James, I *love* that you have an opinion...

Let me clear up a few things from your post, though.

James Newton wrote:
> source= http://www.piclist.com/postbot.asp?id=piclist\2003\01\01\180829a
>
> No Nate, I didn't buy it, the company did... no cost to me. I could have
> installed *nix if I wanted, but I want to get WORK done not learn how the OS
> works.

No point in arguing about who paid for it, you or your employer.  If
it's a legal copy, someone made a decision to shell out cold cash when
Free alternatives were available.  Even if it was bundled with the
machine.  It was paid for.

Those willing to take the plunge and use the free alternatives have a
distinct competitive advantage today and that advantage will get
stronger over time.

Whether you get work done or play with the OS is up to you on any
system.  Linux is now well beyond the "must tinker with it to use it" stage.

I just chat with friends on the phone while their RedHat CD's load
nowadays... no meeting up with them to help them with things, or any of
that anymore.  It helps them feel more comfortable, but my presence or
the presence of any "Unix guru" (whatever that is) is not necessary.

> I want to get patches installed automatically in the background with NO
> effort on my part.

You've definitely been missing out.  It's called "up2date" and is
installed for free with every copy of RedHat 8.0.  (They limit access to
the update servers during supremely heavy load times.)

Debian has apt-get, and Mandrake, SuSE and the others all have similar
functionality now.  Heck I think Debian had automated package management
and upgrades two years before Microsoft did... but I'd have to check on
that.

In the case of up2date, you can double click an icon in the system tray
to launch it, or add a single line to the system scheduler asking it to
do the job as often as you'd like after registration.

Third party choices exist like Ximian's RedCarpet tool, and others, also.

> I want to just start working and not mess with RPM problems and lack of
> driver support for my hardware.

I simply have not run into a piece of hardware that was not supported
natively by the Linux 2.4 kernel EVER, other than one supremely
brand-new Broadcom ethernet chipset last week which was built in to a
motherboard.

[And the motherboard that had it also came with Broadcom's own Linux
kernel module and five commands worth of step-by-step instructions to
install it on any 2.4 kernel machine.]

I've NEVER run into a piece of hardware that the Linux 2.4 kernel
couldn't utilize.  The 2.4 kernel's been out quite a while as the
standard kernel for almost all distributions.  Debian lagged behind over
a year, and their 2.4 version came out over a year ago.

So it's been at least two years since I had any problems getting ANY
hardware to work.  And probably more like three.

The MYTH that Linux doesn't support hardware is left over from when it
didn't.  It does now.

RPM problems is a phrase that runs the gamut of a million possibilities,
since RPM is just a file format.  RPM problems with the OS vendor's RPM
files is a much more serious "offense" than some idiot in his basement
who doesn't know how to make them correctly.  You avoid unprofessional
software, you avoid RPM "problems".

Problems with any of the OS manufacturer/distribution standard RPM's are
pretty much non-existant today.  And the damage NOT caused by an RPM
refusing to load until you force it is certainly less damage than some
old Windows installation software blowing away system DLL files the
machine needs to even boot!  (Been there, done that... never had a Unix
package manager or bad RPM or other Uinx package do that to me, ever.)

> I do, however, support open source development and I don't try to bad mouth
> other people or companys. I do speak from my own experience which is: A)
> every *nix box I have ever worked with has been hacked and B) no windows box
> I have ever worked with has ever gotten a virus or been hacked into. C) I
> have spent hours and hours trying to get simple things done in *nix and I
> have never spent more than a few dealing with the most complex issues in
> Windows.

Every one of those arguments is anecdotal and not based on any concrete
evidence about the technologies used!  A) means whoever set up the boxes
didn't know what they were doing.  B) means that you did know what you
were doing.  C) means you didn't.

Design and research of how to make the design work correctly on EITHER
platform are the hard work.  Just like with PIC's and/or electronics.

> I try to find the good things in everything rather than ranting on, and on
> about how something is evil or wrong or a rip off.

I didn't say any of those things.  I'm sure those were your own personal
interpretations of what I said.

You distilled my very specific statements down to "rant", "evil" and
"wrong" and "rip off" in your own head, which is actually rather intriguing.

Nate

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