[Gllug] Controversial Joel Spolsky article

[Richard Jones]

Actually, I kicked this off to generate a bit of traffic on this
mailing list, which has been rather quiet recently :-)

But anyway, my take on this article:

I have lots of Linux boxes, a Win2K box and a Mac OS X laptop. As
desktop machines there's really not a lot between them.

The Mac is the only one which "just works" and is very consistent.
It's the only one I would recommend for a newbie who had to support
the machine themselves.

I wouldn't recommend either a Windows box or a Linux box for a
complete newbie if they had to support it themselves (adding new
hardware, software).  But if the system was going to be set up for
them and would remain stable (no additional hardware or software
added), then the Linux machine would have a marginal advantage over
the Windows machine.  That's just because the Windows machines I've
used have all suffered from inexplicable "bit rot", even when I've not
changed their configuration in any way (and this includes my current
Win2K machine, which has got slower and flakier ever since I installed
it, and I only turn it on a couple of times a week to do very light
service).

He's completely wrong about the Aunt Madge stuff.  When was this
mythical auntie ever going to write shell script?  Never.  Shell
script is the scripting environment for Unix, and unlike the other
platforms, it's used broadly and consistently throughout the system
for programming tasks.  It's a programming language, for programmers
to automate complex tasks, and so sure the programs are written by
programmers, for programmers.  All recent versions of desktop Linux
come with graphical tools to do configuration tasks, the kind of tools
which it's unlikely even mythical Auntie Madge will be using, because
she'll be getting her niece/nephew to set the machine up for her.

Rich.

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