“Well, the problem with Linux is, it’s just an older form of
UNIX,” an ex-coworker once explained, “and even UNIX can’t handle
graphics, so you’ll never see a Linux web server, because the web
is all graphics and UNIX servers just crash.“
“It was an entertaining bit of improvisational FUD, designed to
explain to me why she would never, ever allow anything but
Microsoft to handle our servers if she had any say in the matter,
and I managed to keep from braying like a donkey when I heard it.
We sat down to the Netcraft site, paid a visit to a few of the web
servers it reported as running Linux, and that was that. Another
small skirmish on the road to world domination had been won.”
“My coworker could hardly be blamed. She’d never really known
much but Windows, and she subsisted on a steady diet of information
from magazines more cynical about the chances of anything ever
ending the Microsoft hegemony than the average ex-hippie is of
Maoists hoisting the red flag over Wall Street. She just didn’t
know any better, she’d never met anyone who actually used Linux (or
UNIX), and she’d pasted together the bits and pieces she’d read
about Linux’s “lack of a GUI” into a collage of misinformation that
no one was around to correct.”