Mea culpa: coming clean about my n00b Linux mistakes

Not getting a second click from me, nope no way.

He's basically saying it's his fault for assuming you could mix and match distributions and package managers the way he did. It's a sort back handed swipe at Linux for not being what he assumed it is.

Very wise, TC. (I've been having a few "sick days", so I've had the time to waste. Perhaps I could have wasted it more productively)

Executive summary: Trolling in Grand style -- He's a wicked cool coder, Linux is a religion, Linux isn't appropriate for "Do It Yourself" or "real" user freedom.

Or, as someone else put it: "a whole lot of culpa, but precious little mea."

No worries, Bernard, LXer is all about letting readers decide what we want to read. Feel better soon!

Your executive summary is perfect :)

This guy's blog is entitled DIY-IT -- do it yourself IT. Isn't that a bit like DIY-surgery?

Both items were pretty weak, and he keeps displaying his ineptitude. Any minute now, someone's going to throw him a bigger shovel so he can keep digging himself into the hole he's dug.

Bernard -- get well soon!

I heard he is renting a JCB for his next article!

Quoting:This guy's blog is entitled DIY-IT -- do it yourself IT. Isn't that a bit like DIY-surgery?

Good Lord! Have we sunk so far as to make an idiotic statement like that? No wonder so many developers are turning to Macs.

For the record:

A competent IT person d@mned well should be able to do their own IT. That's been the basis of many a start-up, and a good way to bring costs under control while trying to grow bigger.

Frankly, I'm shocked to see a statement like that on Lxer. I spend considerable time encouraging people to learn more about their systems and how to do things for themselves. As I recall, that was the genesis of free software.

Must be before your time.

"Those who do not know Unix are doomed to re-invent it... poorly."

The same goes for IT and surgery. Those who think their lack of training makes them more, ah, "flexible" will find out the only thing more flexible is their list of failure modes.

First thing that comes to mind when reading this article: how can someone display such blatant ignorance? I've been using Linux for well over ten years, and I have a bookshelf full of books about the basics: *nix system administration, Bash shell, TCP/IP, distro-specific books from CentOS to Debian to Slackware and FreeBSD. And still, I spend most of my time reading, learning and experimenting. First thing I want to do after reading this guy's article is hit him with "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Unleashed". But then, I must concede Windows has a great advantage over Linux: it even allows complete ignorants to feel like "sysadmins" as long as they can find their way to the System Settings icon like a trained ape.

Just hand him a bigger shovel so he can keep digging himself deeper into the hole he's already dug for himself.

Hey, don't be dissing apes.

I would never diss apes.

You better not (they can fling it better than you can, and have far less compunction about doing so).