UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on…

Mac Airlines
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don’t need to know, don’t want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colourful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Windows XP Air
You turn up at the airport,which is under contract to only allow XP Air planes. All the aircraft are identical, brightly coloured and three times as big as they need to be. The signs are huge and all point the same way. Whichever way you go, someone pops up dressed in a cloak and pointed hat insisting you follow him. Your luggage and clothes are taken off you and replaced with an XP Air suit and suitcase identical to everyone around you as this is included in the exorbitant ticket cost. The aircraft will not take off until you have signed a contract. The inflight entertainment promised turns out to be the same Mickey Mouse cartoon repeated over and over again. You have to phone your travel agent before you can have a meal or drink. You are searched regularly throughout the flight. If you go to the toilet twice or more you get charged for a new ticket. No matter what destination you booked you will always end up crash landing at Whistler in Canada.

Windows Vista Airlines
You enter a good looking terminal with the largest planes you have ever seen. Every 10 feet a security officer appears and asks you if you are “sure” you want to continue walking to your plane and if you would like to cancel. Not sure what cancel would do, you continue walking and ask the agent at the desk why the planes are so big. After the security officer making sure you want to ask the question and you want to hear the answer, the agent replies that they are bigger because it makes customers feel better, but the planes are designed to fly twice as slow. Adding the size helped achieve the slow fly goal.

Once on the plane, every passenger has to be asked individually by the flight attendants if they are sure they want to take this flight. Then it is company policy that the captain asks the passengers collectively the same thing. After answering yes to so many questions, you are punched in the face by some stranger who when he asked “Are you sure you want me to punch you in the face? Cancel or Allow?” you instinctively say “Allow”.

After takeoff, the pilots realize that the landing gear driver wasn’t updated to work with the new plane. Therefore it is always stuck in the down position. This forces the plane to fly even slower, but the pilots are used to it and continue to fly the planes, hoping that soon the landing gear manufacturer will give out a landing gear driver update.

You arrive at your destination wishing you had used your reward miles with XP airlines rather than trying out this new carrier. A close friend, after hearing your story, mentions that Linux Air is a much better alternative and helps you buy your return ticket home.

Linux Air
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself.

When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

Cool,man.

I've seen an older version of this. But this is great with the multiple Windows airlines.

I have not posted here in a while and seen this on another forum, I thought that I would share it here :P

awesome dude.

I know I'm over a year late on the reply, but I wanted to add something for all those people searching and finding this in Google.


I liked this post. It's cute. It's even accurate up to a point, but it hides a little though, that really should be exposed if we're going to stay honest with ourselves and others...




In linux air, you arrive at the airport. You select an already-built airframe, already-built engines and landing gear, and already-provided pilot and flight crew (you can build your own of all of these, but if you're new, you'll probably want the prepackaged versions at least for now so that you know it's all going to work with each other. You still have to select which make and model of e.g. engines you want, but at least they're already built).

You select your seat model, its proximity to the pilot (how in-depth you want to be -- closer to the pilot, more devving and modding you do), and even what tools you want to use to build it. *BUT!* since you don't know how to build the seat, you don't know what tools you need. Fortunately, there's a seat-HOWTO.html, yes, but you need to already be on the plane before you can read it unless you happen to have another plane nearby with a copy of the HOWTO in it or working comms so that someone can read it to you over the radio. Don't forget, you also need to select and build your plane's comms system so that you can communicate with the outside world (internet), especially if you're wireless and using a lesser-supported card like I was a few years back.

Once you figure out which tools you need in order to build your seat, then you have to do it in the right order, and the seat-HOWTO, which was written by someone who built their seat in one airplane with certain tools, doesn't realize that your airplane isn't quite like his, and your tools aren't quite like his, so the steps need to be altered. However, since he doesn't know what your tools are like (or even if he did, he wouldn't have time to learn them), he expects you to be able to adjust the seat-HOWTO to fit YOUR specifications. That's fine: if we're using linux, we're probably smart enough to do that.

Now that you've adjusted the seat-HOWTO to your specs and tools so that you could build your seat, you now must decide on your in-flight meal. You can choose prepackaged food or you can have access to the aircraft galley where you can cook your own. If you cook your own, you'll be responsible for obtaining all the ingredients, either by using what's onboard or having someone ferry them in before the flight of course, but also for if it doesn't turn out right. You can get help from others to make sure it turns out right, but only if you've already gotten your aircraft comms working. And of course, if you foul up bad enough and catch the plane on fire, well, time to start over from scratch -- if you survive.

After your meal is ready, you select your in-flight entertainment. BUT! again, you have to decide how you want to view it. You can use prepackaged television screens and sound systems, or you can build your own, but either way, you have to be sure they're compatible with your particular variant of the airplane and tools -- just like the seat!








I could go on.

I love Linux, don't get me wrong. I work for a school district supporting some 15,000 employee laptops and desktops and probably 5 times as many student workstations running Windows 2000 and XP, and several hundred or possibly thousand by now Macintosh workstations all day every day, and I'd love nothing more than to convert the entire district to Linux if I had the ability and power, but I don't. However, when I advocate linux, I don't make it seem like a bunch of roses. The fact is, "you had to do what with the seat" waters down the problem quite a bit. When you select just the prepackaged stuff, you're limited to what someone else provides and aside from major distributions, major apps like Mozilla and the like, and other MAJOR parts of the OS like the kernel itself, you're at the whim of some guy or some small group of people who are writing the app as a hobby, not getting any money (or motivation) to write it, and so it stagnates. Or, the devs are working hard on it... too hard, in fact, because it's stressing them out. Then, one guy asks the wrong question the wrong way, and the overworked hobbyist developer snaps, and stops devving altogether.

