There is something in here that you touched on that I’d like to address further. There seems to be an underlying opinion in the FOSS community that gets under my skin and really should get under everyone elses. We’ve all had this arguement but I’ll illustrate it here for you *(with hyperbole).

FOSS evangilist: “Well windows doesn’t have a decent command line. Therefor, windows should be taken out back and beaten with a hose.”

Me/You/the internet: “well why do you need the command line?”

FOSS evangilist: “to correctly configure your machine.”

Me/You/the internet: “well you can do that with a GUI in Windows. and what about all the people who arn’t computer savey enough to be able to USE a command line?”

FOSS evangilist: “Well then they shouldn’t be using a computer. Because they really don’t understand it.”

Now, this last line is rarely ever explicitly stated, it’s usually heavily implied, or hidden under a snicker of “well then they can use RedHat and pay for support.”

I think, more then anything, this has been the attitude that has turned me off of FOSS alternatives on principle. The same attitude is freely available through OS X users and if you want that illustrated look at those insulting and irritating “I’m an elitist MAC, here make fun of the tubby bland guy.”

The whole situation is tragic because there are some really good things out there, and I would be in much better straights as a developer if I were to install a good Ubuntu distro.

–Andrew