The Inner Torment of Being A Linux User

Ivanka from the Ubuntu Design Team twit­tered a hys­ter­i­cal link about the dif­fer­ence between Mac and PCs recently. It was an old arti­cle, from 1994 or some such, so they com­pared Mac to DOS, which is funny to start with. Of course, you can sub­sti­tute “Win­dows” or even bet­ter, “Linux,” for DOS in this context.

About mid­way through the arti­cle, it really hit its stride, com­par­ing the Mac/DOS debate to the Catholicism/Protestantism debate. Here’s the killer paragraph:

DOS is Protes­tant, or even Calvin­is­tic. It allows free inter­pre­ta­tion of scrip­ture, demands dif­fi­cult per­sonal deci­sions, imposes a sub­tle hermeneu­tics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve sal­va­tion. To make the sys­tem work you need to inter­pret the pro­gram your­self: Far away from the baroque com­mu­nity of rev­el­ers, the user is closed within the lone­li­ness of his own inner torment.

Did I men­tion that last line about ‘lone­li­ness of his own inner tor­ment’ is sub­stan­tially fun­nier if you sub­sti­tute “Linux” for “DOS”?