Hardware lasts longer under Linux - or how politics don't have a clue.

As you can read at Jan Tielens' Bloggings, one of our political parties suggest using Linux instead of Microsoft products.

One of their arguments is that "PC's last longer". Why does hardware last longer depending on the OS that's running on it? Have you ever seen Office destroy your GPU? Maybe when you fool around enough with Linux you can get a driver damage your hardware, but just like with Windows, that's very unlikely unless you're into low level driver development.

Another great argument of their is they can customize it better. Why do you want to customize PC's in a government building? What would you want to add? It's meant for your end-users, so they'll look at the desktop.

Regarding the sysadmin side. Guess which one will cost more a Windows sysadmin or a Linux one. No Active Directory for managing your stuff ;)

They both have decent file permissions and other security settings. Mind you, we are talking about end-user systems here. Not some 24/7 nuclear power plant control server.

It provide jobs. And installing, configuring and maintaining those Windows PC's doesn't provide jobs? They take care of their own or what? (If that would be the case I should start thinking about switching jobs)

Then they start talking about Open Standards. There's a difference between Open Source/Software and Open Standards. Microsoft uses open standards as well.

I'm guessing it's because elections are coming, and we Belgians mostly choose the role of the underdog, Linux in this case. And their party knows how to play the media. With the great 'free' and 'open' words where everyone falls for. (Remember, with open software it's free as in free speech, not free beer)

They like to point to Munchen in their project. Well one of their arguments that it's cheaper gets destroyed by pointing, because it costs more in Munchen.

Ah, and price, a Linux version for the desktop (with support, because that's what a company takes), starts at 179$, SUSE is at $598 and Windows XP is at $299. Now tell me, where's the huge difference everyone is talking about?

We are talking politics here, they interfere in business they totally have no clue of, something they want to do quickly, and now even more then otherwise, because elections are coming, quickly get some arguments and launch them, everyone not into computers will believe us!

Should I talk about support as well? Who just extended their support for Windows 98? Which is quite old already. Can I get some support on my Linux distro X which seemed to have stopped last year? Can I get some support on package X, developed by a informatics student in his free time who now "doesn't feel like working on it anymore"? That means, if you want to use it, you'll have to get the knowledge to develop it further, and in the long run that is not cheaper.

And lastly, what about professionalism? They advertise with a movie of the Bill Gates pie-in-the-face happening. And with a page called microsuck.htm ...

There is one party I'm really not going to vote for. Hopefully they won't ruin it for the rest, because it's we who'll pay for their crazy ideas.

5 Comments

  • Linux runs on old, slow hardware with better performance than Windows. That's why it "lasts longer."



    Financial diff comes from case studies. "I was spending $X with Microsoft. Now it's $Y with Linux." Tends to be a big difference.



    I'm a .Net developer but I can see their point.

  • Dennis, you can run Windows 95 on a 386 with 32MB of memory, no problem! I'm pretty sure if you want to run the latest version of a Linux distro with the latest version of an office suite that you'll need a pretty beefed pc (been there done that).



    A small note regarding this topic (from a developer point of view): increasing computer power is our friend (quote from Steve Riley, I thought). Fast computers enable us to write great software. VS.NET 2003 offers a much greater user experience than VB 1 for example because I like background compilation, intellisense, dynamic help (in fact I don't like dynamic help but you get the point), ... all these features improve my productivity.

  • LOL! It proves once again that politicians should stay out of technology.. aahh.. ignorance is bliss.. :-)

  • Aah I can tell. You never *truly* ran Linux before. Did you?



    Yeah yeah, I know, you probably installed some Red Hat or Mandrake distro. It was a fiasco. It was different. You didn't understand anything about Unix philosophy. You probably couldn't get your osbscure, fancy scanner to work properly and concluded that Linux is crap. Simply put. You went haywire.



    Let me put it this way. If you buy a car, you want choice right? Well if you buy a Microsoft car, it's *always* the expensive car. It's always the same company that does the maintenance. You are *obligated* to buy the fancy addons, otherwise your engine just stops working. And from the moment you bought that shiny MS car, you are doomed to drive MS forever.



    That's why I drive Linux.

    Lot's of models. It's as expensive as you choose. It runs excellent. Every model has a power engine. It just keeps on running. Maintenance is a breeze.

  • I'm not quiet impressed that Spirit has launched this suggestion. The crazier the better is their spirit. You must know the SPA are in favour of everything that has to do with the word "free", and that's why they probably want to use Linux. Nobody of spa/spirit has probably already used Linux, and I'm sure their emailclient is Outlook, their spreadsheet Word and they play Patience.



    It must have happened like this: some geezer entered their office and said: "look what I have: Linux, an operating system like Windows, and it's free!", Steve immediatly fell of his chair, and Bert raised his eyebrows and started crying. Oh, and the thing about Linux being better for your hardware, that's only because Bert gets furious when Windows crashes and then he smacks his computer all the time...

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