Shifting with the Wind on OSes

There is nothing wrong with turning your sails to the wind if it gets where you are going. I find it ludicrous people feel there is some necessity of being tribal about a computer operating system. It requires a particularly childish turn of mind to think it matters. Sure, it’s okay to playfully poke at one another, but children throw a fit over the smallest failure to show sufficient reverence and devotion to their favorite.

I use whatever matches my needs and the hardware at hand. For example, as long as my HP Deskjet D-2660 was working, it worked best under Windows. This despite the much-ballyhooed HPLIP project where HP actually writes Linux drivers for their stuff. Fine, but it always printed too far down on the page, so the Windows drivers worked better. That is, unless you get sick of their oppressive bundled software which acts as if your computer has no other purpose than to run their stuff. But the printer was on sale, and some of their inkjets worked okay in the past, so I bought it. And some ink refills, which cost about the same as the printer, of course.

Well, the darned thing simply quit working. Under Windows it said something about not communicating properly. Under Linux, it says, “print job completed” when the stinking thing never so much as twitched or clicked. So the internal circuit board is probably fried. As you might expect, HP support was less than helpful. As in, “Oh, you run Linux? Good luck. Thanks for buying our crap.” And of course their HQ wants to see a long history of support tickets before they bother to respond to any complaints about the process. So I went through the motions, but their support staff says they are unauthorized to even discuss Linux. Yeah, they want your business, Linux users, but you have zero means to proving it’s a hardware issue so HP can honor their warranty.

This is not news. Most major corporations hate consumers, but love their money.

So with that sucker dead, and I haven’t even used up the original ink cartridges filled at 10% capacity, I have little reason to run XP. All the other stuff I did was doable under either OS. I keep XP around because so many folks I serve in the computer helps ministry won’t switch to Linux. It’s called “dual-booting” but without that printer, XP will have a lot less time on this machine.

This is not a victory for anyone. Linux slightly edges out XP at this point simply on the basis of my personal habits. It has nothing to do with superiority, and the next time something in Ubuntu irritates me too much, I’ll switch. Then after awhile, I’m sure something in Windows will irritate me and I’ll switch again. I don’t love either, and the realities of variation in any supported operating system, and the various software packages which run on them, means things can pass through rough periods on any of them. To the fanboys that appears to be childish because their whole orientation in life is backwards. If computers are your life, I suppose it matters, but computers are only so useful as they serve the needs of people. In my world, people rate more highly than computers. At the moment, computers are my one best tool for helping them, but never more than a tool. That’s the way it is with all God’s Creation.