As a now 'senior' member of the channel, I get subjected to both the best and the worst examples of the installation, maintenance and use of the Linux operating system. I thought you'd enjoy a summary of the things that really bug me about Linux and the associated community.
No doubt I'm going to get a lot of flames for this one but, I'm sorry to say, Redhat has gone way too far in making Linux easy to use. Day-in day-out I'm subjected to a barrage of questions from Linux admin wannabes who are little better than Windows point-and-drool scriptkiddies. 99% of the questions I'm asked have well-documented answers; the asker has simply not bothered to take 5 minutes to actually look for a solution themselves.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm all for Linux being made easy to install and use. That's great and I think we all appreciate the value of that. What scares me is that these people honestly believe that they have a secure and stable system. In reality, they are in the same fairy tale as many Windows NT Administrators. I'll let neither colour anywhere near the root password.
For exactly the same reasons as above.
These people, in my opinion, rate as some of the lowest forms of life of the planet. I'm sorry guys but Microsoft has done a lot more for the computing industry than virtually any other company in existence today. Only the likes of IBM, ICL and Oracle can claim to have made equally important contributions. Yelling "Microsoft sucks" at me time and time again is not going to rate you highly in my "Top 10 People I Like To Listen To" charts. I'm very willing and able to make fun of Microsoft when what they say is not just wrong but actually misleading but, frankly, you people have all but lost the plot.
The great thing about Linux is that there are a lot of genuinely talented programmers who are prepared to give away their time and effort producing code which far surpasses that which is commercially available in terms of both functionality and stability. Unfortunately, for every truly great programming project there are half a dozen really bad ones.
As mentioned above, your average Script Kiddie is someone who has, unfortunately, found a copy of Redhat Linux on the front of their favourite magazine and has actually managed to install it. Hooray! Congratulations! Well done! And so on. Now comes the tricky bit, actually getting all their hardware to work under Linux. So, they spend approximately 30 seconds looking for help (bear in mind they haven't found 'man' yet) then reboot back to Windows. Why? So they can get back on the Internet, load mIRC, join #linux and start asking things like (and this is genuine): "Hello, I just installed Linux (no more Windoze for me!!!!) I try to find DOS prompt but all I get is 'bash-2.3 #' HELP!"
Now, this is actually not such a bad question. It's true that a fair percentage of people using computers today will not have been exposed to the Command Line Interface, they just know how to point-and-drool. They have not needed to know how to get a recursive listing of all the directories on their C: drive. Suddenly, though, they have broken free of Microsoft, they feel liberated, THEY ARE USING REDHAT LINUX!!!! Shame that they can't actually use it though. "setup.exe" doesn't really exist in the world of Linux and the idea of having to compile a program before using it is an alien concept. So they (eventually) find our good old friend, RPM - the Redhat Package Manager. For those who don't know what this is, RPM is a way of easily installing programs and utilities for Linux. Your program comes neatly bundled up in a ".rpm" file and one command will neatly install it for you, no questions asked. At least, that's the theory. In reality, you get this: <Goosey> Hello, where to get nVidia drivers for Linux (in RPM) where to get SBLive driver for Linux (in RPM) where to get Epson Stylus Driver for Linux (in RPM). And, no, I didn't make that up. Do us all a favour and stick to Windows guys, please?
For all intents and purposes, this is identical to Part One. The only difference is that the sysadmin wannabe or (and full credit to a certain Mr. Peter J. Mills here) as he/she should be known, the Root Vegetable, is about 13 years old. In which case the questions would look like: <G00s3y> H3y d3wdz, 1 n3e|> 2 g3t sum driv3rz 4 L|nuX, C4n ne1 help? plz! msg me! (linex 6.1)
Nuff said.