“I installed Linux–and lived!”
“It’s become a standard saga of pain and woe in the geek press.
Time was that anyone who wanted to use the free software originally
developed by Linus Torvalds and now running millions of computers
worldwide had to pay a high price in frustration and wasted
time.”
“I decided to see what would happen if a mere mortal–me–tried
to take Linux home. It wasn’t ideological; I’ve got no deep-seated
antipathy toward Microsoft. I just wanted to get the feel of the
increasingly popular operating system, and to be able to say that I
had joined the intrepid band of the walking wounded, those who
suffered in the name of Linus Torvalds, Penguins and all that
uber-geeks hold sacred.”
“I was dumbfounded to discover that installing Linux was
easy. Why? Well, the world has changed. No more do you have to
understand everything about Linux before you install it,
downloading the many chunks of code necessary to run a complete
system and getting them all to work together. That was BSW–before
shrink-wrap. With companies such as Red Hat and Corel putting all
the software you need in a box, the pain is (nearly) gone.”