Dumber people can run Linux

Dumber people can run Linux: "Dumber people can run Linux

net.wars

By Wendy M. Grossman: Friday 14 October 2005, 12:44
FOR A COUPLE of years now I've had the idea that I should migrate my mail server to Linux.

The mail server is Communigate, and it's running on Windows 2000. It's ultra-stable, that's not the problem. Truly. It *never* goes wrong except when I'm out of town. No, the reason to change is that there are some spam-filtering things called Razor and Pyzor that I could add to my installation of SpamAssassin that don't run on Windows. Or so the documentation I have here says.

So a couple of weeks ago I acquired an old Thinkpad and took a poll among my friends as to which GNU/Linux-type operating system I should put on it. It didn't necessarily, I said, have to be the easiest to install since I really only intended to install it once; it did need to be reliable. Fedora Core, said a couple. FreeBSD, said a couple of others. Solaris, said one. Ask a question like this in a room full of geeks, and you can get them all arguing among themselves. Fun!

So I decided to be difficult and download Ubuntu instead (because the friend I consulted by email suggested it and then it turned out that all those geeks who recommended other things said, 'Oh, yeah, I have one running that. I like it.'). Of course, unless I download and install, one by one, every Linux variant I'll never know which one is 'best', but friends, if there's a Linux I would hand a novice to install, this is it. Yes, the text messages that scroll by at length are a little intimidating. But so what? When it comes to a point where it has to ask you something, it does so in plain English and tells you why it wants to know. After all these decades of obscure error messages and cryptic questions, here's an operating system that says something like, 'From your choice of language, we guess you're in one of these countries. Which is it?' I would have kissed it, except that it isn't tangible, plus you look rea"