11:32 am, 4 Feb 10
car analogy
A not-quite-so-technical friend saw me running Linux on my laptop and asked me what the deal was -- aka "Why do all engineers at Google run Linux while everyone else runs something else," something I often try to explain in terms of Morlocks and Eloi. This time I tried a new analogy that seemed to work so well I will share it with you.
At my high school there were a group of kids who were really into cars. They would spend weekends disassembling and reassembling their engines or trying out new speaker cabinets. The resulting vehicles -- almost always old Volkswagens and BMWs -- frequently were unreliable and rarely had consistent paint jobs. The rich kids in their Audis would scoff and say: "my car looks and runs so much better!" The kids who didn't much care about cars would confusedly say: "my Honda Civic is more reliable and ultimately costs less!"
But the beater Volkswagen was the car of choice of people who were into cars; those other concerns mattered less then the fact the car was theirs. Criticizing their cars by these other metrics makes about as much sense as criticizing someone who drew a picture and hung it on their wall: yes, the drawing isn't very good compared to what you could buy in a store or see in a museum, but that feedback isn't useful to the person who put their heart into their drawing and you just come across like an asshole.
PS: In case it wasn't clear, I don't think Linux is a plausible normal-user-oriented desktop OS. I think users / the market have confirmed this. I respect the people who are trying to make it otherwise but I am skeptical.
PPS: I am not trying to make some sort of labored analogy between car vendors and operating system vendors, so please don't read too deeply into it. (In terms of actual cars, I own a Civic.)
At my high school there were a group of kids who were really into cars. They would spend weekends disassembling and reassembling their engines or trying out new speaker cabinets. The resulting vehicles -- almost always old Volkswagens and BMWs -- frequently were unreliable and rarely had consistent paint jobs. The rich kids in their Audis would scoff and say: "my car looks and runs so much better!" The kids who didn't much care about cars would confusedly say: "my Honda Civic is more reliable and ultimately costs less!"
But the beater Volkswagen was the car of choice of people who were into cars; those other concerns mattered less then the fact the car was theirs. Criticizing their cars by these other metrics makes about as much sense as criticizing someone who drew a picture and hung it on their wall: yes, the drawing isn't very good compared to what you could buy in a store or see in a museum, but that feedback isn't useful to the person who put their heart into their drawing and you just come across like an asshole.
PS: In case it wasn't clear, I don't think Linux is a plausible normal-user-oriented desktop OS. I think users / the market have confirmed this. I respect the people who are trying to make it otherwise but I am skeptical.
PPS: I am not trying to make some sort of labored analogy between car vendors and operating system vendors, so please don't read too deeply into it. (In terms of actual cars, I own a Civic.)
(-:
your analogy is clearer than his, I think (he focuses on the dealers; you focus on the owners), but your analogy dovetails with his.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
None of my Linux machines require any tinkering in day-to-day business.
My main workstation is a Slackware box, which is painful in terms of package management, so every 6 or 7 months I spend maybe half a day upgrading when a new Slackware release comes out. However, I can’t remember when I last installed it from scratch. My recollection puts the date around late 2001. Why would I, if the system doesn’t degrade itself over time. So I run a fresh system in terms of features, yet aside from upgrades I’ve barely had to touch it in almost a decade. (I spent far more time twiddling Firefox than the OS.) As far as I’m concerned, Linux is soviet technology: primitive and utterly indestructible. That’s what I like about it. (And the same reason has kept me stuck to Slackware, however painful it may sometimes be (and it is).)
This wouldn’t work for most people. That’s OK, I’m me and they’re them.
But don’t tell me it’s cutting into my productivity just because I don’t use a more consumer-grade system.
Soviet technology hasn't ever been indestructible in any sence. Soviet cars do break down a lot.
I think this did a better job of explaining it than the one on cars. I was previously using the Neal Stephenson analogy about Batmobiles and SUVs. I think I'm going to use this analogy more often.