[members at lugog] Re Introduction

[Ian Dickinson]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 9:34 AM, john lewis <johnlewis at hantslug.org.uk> wrote:
> Alan Levett <alan at hidown.plus.com> wrote:
>> Each new version of M$ requires the newest and latest hardware, and
>> will not work on anything less - collusion with hardware
>> manufacturers?.
>
> And often the software will need upgrading as well, so more expense as
> you'll be unlikely to get that for the cost of a download.
I think this discussion would be much healthier if folks stuck to
making positive assertions about the things they were trying to
advocate, rather than making negative assertions about the things they
were advocating against. "Linux is great because ..." rather than
"Windows sucks because ...". Particularly as it's not that difficult
to find counter-examples - when I was a windows user, I kept the same
version of Quicken running through multiple windows upgrades. I also
never once had a virus or other malware, although to be fair I do know
people that have.

For example, using Wine, on my system today I have multiple versions
of Internet explorer installed, from 5.5 onwards, so that I can easily
do CSS compatibility testing against the browsers used by our users.
Having multiple IE versions installed simultaneously is actually quite
hard to do on a Windows system I understand.

Today, I run Ubuntu on four different machines plus a number of
servers. I spend my day coding, and doing data analysis and UX design.
I use Ubuntu because it's straightforward and doesn't get in my way -
I'm personally not remotely interested in "my open source distro is
opener than yours" debates.

Ian