But that's not the point at all, and running a Linux OS like Ubuntu doesn't require any tinkering with the workings of your computer unless you want to.A_Northern_Soul wrote:I'm with Ian on this; I don't buy the argument that we should all be using Linux or whatever and tinkering about with the workings of our computers, and that anyone who just wants the damn thing to work is some kind of Luddite.
I didn't mean to give off that impression.
It's this whole "it just works" thing that bothers me the most. My father used to say it a lot, who switched from a PC to Mac. His experiences were mainly with horrible computers sold for 400 dollars or less (so essentially, 150 dollar computers) from retail stores like Best Buy or Circuit City. I showed him the computer that I had built ran just fine. I also explained that a computer with the same hardware as the iMac he had purchased for 2000$ (some sort of dual core Intel processor and an Nvidia 8800, this was a few years ago so I can't remember exactly) would have run just fine as well. I also showed him browsers like Firefox and Chromium that completely eliminated all of his problems with his internet browsing, media players like VLC and Media Player Classic that ran all of the files he needed to without ever having to install a codec and I showed him most of the Windows key commands. I saw him use my computer without ever encountering a problem that whole day, doing everything he normally does.
Somewhere along the line though, he jumped back to the persisting statement of "Mac just works", attributing all of the faults of his horrible, old PC to Windows itself, as though he completely forgot.
I see this all the time from Apple users. It bothers me when people who don't know the reason why what they have "works" in contrast to what else they had attribute it to entirely the wrong thing.
I understand the argument for it. Going to the car analogy, it would be one thing if it were like buying a car you pay extra for so that you don't have to maintain it. However, would you still pay extra for that car if there were another one you could pay half the price for and wouldn't have to maintain either, provided you do nothing stupid like burn out the clutch and run it while the oil is low? If the answer is that going that little extra distance to learn how to use it properly is too much for those who are not "technically minded" then I'm not sure I can support that.
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