Linuxers view of my Vista presentation...

Well, Vista presentation was quite fun for me - however this time I was quite disappointed by interaction with people :(

There were quite many people from Linux community - I knew about it before the presentation started. I hoped there will be a lot of discussion, like "Why is this missing in Vista when we have it for a long time" or "how does this exactly work" etc... In fact I really like when someone from Apple/Linux community attend my presentations, because they see the things from different perspective.

However this time I was really disappointed - there were just STUPID questions like "Why Microsoft dont distribute ONLY Windows Vista N and allow to install utilities as optional components" and similar.

Why???

Similar situation occured when I was presenting Monad on LinuxHall - there were no technical questions or comparison to advantages of another scripting languages. I really hoped I will be able to send mail to Jeffrey Snover with content like "These linux guys had these ideas, I think they are great, wouldnt you like to have a look and think about it?".

If you have a look at forums all around the internet, it seems that linux community is really great and that having dialogue with them could bring many great ideas. If you look at the same guys when you meet them personally, you will find out it is really hard to get anything usefull from them.

Dont get me wrong - I like the idea of Linux and I know many people that have clever ideas. However the mass of linux "power" users seems useless to me :(

Published Sun, Apr 16 2006 9:26 by martin

Comments

# re: Linuxers view of my Vista presentation...

The reason for it is that they dont want to share their ideas with you - because you are representing everything wrong in their eyes. You, as a speaker in Microsoft building = Microsoft :)

Sunday, April 16, 2006 4:59 PM by Martin Pavlis

# re: Linuxers view of my Vista presentation...

Well, it is quite said - in my eyes it looks like community (here in czech) around Microsoft technologies is much more active and open than Linux community :( Just have a look at people around WUG - many of them have practical experiences with *nix systems and they dont hate linux just because it is different platform. For me personally one of the best persons I can speak about Linux with is Mirek Pragl - the reason is he got really practical view on problems and he hates both Windows/Linux sometimes :) Few times I attended Linux presentations - there were only two scenarios, in one EVERYBODY agreed with speaker or EVERYBODY disagrees. I noticed this behavior few times on my presentations - there is almost every time one Linux guru and few "minions" around him. I said something, guru make his opinion and (after look on guru) minions strongly agrees or disagrees. It was quite funny sometimes when guru changed his opinion during my speak - you can see, that everybody around him changed opinion in that moment :) As I said - this is really sad :(

Monday, April 17, 2006 4:14 AM by martin

# re: Linuxers view of my Vista presentation...

According to my experience, open source has two different sides.

The first is practical and technological. I'm writing and using some OSS, because they meet my needs. I generally don't care about their license - it's good that they're free, but it's not the key.

The second side is religious and political. Some people propagate (not necessarily use) open source software as a poilitical and sometimes religious statement.

With the first kind of people you can lead a meaningful discussion. Everything has its own advantages and disadvantages and different points of view may help to both participants.

But you generally cannot hold any sane discussion on political-religious topic, especially when one side actually does not want to discuss.

And that' the main problem here in Czech Republic: most of vocal OSS activists falls into the second group. They usually never wrote any open software or helped it any way. Their "contribution" is by yelling at "Micr$hit".

People who really do something useful in OSS generally do not participate much by local activities, because they are disgusted by these idiots equally as we are.

Monday, April 17, 2006 5:41 AM by Michal Altair Valášek

# re: Linuxers view of my Vista presentation...

The view is the same from the other side. Linux community also see the Windows users mass as the bunch of stupid people that run their computers under administrator account, spredding viruses and worms and writing stupid articles to the internet forums. Quite a few people are usable for discussion. It is hard to find a suitable opponent for discussion. On both sides.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 3:06 AM by TNX