Dave_Thomas mailing lists wrote:
Ten years ago, I had a CS professor named Jeff Ely at Lewis & Clark College tell me, "if you learn Windows, you need to relearn the whole OS every 2 or 3 years. If you learn UNIX, it has a steeper learning curve, but you just learn it once, and you have a career for life."
Well, except that you have to learn Linux, and then BSD, and then OS X, and then Solaris. ;)
Do you guys think Linux still has a steeper learning curve than Windows?
No, I think it has about the same learning curve, now. But, as I said, we are fighting against an indoctrination that starts in high school.
The problem is that everybody has already climbed the Windows learning curve. Nobody wants to climb another learning curve if they don't have to, myself included. That's why my primary development machine is a Mac rather than Linux machine.
Though we've come some distance in the desktop arena, I'm still asking myself if I even want all the management types learning enough to be dangerous.
Tough call. I browbeat a CEO I worked for into getting a 12" OS X laptop. I didn't give him administrator privileges. This was *great*.
Yes, we got a few more calls about "I want to install program FOO but it won't let me." However, most OS X stuff doesn't need root for a local install. The improvement in stability was worth the couple extra calls for installing a program. Besides, installing a program is generally more fun than debugging the aftermath of breakage.
It worked pretty nicely. However, we weren't wedded to the Exchange calendar functionality. He liked Thunderbird, and he didn't notice the difference between Firefox and IE. He adored Pages and Keynote.
He also had the "HelpMe!" button on the desktop that opened a secure port to an external server for VNC so the admin team could take over his machine. As long as he had network, we could undo most damage.
-a -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
