So Scoble linked to some guy’s website which contains a hilarious (oh,
my aching sides) flash animation entitled How to Turn Your Windows
Desktop into Linux. Besides the obvious point of why anyone would use
flash to put up a page that’s mostly text with a couple of pictures,
bandwidth anyone?; this irritated the hell out of me because it
illustrates a trait all too common amongst computer users of all
stripes. Because they don’t understand another platform that platform
is Bad.

I feel I’m in a prety good position to hold forth on this subject as a
regular user of Windows, Linux, OS/X and Solaris. So I’m going to
go through this idiot list and tell you what I think about it.

1) Remove all file extensions

I already want to kill this guy because of the fucking audio on
this flash animation. Websites with sound are right up
there with the <BLINK> tag as things which should be capital
crimes. Anyway I digress. The main point here is that many versions of
windows are so retarded that they can’t work out what a file contains
if that information isn’t encoded into the filename. At his point
you have a situation where you have forced your users to remeber a
useles set of extensions like .doc,.txt,.htm, which noone in there
right mind would expect normal people to do. To get around this the
default behaviour of explorer is to drop the file extensions. So
you now have the situation where users can be presented with either “My
Letter” or “My Letter.doc” in different situations. This can lead to
understandable confusion. Needless to say, sensible operating systems
don’t behave this way.

2) Export the Registry into 56,000 text files

Whether to centralise all your configs or to have a file per
apllication approach is a question with merits to both
approaches. Centralising the linux configs is something that comes up
on development mailing lists from time to time , but so far no-one has
come up with a design that everyone likes. However, if you
are going to go with the centralised approach don’t use a honking great
binary file. Why?, you ask. Well if you’ve got to repair a hosed system
would you prefer the vital system configurations to be installed in
text files that are easy to repair with command-line tools or in a
whacking great binary file whose inner workings are only understood by
two guys at microsoft?

3-4) Scatter files around the hardrive and give them short meaningless names. Make sure some begin with . and end in d

Oh, grow up. Read the File Heirarchy Standard.
That’s right there are standard places to put things on a linux box.
And the great thing is once you’ve understood how it works on a linux
box you are in pretty good shape when you move to any other UNIX. Plus
the whole thing with short commands, e.g. cp not copy, is when you
spend your whole day typing stuff into consoles the fewer letters the
better. Just because you don’t know what it means doesn’t make it
meaningless.

5) Downgrade to Windows 3.11 for those boxy windows

I’m at a loss for what to say to that. I can only assume that this
guy hasn’t actually used a linux box in in the last five years. GNOME, KDE, ’nuff said.

6) Type all in lower case, pretending that your filesystem is case sensitive

Is he actually claiming that a case insensitive file system is a
good thing? The mind boggles. At this point I’m beggining to wonder if
this is actually a brilliant caricature of a foaming at the mouth
windows fanboy. Other evidence leads me to believe that this is not the case.

8) Uninstall all your printer drivers. Use only “Generic Printer”

OK, this approaches being reasonable. Printing can be a bit of a
pain under linux. If you are lucky it’ll just work, but if not you are
in for some pain. In defense of linux this is mostly due to
manufacturers not releasing linux drivers or enough information for
other people to write them.

9-11) Random digs at Linux users

I shall not dignify any of this with commentary. If you are wondering where 7 went I covered it in 3-4.

12) Don’t forget the $ in Micro$oft

Yeah this annoys anyone with more than two brain-cells to rub together.
Unfortunatley for our flash-boy he’s just as much a retarded zealot as
they are.