I agree entirely, there's even one point where I complain near constantly about windows where the article's author seems to consider a "feature"

No delayed loading of system services.

You know how you log into a GNU/Linux desktop of your choice and can immediately start using programs. You know how you log into windows (which takes the same amount of time to log into) and you click Firefox, Skype, and Thunderbird and have to wait a solid minute to minute and a half before any of them open?

How is this a shortcoming of Linux? This is clearly a flamebait article with no real substance.

If I'm handcuffed and driven to a police station against my will, you can just consider me arrested.

Here's a good definition of "arrest" http://dpi.wi.gov/tepdl/bgterms.html

What about the websites you look at for free which are ad supported? Wouldn't that same philosophy apply? Those sites are providing you with content in exchange for looking at their ads which pays their bandwidth, licensing, etc.

I wonder what the liability of the school would be if your cellphone came up missing...

I remember a friend showing up at my house with a box of 1.44" floppies in a shoebox telling me "You have to install this." It was Slackware for an old IBM 380XD which I'd had for about 6 months. After a weekend of Tequizas and using lycos to try to find answers to problems, we finally got it installed and running for the next 3 or 4 years before I updated to a newer version.

The earth has been everything from a frozen wasteland to a molten ball of superheated rock. If it wasn't for climate change, we wouldn't be on a hospitable planet, but in an unchanging sea of molten lava.

Not all salespeople lie. I worked for Radio Shack in San Antonio for a few years in my younger days. We were told to offer service plans to customers. If they didn't buy them, we just smiled and continued to ring their purchases up. The prices were a bit higher, so the margins had to be better, but we were honest and tried to be helpful to our customers and sell them what they needed as opposed to what would give us the best markup and commission.

The manager's theory was, if we make $20 (profit) off of a customer today and he never comes back, it misses out on the $100 we'll make on him in the next year by being sensitive to his needs.

Not all stores are out to screw the customer. But if you shop in a place with razor thin margins, be prepared to get cut in a few places. If you're interested in only getting the loss leader as cheaply as possible as opposed to what you really need though, caveat emptor.

I don't think it's laziness. This guy admittedly has been with windows since version 2.0. He has windows interface and doing things the windows way burned so deep into his skull that it would take a flamethrower and some napalm to remove it.

Imagine coming from windows and being used to windows updating just updating windows. Suddenly you click on something that updates every single piece of software on your entire computer. Imagine how scary that would seem to a windows user. I'd imagine it's much more complex for him, even using the gui, to update things that he doesn't understand like bind, tzconfig, or even allowing ubuntu to update his openoffice.

If windows update told me it had to update my firefox, I'd be more than a little leary. Coming from the windows world into linux and moving over to a completely different philosophy behind the word "update" would be hard enough.

Using apt (command line anything) is in an entirely different ballpark. Most windows users probably don't even know how to get to a command line, much less use it for anything useful. Trying to tell them to go to a command line interface to update their computer is even more alien than the computer updating all software at once.

It took microsoft years to teach people their interface and philosophy. Giving someone a cd and allowing them two weeks (referring to article) to learn an OS on their own is a ridiculous task. Imagine taking a clinical engineer from a hospital after 20 years of working on that equipment and putting him into a mechanical engineer in the aerospace field. Sure it's the same general job title "engineer" but they are vastly different jobs. Even though Linux and Windows are both OSs, they are vastly different in makeup, interface, philosophy, and interaction. Two weeks is hardly a primer.

Cellular phones don't last forever. Most prisons don't allow prisoners to have electrical appliances in their cells. Remove all electrical outlets inside the cells and let the cell phones die after a few hours of use.

It won't stop new ones from coming in, but it would damn sure have to increase the flow enough to cause a few more ripples.

Well, in WoW, you need a lot of gold to buy things like very fast mounts, land and air mounts. It takes months of farming and doing quests, or you can have a bot play for you 8 hours a day while you sleep.

