This is in response to the comments by Chris and Roger Rustad - in my philosophy there are times when outsourcing certain work is perfectly justifiable. There is a reason why division of labor has been invented.
The Interplanetary Internationale is a non-profit organisation with a serious mission, and all of our members are hard-working people who do their jobs well. Due to being a small non-profit we are already doing too much multitasking and wear a lot of hats. I for one wear at least 3 major hats (commander, chief engineer and researcher/analyst) and that isn't counting the minor ones, so I really don't need to put on yet another hat (desktop PC support) if I can avoid it. Yes, I am perfectly capable of spending the next few years of my life learning everything there is to know about F/OSS web/audio/video software for the functions I'm interested in, but I have far, far more valuable things to do with my life. My philosophy is that if something can be outsourced, it should be outsourced, because there are far too many things that can't be. Even on the computer/tech side of things there are far too many things that only I can do (maintaining 4.3BSD-Quasijarus, our main in-house OS, core network admin, certain in-house UNIX applications), and the computer/tech stuff in general isn't even the primary purpose of our organisation in the first place! Thus when it comes to stuff that resides on the lower rungs of my ladder of importance (basically all desktop stuff), I certainly want to outsource it. As for refusing to install consumer distros like Ubuntu and insisting on Slackware, that is a simple matter of administrative policy. We are not talking about a home PC for a housewife, ours is a serious organisation with a chain of command and a clear division of responsibilities, and the matters of OS selection and overall network planning and management are taken seriously (that's my area of responsibility). My stance is that the distro matters only to the system administrator, not to ordinary users, therefore, the choice of distro is the exclusive privilege of the chief system administrator. Users do not care about distros, that's an admin matter, a user merely logs in with a company- issued username and password and is presented with a set of applications decided upon by the company. Business environment, not home - work, not play. In the good old days of UNIX there was a clear division between the OS and applications, and that's how I like to keep it. An operating system should only come with system software like daemons and a minimal set of basic tools (shell, awk, C compiler, that kind of stuff); everything else is none of the OS distribution's business. High-level applications like web/audio/video SW absolutely do not belong in an OS distribution in my opinion. I choose Slackware because it's the most UNIX-like of all Linux distributions (it's for people like me who like UNIX better than Linux and run Linux only out of necessity) and also because it maintains a clear distinction between users and administrators which is essential to my business model. When I say that users and administrators should be separate, I don't just mean separate accounts/passwords, I mean different people in flesh and blood. That's why I don't believe in the sudo bs - if a certain function should be available to ordinary users whose jobs aren't in IT, there should be a setuid program which they can use like a normal command with no fuss, whereas if a certain function should not be available to such users, it should not be available period - if you need the services of the IT department, pick up the phone and call the IT helpdesk. Our organisation is seeking an IT support person who would serve as a go-between intermediary between the core OS/network engineering (me) on one side and the non-technical user community on the other, someone who can effectively bridge the two worlds. MS P.S. In response to Roger Rustad's comment about nudity, that is absolutely not permitted here and is not practiced by me or by anyone else who lives or works at any of our facilities. We generally follow the standards of conduct which were set in the Soviet Union for Communist Party members and for military officers.
