“Get the Facts” Right, Microsoft…
Usually I don’t pay attention to Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” style propaganda, but this one was so silly that I just couldn’t pass by when pointed to it.
Basically, there are two WMV screencasts “comparing” the easiness of installation of Perl and PHP on Windows and Linux. Notwithstanding the fact that the Linux screencast uses a three-year-old version of Ubuntu and the makers apparently didn’t hear of Synaptic and the Applications menu, what is it supposed to prove? If anything, that it’s easier to type a single command to “apt-get install” a package and get it working out of the box, than to run an installer (predownloaded from a third-party site and hopefully prescanned for viruses before the screencast begins) and making them work with IIS through a configuration window.
Or if it’s supposed to be aimed at Windows users to begin with (“I’d rather click Next into oblivion and then use the command line anyway to set up directories than just install everything with this unintuitive apt-get thing!”), who are they hoping to convince? If anything, it ends up looking like an advert for Linux instead.
Nice job breaking it, heroes.
Thanks for pointing this one out. It really makes you wonder whether it was made by someone who favours Linux, but happens to work for Microsoft :)
If anything, that it’s easier to type a single command
I was attending a network technologies user group a couple years back when I got into this debate with one of the many Windows admins in the group over dinner. Across the table it went:
“But just typing a command is so easy!”
“But you need to learn what command to type, with the GUI you can click around to find what you need!”
“The overhead for remote administration is much less over ssh!”
“The overhead for a Windows GUI is worth it!”
“I hate the mouse, it slows down productivity!”
“I love the mouse, it makes things easier!”
He did have his points, he wasn’t stupid , he didn’t want to spend time learning things that “Windows made it easy for him to not have to know” so he could learn other things, and I can sympathize with that. I think in general it’s just a whole different mentality, and they will only convince people who are afraid of the command line (of which there are many).
Except the Windows screencast also uses the command line. For operations that can be done through the Windows Explorer, no less — similar to how the Ubuntu screencast uses the command line instead of Synaptic.