For the people who can only play 2 or 3 hours a day at most, having your computer play for an additional 8 hours would be a huge help. Instead of farming, I spent most of my time in auction halls trying to buy low and sell high, but that really cut into the couple hours of play time I could put in every day.

WoW isn't a friendly game to the casual player. You're either addicted and play 10 hours a day, or you don't get far very quickly.

I'll just use fishing as an example.
30 second average to catch a fish
0-50 points in fishing, you get one per fish caught.
50-125 you get one per three fish caught
125 -250 you get one per five fish caught
250 - 375 you get one per ten fish caught

50 x 30 seconds = 25 minutes
75 x 30 sec x 3 avg = 112.5
75 x 30 sec x 5 avg = 187.5
125 x 30 sec x 10 avg = 625
950 minutes / 60 = 15.8 hours of fishing to level it.

So, on top of the regular playing that you do, you'd need to fish for 16 solid hours (not counting breaks or sleeping) in order to get it to max level... or what used to be when I was playing.

So, you can spend 2 nights of letting a bot fish while you sleep, or take 8 solid days of your play time leveling (grinding) something so you can get a higher level at it.

I'm sure my math is off, but you get the point.

Ok, depending on your definition of "safe" and "stable" vary on experience. I install and uninstall a bit of software on my windows laptop and my linux pc. Because of this, windows starts to crash after a while, it's processes begin to hang on shutdown, things randomly disappear and magically reappear on my task bar. I've grown used to these things. In Ubuntu, adding and removing programs on a regular basis don't seem to affect anything.

I've also grown used to having to run virus protection, spybot s&d, spyware blaster, and a handful of other utilities to keep windows safe. These make it feel secure while I'm able to do this on my own, the average person has quite a few issues that in my opinion as a field techie, leaves them open for quite a few problems.

I remove viruses for people, I remove spyware for people, I help people learn how to take care of their windows machines themselves. I constantly see people using IE that went to the wrong website, or opened up the link that came in their outlook express promising Bill Gates would give them a new computer if they replied, or the free penguin screenserver makes these funny popups come up now...

This makes me prejudiced because the only call I get concerning linux is usually the RHEL 3 server or FreeBSD 4.10 box that's been running a mail server in the back room of a business where the hardware failed after %n years and it needs to be installed on a new machine.

I love linux, I'm an advocate of free (speech and beer) software. I don't think linux is ready for mainstream, not even ubuntu, but I do see it gaining momentum. Blaming linux for not being easy to use or not being secure, or not being stable is the wrong path. If you want to talk about grandma building programs from tar.gz packages, start trying to tell grandma to compile her own C++ programs on windows and realize that both are an exercise in futility.

Linux may not be the right path for everyone, but the real reasons that it's not the right path has nothing to do with any of the reasons listed in the initial post. If security, stability, and ease of use are major concerns about linux, then he should probably research into linux a bit more. If he's concerned that the software he knows already won't work in linux and that he won't be able to understand the inner workings as easily as windows which he's learned over the last 10 years, these are indeed valid concerns.

Try taking your (insert OS here) machine down to the local Geek Squad desk and watching the kid behind the counter squirm as you explain anything that's not contained in his flip book of tech support answers behind the counter.

Glider was a bot that would farm for you. It would move to areas, kill things, collect things off the body for you, even fish.

It's not just a spam bot, it's a full script that would play the game for you. Whether it's farming something, fishing to get your levels up, or mining, it was able to do it without your interaction.

I think that's the issue. XP isn't safe or stable... it's also not fairly easy to use, however it's probably the same interface you've used since you were a kid. That makes it familiar, not easy.

Ubuntu may be safer, it may be easier to install, it may be more stable, and it may be very easy to install with no technical prowess needed at all.

The fear of change and the fear of "what if" is what keeps someone like you from switching to Ubuntu. I'm not saying you should try something, I'm not saying that you'd even like it. The issue is that people make a lot of assumptions, just like you do, and go off of those assumptions. Whether they're true or not, it's what happens and they end up staying with what's familiar.

It doesn't even sound like they're describing that. It seems more like a multi-user logmein setup.