Tim Connors <tconnors@rather.puzzling.org> wrote:
I don't get why geeks use Ubuntu. I think the usual argument is "it just works" (somewhat like Apples - I can at least understand that in principle, although it never worked for me, with my brain being wired to focus-follows-mouse-but-not-raise, and with middle click being broken in the opengl X11 apps I was programming, and with package management being useless), but demonstrably, it just doesn't work (so completely unlike, I mean, like Apple then).
Linux mostly "just works" for me, with one major exception - anything related to X desktop accessibility, where the number of bugs is high relative to everything else that I use. In general, though, if I weren't involved in the community and actively testing and exploring new tools, I could, for the most part, just configure everything as I want it and leave it alone to "just work". Procmail is a good example, I only touch it when I want to add a mailing list or improve the spam filtering. It's still basically the same configuration that I set up in 1994 or 1995 under SunOS. What's even better these days is that, under distributions such as Debian, many packages have reasonable default configurations, and hardware detection by the kernel and by the X Window System is much better than it used to be, reducing still further the required configuration work.