Submitted by rich_c on September 14, 2009 - 2:01am
After that tripe Microsoft were peddling last week about the capabilities of Windows vs. Linux, somthing happened over the weekend that I thought illustrated the good and the bad of Linux quite nicely. Here's a summary in point format:
1. On the system I'm running currently, Flash Player has always worked flawlessly from day 1. - Good.
2. A handful of updates I applied over the weekend 'broke' Flash Player. - Bad.
3. From past experience (Gained by having an operating system that encourages you to gain experience and knowledge!) I was quickly able to deduce where the problem lay and fixed it with a couple of commands on the command line. - Good and Bad. It took me but a few minutes to fix but the method I used would for many involve the dreaded command line and therefore be too daunting. Please feel free to read a bit of sarcasm into that. ;-> (And, yes, I appreciate that comment was a bit 733t of me. Apologies to anyone who might feel offended.)
4. Having posted my findings on Mepislovers here, it was a matter of a few hours that morning before more knowledgeable members of the community were investigating and suggesting more elegant ways to fix the problem. - Good.
So to summarise this particular example, something that works perfectly might occasionally get broken by an update. However, you can usually rely on the community to do their utmost to fix the problem very quickly! The strengths of Linux in general and Mepis in particular, are the fact that an awful lot of functionality works right from the initial install and that when things do go wrong other users will help you out far quicker than any proprietary systems' helldesk operators can.
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