From: Edward Murrell [mailto:edward(a)murrell.co.nz]

I was discussing the use of Linux at uni today. One of the main points I was asked to defend was essentially; "Why does Linux sucks so much?"

This persons experience with Linux had pretty much centred round the R block, and G basement computers at uni - and I can't say I disagree with her. As far as I can make out, those computers are running some ancient version of Slackware (I think?) with GNOME 1.4, and KDE2. Most of the other WMs seem to be broken. Fonts are abysmal, and the default browser is Netscape 4. The CDRom/fstab is only correctly setup on some of the machines.

I've talked about this problem with others a number of times. It's been ages since I was at uni now but when I was there all of the machines were well behind in their operating systems. Not just Linux machines but the Macs and Windows boxes too (well the few windows boxes I saw anyway). Whenever someone put down another OS based purely on using uni computers I just used to say to them "If you had an <insert their favourite OS here> machine set up the way they are at uni would you like to use that?". Nobody ever said yes. Matt Browne