family has started out with a number of windows machines (mostly 
laptops) and my wife has said she wanted to keep the windows in there. 
That normally lasts about a week before I get "put what you have in my 
computer please". This from someone who uses their computer for browsing, 
skype, and word processing.

I can't talk about Macs, they are out of our price range.

It is unfortunate that some of the big players in the Linux world have 
decided "covergence" is a good thing. I really, really, do not want my 
desktop/laptop to work like a 5inch phone thank you very much. I actually 
do work on my machine. Thankfully, Linux does offer more than one DE and 
one can find work helpers buried, but still there if they need to.

I have worked in a large company who used windows as the corperate system 
because there was someone to sue if things broke too badly. At the time 
the microvax was still used for realtime stuff (machine control) with NT for 
data massaging. However, the install disks we were supplied with (to 
install NT) were all basic linux on a cd with dd to install the image. We 
also found that most trouble shooting was best done with a linux rescue 
disk. Backups were all done with a linux dd too. Do note, I have been away 
from the technical end for over 10 years now (it let me move out of the 
Vancouver area and onto Vancouver Island and less than 1 hour to get to 
work for 2 hours saved a day) and I know there are new machines that have 
been installed. I am sure they do not use MicroVax as there is no one 
around to sue if it quits but I do not know what they do use. There was 
some experimenting with Red Hat by the IT department (remember someone to 
sue, and this company is big enough that they did use lawsuit as a 
negotiating tool - often).

My experience with proprietary software as someone whos job is to keep 
things running has been if it's broken... live with it somehow. Even the 
smallest SW fix was $10k so they weren't done often and then only when the 
fixes were a list, never a single bug. In older times, the machine control 
SW was written in house, well understood and fixed as needed.

I also remember the days when hardware automatically came with a full 
schematic.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net