It’s funny; if I were to mention that when I finally got Ubuntu configured more-or-less like I wanted it to be, some thoughtless configuration change I made caused the whole thing (modules, X, networking, everything) to break (more on this later), the reaction I would get would be dependent on who I was speaking to.
- A Mac user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not using a Mac.
- A Windows user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not just using Windows.
- Another Linux user would shake his or her head disapprovingly, as if to say that you shouldn’t be messing with things if you don’t understand what you’re doing, and would go on to extol the virtues of the Linux distro of his or her choice.
These are the stereotypical reactions one would expect, at least. The funny thing is, that if the platform shifts, the reactions shift also, but otherwise remain the same. If I have a Windows computer that gets totally screwed up, the reactions might be
- A Mac user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not using a Mac.
- A Linux user would probably tell me that it serves me right for not using anything other than Windows.
- Another Windows user would shake his or her head disapprovingly, as if to say that you shouldn’t be messing with things if you don’t understand what you’re doing, and would go on to extol the virtues of the anti-spyware/anti-virus software of his or her choice.
And if my Mac got hosed (don’t even tell me that it doesn’t happen… I’ve had to fix some of them)… well, you get the idea.
The point being that sometimes bad things happen to good computers, regardless of the OS in question.
Case in point; there is a Dell about 10 feet away from me which spontaneously stopped booting yesterday. There are no known hadware issues, the user of this machine does not even have internet access, and it isn’t more than a couple years old. It just decided that it would no longer boot all the way into windows, but would continually reboot and ask you if you’d like to try one of several flavours of Safe Mode instead.
Back to the Ubuntu disaster.
To be honest, I was pretty carelessly installing new things, enabling alternate repostiories (that is, libraries of available software packages which may or may not actually be stable), installing optimized kernels with apt (I’m not sure that is a good idea anymore), and so forth. All this in service of getting Wine up and running, for the express purpose of getting World of Warcraft back up and running; not the most pragmatic of pursuits, I suppose.
At any rate, the PC at home has Ubuntu reinstalled, Wine working, and World of Warcraft mostly working. The borked Windows PC is being repaired as I type.
My wife’s Mac is still doing fine.
I think I might have to get one of those.
(Yes, I know I just claimed that Macs have problems, too. Well, they do; they just seem to have, well, less of them.)