Try Debian sometime. Stable as hell, but old as hell too. I'm slowly converting my Debian system to Ubuntu because of all the times I've had to go to Ubuntu's package repositories just to get a fairly usable, up to date version of package xyz. Sure, Debian's great if you want a webserver you never have to maintain, but I also want to do other things on my box as well. VLC and Xine STILL don't work right on my particular variant, and I've yet to find out why.

When you build your own, you're limited by what you have already, and what's compatible. You have to know how to find your own answers, because OH MY GOD FORBID you ask a question in a dev forum that's been asked once or maybe twice before. Read the FAQ! RTFM! Okay, great, fine. Where's the FAQ? Why am I having such a hard time finding your documentation on your website? Oh, your website layout sucks, and it's in a hard-to-see location. Okay, I get it now. Because every other site has clear, easy to read links, but yours has to hide them behind menus and javascripts and one link takes you to a page with more links to three or four other things as well.

I'm sorry, I didn't have three hours to read every single word on your website to make sure I didn't miss the link to "FAQ" which was buried behind two other pages. Forgive me for asking a question to save time.

Seriously. Windows sucks. I hate it. That's why I use Linux. At the same time though, Linux requires work on the user's part. Period. You can't say "you had to do what with the seat" and sum it up that way. It's inaccurate. It's more like, "you had to install your own OS, select which programs you wanted, compile your own hardware drivers from source code on the website after figuring out how to get your internet hooked up? Gee, all I had to do was unbox it, plug it in, and turn it on..." Sure, Windows gives the user stuff they don't need or want, but at least the damned thing works out of the box. I hate Windows, but I'll give it credit there.

I needed a workstation to host a card provided to me by a client. For technical reasons, I was not going to host that card in my main workstation.

I purchased a used Dell computer with a completely wiped hard drive.

I plugged that computer into the wall and into the LAN. Took a Mandriva One CD, stuck it in the drive.

It booted.

I played briefly with the resulting system, then told it to install itself on the hard drive. Then I went away, while it started installation and started downloading things from the internet.

Came back a bit later, rebooted the machine into the new hard drive installation. It came up and worked immediately and without issue.

I then used the Mandriva tools to install the development packages I needed. I installed the card, the drivers for the card, and compiled the user interface stuff.

And I was done. Up and running, and now I am using it for development of things that are associated with that card. I am running it mostly headless, connecting via SSH from my main workstation.

I don't see how it could be any less painful, unless of course I had purchased a used Dell with Linux already installed on it.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, Linux is great. My first foray into it was with Red Hat 6.22. I thought it was outdated and ugly, but it opened my eyes to something other than Windows. About a year later I tried again, but this time it was with Mandrake 8.1 on a Pentium III laptop I got for free from a class my job paid for. Everything but the wifi, video, and sound worked right. Even video and sound worked, but not the way they should have. As a linux newbie, I had no clue where to get help or info or drivers. It took me a while, and it was a PITA, but I enjoyed the learning curve. I finally found a challenge that was well suited to my skillset and would provide entertainment for my brain. Problem is, most windows users will be spoiled to setup.exe doing it all for them and linux is only that easy (in my exp.) If you stick to the pkgs that are in the distro's repository.

Long -> short (since I'm posting from my G1 cellphone), I later tried 'drake 9.1, Debian, red hat, ubuntu, and decided on Debian for my personal day to day use.

---

What I was getting at but ran out of time for (on the phone) was that I'm in no way saying Linux is hard, or difficult, or whatever; but rather that it's not so simple as the story in post 1 made it out to be. I gathered the story to be saying that windows users balk at having to do one little thing to get linux to work right, but in my experience it's usually one little thing to get one little part of it to work right, then another little thing to get another little part of it to work right, over and over until it all works right. That's more what I expect Windows users to balk at. If it was just one little thing, they'd quickly get over it just to get away from viruses and exploits and there'd be a million and one seat-HOWTO_for_dummies.html files floating around the web. Then again, that's just been my personal experience. My problems with Mandrake came when I started wanting to add programs that Mandrake didn't have in their repo. At the same time, I was still quite young in Linux and didn't have the knowledge I have today. I now know that to compile an app from source, I'll not only need certain development tools like make or cmake, gcc and gpp, but I'll also need certain libraries, etc. Even then, I still run into many problems whenever I want to get a program. Take FlightGear for example. It's my most recent foray into source code land. Debian offered version 0.9-something on their repo, but the up to date version is 1.9. Of course, I want the newer one with all the newest features. What I didn't expect, was that it requires also newer versions of dev tools and libs like Boost, OpenSceneGraph, and SimGear than what Debian had as well. So now I have to go and compile ALL of these from source, and each of them require newer versions of still other libs than what Debian has. That's been my experience.

Your experience with Mandrake is fairly typical, actually, because most people are satisfied to have whatever's in the repo. Just like the iPhone and the Apple Apps Store, the G1 and the Market, most people stick with what's offered to them. I realize you know more than that, but most people don't. And they're happy. For new users of Linux, I've recommended Mandrake/Mandriva and Ubuntu the most, second to a LiveCD like Knoppix because they DO have fairly up to date software. I think Debian takes it a little too far to the extreme of stability -- sometimes I still feel that way even with their unstable Sid branch. I've contemplated many a time of just going to Ubuntu so as to keep the Debian package management and overall system operation and getting the benefit of updated packages that Ubuntu offers, but I worry that I'm begging for a can of worms there (as though recently converting from a multiple partition system to a single partition wasn't, eh?)...


Anywhoo... I've been wrong before.

One airline that's too big to fail is all we need anyways. It's the !@#$ free-market that's the problem!