The Last Straw at Robert Pogson

All of us resist change one way or another. We achieved our current status with some effort and do not want to change because it would require more effort. IT is like that. A complicated system evolves with intricate interlocking parts. If anything is changed it can mess up the whole thing unless change is carefully managed. Just as there can be “the straw that broke the camel’s back” there can be the last straw that pushes us to finally make the change.

When I adopted GNU/Linux the impetus to change was the persistent failure of that other OS to run through a single 45 minute period of class time without fail. Perhaps the latest vulnerability in that other OS will be the impetus for many more to migrate. This one is not a bug but a feature of that other OS to permit working with foreign character-sets. That other OS welcomes executable files to manipulate foreign characters and in the process allows the system to be owned by aliens. Malware is out in the wild exploiting this feature of that other OS.

This is another example where M$ uses code rather than constants to configure a system making ordinary usage fraught with danger. We’ve had enough of that. Stop using that other OS. Switch to GNU/Linux.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.

2 Responses to “The Last Straw”

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1 oe Jul 8th, 2010 at 8:12 pm

Wouldn’t say that the negatives of that other OS drove me away; rather it pout me into a determined search. I already had used GNU/Linux in 1994-5 for numerical programming work (poor man’s workstation) and again in 2000-1 for intranet serving (files/web/print) after STRUGGLING with IIS and Win2000, so I already had respect for its power, stability, and ease of use. But the big questions were: would I be confined to a side branch of IT by adopting it with second rate apps selection, and worse was the conundrum of “Which distro to use (too much choice!)?”. Anyhow the failings of that other OS got me looking through GNU/Linux, BSD, OpenSolaries, etc. with gusto. What sealed the 100% changeover: one the quality of the apps (we’re talking under the hood here, not on the polish and arty look and feel, which Mac beware is really getting good…., and the killer app…which to me was, most developed in the debian distro family, integrated package management. That sealed the 100% switchover.
2 Robert Pogson Jul 9th, 2010 at 4:04 am

Amen. I love APT. It makes managing the software on one or thousands of PCs almost trivial. I like to use it in combination with SSH for remote administration, and with apt-cacher-ng to keep a local repository of used packages for speed and with the debian installer to do a basic installation in a few minutes, to configure from package lists, saving backups of software. Unlike that other OS that only provides such tools for M$’s stuff, APT can update all installed packages from several repositories at once. It is way cool. It rarely requires a re-boot.