Sadly, it was hard to follow the article long enough find any merit in his opinions.  I couldn’t get past the written lashing he assigned to the poor bastard he quoted at the start of his post. Since quotation marks were used in his article, I was made aware that he was  quoting someone.  If there was any doubt however, he did name the author of the missive prior to the actual quote.  In spite of this, he used my favorite quoting tool, (sic).  Meaning thus or so, this allows the reader to understand that the written error belongs to the person quoted and not the person quoting.  Additionally, it lets the reader know that the author feels that the quotes alone weren’t enough to ensure that the reader blame someone other than the author.

But wait, there’s more.

Even using my favorite tag, this particular author didn’t feel that he assigned ownership sufficiently, however.

If he truly thinks there are no standards common “between” (I would have said “among”, but that’s just me.) 6 or 7 “versions” (I would say “distributions”.) of GNU/Linux then he did not examine them closely enough.

Please keep in mind that the author’s intention is to debate the merit of the number of linux forks. In spite of the intended direction of the discussion, it seems as if he simply couldn’t help himself and just had make damned sure that you not only understood that the errors were not his, but also that he knew how to correct them.  It was clear by the end of the paragraph that he utilized the quoted author’s grammatical and spelling errors to let you know that since he couldn’t draft his thoughts in proper English, his opinion obviously couldn’t carry the same weight as someone that could correct it.

Between Captain Grammatical and this guy, it’s a wonder that linux hasn’t taken over the world.

You guys know me.  I could give two shits less what you use as an operating system, however I never cease to get a kick out of the linux zealot that can’t figure out why linux isn’t the global OS of choice.

His first example:

“I put a DVD in my player and it won’t play.”

He begins his helpful tutorial by telling them that they’re ignorant because they don’t know the true meaning of the terms mp3 and dvd, flippantly tossing the terms around with nary a care in the world.

Windows user #1: “Hey Bob, you want to throw the DVD with me tomorrow down on the beach?”

Windows user #2: “Sorry John, I’ve got to take my car into the shop tomorrow to get the mp3′s rotated.”

Windows user #1: “Oh, ok.  I guess I’ll just hang out at the house and watch the moving picture rectangle.”

Now, in Ryan’s world, this is not only possible, it’s almost definitely happening right now as we speak.

He then tackles the Windows users’ complaints that their hardware doesn’t work.  It’s Microsoft’s fault, because their dominance prevents us linux users from having drivers that work.  Never mind that your wireless card won’t work, that’s irrelevant. As long as we have someone to blame other than linux developers, it doesn’t seem to matter if your hardware works or not.  We have an explanation as to why, so just quit your bitching.

His rebuttal for “Linux is not good for gaming.”?  Yes it is.  Linux is great for gaming.  There’s just no games for linux.

There’s a difference.  Again, never mind that you can’t play Bioshock on your linux machine.  It would run just fine if they would write the game to run on linux. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you Winwhiner.

It goes on from there, but to be frank, I grabbed the gems from the post.

My point is merely this; Ryan is not an anomaly.  He’s not the exception to the rule.  There are linux zealots everywhere that try to help Windows users understand linux by explaining to them that they’re ignorant dolts and their arguments are nullified by the simple fact that everything that doesn’t work in linux is another entity’s fault. MP3′s don’t work on your Fedora install?  It’s because of licensing restrictions man.  Never mind that they work in Windows.  Your hardware doesn’t get recognized?  It’s the man in Redomond, he won’t let hardware comapnies develop drivers for us, man.  Buy hardware that linux can recognize.  You can’t game in linux?  Sure you can, I just posted a top score on tux racer.  If you don’t like it, you need to complain to the game developers.

I could expound even further, but there’s something good on the moving picture rectangle.