Jeremy Buchmann said:
I don't understand this weird uber-advocacy stance that says we have to convert every single Windows user to Linux and make Linux the one and only operating system on earth. It's completely irrational and goes against the very idea of having a choice of computer operating systems.
While I agree with you that blind advocacy is a stupid thing, I must say that more people using Linux and seeing it as a viable alternative to Windows could well make a difference for many of us: my work is maintaining a network of about 100 client PC, and as of today linux could be used to do a good 95% of all we need to do with these computer. But we have to use Windows, mainly for Office and for easy interoperability with "external" software and software houses (accounting, payrolls, etc are windows only, or at best unix-but-not-linux).
I know how you feel. I used to be a tech support peon (sp?) at a company where we had about 350 PCs, 300 of which had no relation whatsoever to the other 50 and could (read: should) have been running Linux. With Windows NT 4.0 (and only 32MB of RAM), they were horridly slow and unstable. They only had to run a few applications, all of which could have been run on Linux. We had to reboot those machines *nightly* to keep them stable during the day. Every couple months we had to make some stupid configuration change to the system which either required re-imaging the whole drive or 4 reboots per machine...an eternity on NT+Netware client. Had we been running Linux, we could have made all these changes via shell scripts. I eventually was able to convince 3 uppers (my boss, his boss, and his boss's boss) that running Linux/UNIX would be better for these machines, but the Microsoft Mentality was so pervasive, no one really considered it as a viable option. However, this still has nothing to to with dragging Joe User from Windows 98 to Linux on his home system. There is nothing wrong with having sshd sitting in /usr/sbin and not doing anything. One of the things I actually liked about RH's old install was you could choose what services you wanted running on the machine during the installation...of course, it would start all of them anyway, but the idea was nice :)