Seriously, if you could not get Ubuntu to play an mp3 or browse a web-page, I am forced to conclude you are an absolute idiot. Seriously, I am afraid you might be really, really, stupid.

I love these “UNIX guys” from way back who can’t get it to work, but my Mom can.

Give me a break.

I run Kubuntu on a shuttle Core2Duo 2, have a MacMini running Panther, a MacBookBlack on Leopard, a Fujitsu P1510D doing TabletPC 2005, a T4220 doing Vista Business32 (Tablet), A Ferrari 4005 running Vista Ultimate 64, a custom box running XPPro for LiquidPro7 and games, a 2002 XPPro Toshiba 2.8HT 17 incher in the kitchen… oh, and two ancient no-name 1.8GHz single cores with 768GB RAM running Windows Server 2003 Standard (SqlServer Standard on both, IIS on one, WindowsMediaServer and Wowza Media Server on the other and they do just fien with low ram and occassionally high loads).

I haven’t had any problems with Vista, personally, but I guess that’s just me. Honestly, one of my servers hadn’t had a reboot in well over a year (I did it when I added Java6 and the Wowza Server because I just figured it was time but not that it needed it) and the other I don’t know how long its been.

As a developer my last year of so has been all Java and Flash (predominantly coding on a Windows 2003 Server standard machine) but before that it was years of .Net and before that COM. Since moving up from Windows 2000 Pro and Server I honestly can not remember ever seeing the Blue Screen of Death that Linux and Mac folks love to talk about being so common on a Windows box.

Honest.

And as a dev I do a lot of bashing of my machines and registries. My Macs are also pretty stable (Though I find it annoying that the MacBook has to be rebooted about 50% of the time after installing Adobe or even Apple-branded software … but I can live with it). The Kubuntu box? Well, it brings back memories of my first OS …real olde UNIX on a mini mainframe … it’s fine geeky fun to have to spend so much time searching the internet for the secret commandlines to get stuff working, but for anyone who just needs a machine to work I wouldn’t personally recommend it. Becuase if I do them I’m the one who’s going to get the phone calls to help people and it’s just a drag to tell people to type switches over the phone

Now, I know, because I’ve read them in this thread, that there are people who say to heck with regular users they are all stupid and shouldn’t even have computers ;-), but IMVHO that isn’t a particularly bright point of view. And we all know that they were kidding, right?

Now then, here’s my personal view on the good folks who have personal, real, complaints about Microsoft. This is a true story, from a real regular person.

When XP first came out I went to OfficeMax and bought my upgrade copy. OfficeMax (Not Microsoft) put a no-returns policy on the software if the box was open. Kinda standard in all Windows and Mac software retail chains but for an OS, it’s a bit more of a big deal. Guess what… I ran the upgrade as a full install (because upgrades are never right) and once finished XP Pro locked up over and over (locked, not blue screened, a blue would have at least given me a dump).

With no way to return it, I put it in a manilla envelope and addressed it to Mr. William Gates, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corp, One Microsoft Way, Redmond. Along with the XP folder and disc I included a short note saying that I had been very pleased with most Microsoft products over the years and especially grateful for the high value that Microsoft obviously put on the professional development community but XP just was not working for me and if he (Gates) could make it run then he could keep it. My note ended with the sentence “All the best, I’m sure the next OS will be great.”

Two or three days later I got a call from the head of Windows OS Testing (Chang, I believe was his name, but it’s been years). He told me that “Bill asked me to give you a call and figure out what was going on with your computer”. I live just one town over from Redmond so he offered to come over and “debug XP” at my house. Instead I drove my compaq over to the campus and dropped it off with him.

A few days after that I got another call. The problem with XP had been found. My extremely normal and very common Compaq Presario desktop BIOS was way out of date. After they’d updated it the problems stopped.

I felt very silly to have not verified my BIOS and for having brought my supposed-pro ignorance up to the top level attention, but the test group guys were very nice about it, The one guy said that in looking over my machine they did find a compatibility issue in a Compaq driver that they hadn’t seen before, and that it helped them and that they would have a patch for that on Windows Update for all of the other Compaq users in a matter of days … which they absolutely did (that was really weird, like interactive TV).

You may doubt this all but I swear that it is true, and I was assured that Mr. Gates himself did get my letter, did read my letter and did make things happen for me. Probably if I wasn’t living so close and easy it might not have been as quick, but I got the real impression that everyone at Microsoft that I dealt with took my issue seriously and even personally.

Since that day… I have no complaints about the level of service or the dedication of Microsoft employees or about Microsoft employees caring about their products. I think that if other folks have different stories, they might consider that they aren’t asking the right people (or the right way) for help. You don’t ask bum in the street the best way to make a million dollars, and like the joke says 3rd party tech support is 2 parties away from the party

Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever. Eventually folks get older, hopefully get girlfriends ;-), and it all becomes less of a burning religious issue. They’re just machines and the screen shots above are all just tricks of light.