[Lvlug] HERESY

[C. Hever]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:42 AM, Randy Kramer<rhkramer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 26 June 2009 07:10:24 am C. Hever wrote:
>> So my old computer broke (or, ostensibly, the power supply did) and I
>> am now using a PIII with Windows XP and about 1G of real memory,
>> because somebody owes me favors and I besides he needs me to have a
>> computer to do stuff for him.
>>
>> ANYWAY, this is the first time I've had a Windows installation that I
>> was able to modify extensively. I installed firefox, ghostscript &
>> ghostview, cygwin (for the purpose of using vim, octave, and tetex),
>> maxima, vlc, xchat, and just one commercial app: winrar.
>>
>> I have to say I really like this combination. I noticed a lot of
>> things are much less of a pain in the ass on Windows if you have full
>> leeway over the system, but you can still enjoy nearly all the
>> advantages of Linux or a similar Unix OS. In fact, I really wonder
>> whether I will continue to use this configuration in the future.
>>
>> So am I hell-bound already?
>
> Hmm, I didn't think that was predicated on your choice of OS. ;-)

Revise Pascal's Wager enough and you'll find the decision matrix to be
mind-bogglingly huge.

> Many things in Windows are (or seem) easier to do and learn--in some
> cases they become more difficult / tedious when you are past the
> learning stage--you know, doing things by clicking a mouse all over the
> screen gets old--a nice script (and I used the command line and .bat
> files quite a bit when I lived in Dos/Windows land).

Yeah to be honest I still understand Linux better than Windows.

> My advocacy of Linux is based in a few things:
>   * I resent Microsoft / Bill Gates, and some of the (business)
> practices that got Windows to the pre-eminent position they are in (and
> keep them there)
>   * I want to see viable competition for Microsoft, to, among other
> things, attempt to mitigate or minimize those practices
>    * I like the idea of the free software movement, and most of the
> things associated with it (can't think of any I don't like at the
> moment, therefore staying sort of general)
>   * The above includes not having obvious ideas locked up in patents
> (or copyrights), or precluding people from learning from other people's
> source code

Me too, that's why every script or program I've ever written is
implicitly in the public domain. (I basically stopped writing software
though.)

For me the operating system is not anywhere near as important as the
applications ...... I need to use this scanner which doesn't work with
SANE and right now WinDOS XP is just being a really convenient vehicle
for those (virtually all software libre) applications.

btw, I think "software libre" is a better term than "open source",
because that sounds like "open sores", and better than "free software"
which is ambiguous, and also because it's associated with Latin
America which automatically makes it cool.

-- 
"Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores,
and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much.
But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it
is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For
nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man
retire than into his own soul." -- Marcus Aurelius