ya its important to have the skill too. in my case i just have it. the fiddling is actually learning incase of new things in case you didn't knew which to my experience you can't have with windows.

And it's that line of thinking that keeps you tied to Windows. I've not had to "spend hours fiddling" to get something to work under Linux since 2001. Once you figure out how to do things the Linux way, everything falls into place. It took me 2 years of using Linux to get to that point.

I read something on the internet earlier this week went something like:

Do you remember the days when people were willing to figure out Commodore 64's, DOS and Apple BASIC without any problem? If you put 99% of those same people in front of one of those systems today they'd instantly transmogrify into a sack of potatoes.

Why is it so?

You do know that sometimes things never work under windoze right? I have a digital camara that plain refuses to work on my brother's win XP rig. His camera will only work if he cuts the puter off, plugs in the camera and turns the camera on and then turns the puter on. You have to do all that before the camera powers itself off too. Yup, we tried newer software too. Nothing. I have to burn them to a CD on my Linux box then give him the CD.

There's a huge difference between having a computer come with an operating system preinstalled and preconfigured and having to install a non-native operating system on a computer yourself.

there's a huge difference between not being able to change practically anything about your desktop even if you want to, and being able to change your desktop in any way you want.

you know, i am working in an office at the moment and yesterday my boss brought in a new dell-server machine with a nice raid array (for no apparent reason, it's not as if we need the speed) running windows xp. i managed to crash it within 20 minutes, and i don't think i was doing anything wrong, but i don't know that much about windows, so maybe i clicked somewhere where you shouldn't click.

one of the things is, i find working on windows incredibly slow because i actually bother to read the pop-up messages. about every 2 minutes i got a pop-up from the anti-virus software, then the firewall, then some windows thing downloading stuff telling me to reboot the computer (i think i had to reboot it about 6 times in the space of an hour). and then my boss tried to set up the network, and it didn't work. after about an hour he'd managed to connect the computers, but he couldn't get the network printers to accept tasks. the server just complained that the print queues were full. very strange.

so all in all, i didn't manage to get any work done yesterday

Sure you did, it was a easy day for this part. You crashed windoze!! Wasn't that easy?? He should have gotten a Dell with Linux on it.

Please go back and read the thread I was referring to. The original poster was by no means complaining about having the ability to change settings if they want to (obviously having additional choices is no cause for complaint). They were complaining about having to do loads of configuration.

Note the word "requires". If they had said "Linux has the optiion to be configured" then that would not have been a cause for complaint, but that is not the issue raised in that post.

As I said before, there is a difference between being able to make changes and having to make changes, and it is the second one that is the issue here. Please consider this before confusing the two completely different concepts.

but i wasn't responding to the original poster, i was responding to what you wrote.



but you *have to* configure windows, too, so your point is invalid. or are you saying you just install apache or windows itself and it runs exactly as you want with no configuration?

I never said you didn't have to configure Windows. All I did was point out that a response to a previous post was invalid.

You didn't even respond coherently to what I wrote. Stating that

doesn't change the fact that neither of the things you were comparing are the same as having to make loads of changes to get it to work at all, which was the actual issue under consideration.

And my point certainly is valid. There definietly is a difference between being able to and having to do something.

so all you're really saying is that windows is for people who are lazy. i agree.

I don't know where you got that from, but I didn't say anything of the sort.

I have often wondered this, what if there was no windoze at all? I know they would try to write more viruses for Linux and all but Linux is pretty secure. What would happen if there was no windoze? What would the net be like security wise? I tested mine last night and all ports are stealth. I am behind a Linksys router/firewall and I also have iptables set up on my Linux box. Is it possible for Linux to be attacked the way windoze is?

I have said this before, I have no use for windoze. I think if people would learn how to run their systems better that life would be easier for everybody. Same for driving a car. There are some that should never be behind the wheel.

My opinion likely sucks.

sure you did. you're complaining about having to configure linux, then you said you never claimed one *didn't* have to configure windows. therefore, you are complaining about a matter of *degree* -- you're complaining because one perhaps has to configure linux *more.* one conclusion from that is that the person is lazy and doesn't want to spend the effort to configure something.

another conclusion is that the person is wrong from the outset. because once you've configured something in linux and backed up the config file, you don't have to configure it a second time if you reinstall. you just replace the config file and you're done. with windows, you'd have to go through the whole "setup" and point and click configuration again. so with windows one often has to configure unnecessarily a lot more.

and don't say it's about not being able to use something without configuring it, because we've already established that one has to configure apps in windows before one can even use them, too, e.g., apache.

I didn't, it was Maritime who was complaining about having to configure Linux.

Quite true, I didn't say that.

I never said anything about how much configuration was necessary in either case.


Not necessarily. Not wasting time doing unnecessary work does not make someone "lazy".

I'm not sure I'm with you there. Changes made under any system must be storred somewhere. Config files can just as well be backed up in Windows as Linux!