A linux advocate downloads linux, installs it on a $500 -
$800 powerful computer, and is happy that you he has a free
OS. Furthermore he goes about making fun of everyone else
with windows computers, calling them stupid.
How blind can a person be?
If you look further into the mechanisms that made this
possible you will see that windows was the OS responsible
for this.
Windows was the OS that let people of all kinds to start
using computers in an everyday basis. Windows was the OS
that changed computers from a thing only
super geeks that had gone to 5 years to learn how to
program, to a thing any person could do, even a child.
Childsplay! Windows was the OS that changed the whole
market for software and hardware, created new
opportunities, new hardware innovations, new technologies,
and the expansion of the internet to what we have now.
Thousands went to study computer programming because of
windows. Thousands of jobs where created to fuel the
windows and computer revolution. Thousands of computers
were installed in businesses, homes, schools and everyone
started using them.
Windows created all this foundation that we have today.
Linux now stepped on that foundation of cheap computers,
the expanded internet, and computer literate community
and used that to try to develop a user friendly version of
its OS. THIS HAS NOT BEEN ACCOMPLISHED even to this day.
As any logical person would observe, it is stealing
resources from the windows platform. Not to say that most
of its programs are developed like clones or rip-offs of
windows applications.
If you take everything I said into account, if people had
not used windows, the computers would be more expensive,
the internet would be smaller, less people would be using
computers, less people would be designing hardware, less
people would be being educated to be programmers, less
software would exist. Practically we would be 10 years
behind... and 10 years in computer time is like hundreds of
years normal time.
So if windows made everything cheaper and more accessible,
isn't it more cost efficient for it to exist, than linux? I
say that it has a negative cost...
meaning that it brings more money in that it takes out and
created new possibilities that would never exist without
it. In other words if we wanted to have what we have now,
with technology that was 10 years older, the cost would be
unbearable, even if it was possible.
Having said all that, I know of course that windows was
created on top of a unix prehistory... MS found programmers
and ideas from unix. But you cannot disregard the influence
windows had on the advancement of technologies we have
today.