On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 16:17, Derek Neighbors wrote:
> the M$ helps no one.  In fact, there used to be a saying....
> 
> BSD users love Unix.
> Linux users just hate Microsoft.
> 
> Its a shame that sometimes people are more in love with hating M$ than
> valuing the freedoms GNU/Linux gives them.
-----
Whatever it takes seems to be operative here.

I don't hate Microsoft - I would prefer to use less restrictive, less
expensive software. I used to want the latest / greatest everything. I
used to worship the smooth mail interface but I learned that I could
control mail with procmail and use just about anything for imap access
and then the MUA became highly unimportant. I used to worship Word &
Excel but the feature glut has given me a boat load of features that not
only I will never use, but few people I have ever met will ever use.

There is very little demand for the new features of Office XP or Windows
XP, Office 2000 & Windows 2000 are/were good enough for the most part.
That's why linux / open source stuff is gonna ultimately win out...the
feature set doesn't really expand - regardless of what Microsoft would
want us to believe. That being said...I like Windows XP and I like
Microsoft Office but I can (and am) living without them.

So in deference to your quote about linux users hate Microsoft - that's
obviously an oversimplification. In general, linux users are savvy
enough to know that Microsoft doesn't offer much that can't be had for
free or considerably less than the Windows counterpart. We all know
greed when we see it.

And lastly, computing platforms seemed to have always generated an
overabundant amount of elitism. I remember Macintosh users sneering at
the Apple II users. The Windows users sneering at the Macintosh users
etc...it goes on and on. Apparently, you are not only what you eat, you
are also the OS that is on your computer.

Craig