You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, apart from this.
I was reading the excellent Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing yesterday and came across a link to someone wittering on about how great a file server a new Linux distribution called Mint is. It’s based on Ubuntu, don’t you know. And I know the name Ubuntu because Rupert Goodwins has mentioned it. So, what the hell, I now officially hate Windows so let’s have a Linux machine in the house too.
It’s nearly 30 hours later and, right now, Vito – the machine destined to become a Linux file server – is quietly reformatting itself as a Windows XP machine.
Why? Not because Linux/Mint/Ubuntu is uglier than Windows, although it is; not because it lacks usability, because it doesn’t. I could quite happily work on such a machine and do everything I do now on Windows or Mac OSX.
No, Linux is being formatted off Vito because I couldn’t make it work as the one thing I wanted it to – a file server. That means, connect to it from another machine on the home network and see the files on it, copy them, use them, read them, store them.
There is an explanation, from people who wear excruciatingly stupid t-shirts and scorn ‘end users’ as the scum of the Earth that they are; it has something to do with Windows being insecure and file sharing being inherently insecure and who’d want to share files between Windows and Linux (I’m trying to share them with a Mac, but that’s apparently not the point). Anyway, my attention sort of drifted off a while.
Oh, I did a lot of searching on the web and found out about Samba, which is what you need to make Windows and Linux machines play nicely when it comes to file sharing. I found Swat, too. And NFS and SMB and lots of other acronyms. I found lots and lots of people who really, really, really hate Microsoft and truly despise anyone who dares to use Windows (people who, coincidentally, smell funny, wear strange t-shirts, have spots, eat pizza and can’t get a girl/boyfriend. Not that I’m stereotyping or anything, that’s what they’re doing).
Anyway. it all got too ridiculous when the widget that would, promise honest IRQ, solve my problems – didn’t. Instead it undid all the good things I had managed to do so far. And that included three different installations – how nuts is it that you get a choice of interfaces for Linux, none of which look like the screen prints you find on the web (OK freetards, you don’t need to explain that one to me, I understand already). Linux doesn’t look enough like Windows to be obvious, you can’t see your hard discs as C: and E:, you have to mount them (fnar, fnar) but, when you work out how to do that it tells you that you don’t have permission. What?. As one Windows hater I came across put it, Linux is for people who want to spend more time with their computers.
Well, Windows is the same too, and so is the Mac OS now and then as well. But Windows and Macs are enough like each other that it’s not too long before it’s obvious what the answer is to whatever stupid mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Linux isn’t, it reminds me of when I tried to learn Russian at school – it looks vaguely similar but there are too many differences to make it intuitive to someone who has already learned French and Spanish.
And ultimately not worth 30 hours of my life, or at least certainly no more. So Windows XP it is for now.
Not that I’m delighted with it, but all I want to do with the box is have it serve up files to my laptop, store films and music, that sort of thing. Linux, to those who’ve deprived themselves sufficiently of a private life to grep it, may be a better tool for this, but I have a real life to get on with.
So now I’m back to the stupidities of Windows XP. Which, if you install it from a DVD with various versions of Windows XP on it, forgets where it’s stored all its installation files and you have to keep telling it to go look in d:englishwindowsxpspa1. But it’s a comfortable stupidity, a stupidity I’m expecting and understand and which I can work with.
Obviously, if you’re a Freetard, as the nice new name for Linuxen has it, I’m stupid and retarded and whatever. Right. But so what? I have my life back and I don’t care.

** Update **
In the 25 minutes I spent writing this, Windows XP installed and I started on the never-ending Update cycle. And I set up networking on the new Windowed Vito, told the hard discs to consider themselves shareable and connected to them from my Mac. 30 minutes as opposed to 30 hours; I’m not a major geek, but really – the Freetards are STILL making all this too hard and too unfriendly. If you have just one computer, Linux will do it and Linux Mint/Ubuntu seems well up to the task. If you need your machines to play nicely between Linux and other operating systems – well, I hope you have better luck than I did. It seems the situation reflects the attitude of the Linux camp to Windows in real life – they just hate Windows and don’t want anything to do with it.