Not what we signed up for

[desperance]

Just en passant: it must be, oh, eight years? ten years, maybe? - since I first started playing with Linux as an operating system. How it happened, a little bit of history: I spent most of the nineties bitchin' about Windows, hating the whole mouse-and-icon philosophy of computing (I was never a programmer - oh, except when I was eight years old, which doesn't count - but definitely a DOS power-user). I was a typist, and command lines were native to me; when I wanted to delete something, I liked to type 'delete'. Dragging a picture of a folder onto a picture of a trash bin was demeaning, it made an idiot out of me. So I kvetched about this. A lot. And my friends got bored with hearing it, and two of them separately (Geoff Ryman, this is your fault) told me that if I was serious, I should investigate Linux. This being back in the day, when Linux was still entirely a command-line system, no GUI extant.

So I did, and fell entirely in love with computers again, and I've been a Linux man ever since (tho' definitely not a hacker, not a power user, I only scrabble at the edges). But anyway, in brief, hatred of Microsoft and all its works drove me into the arms of Linux - and more specifically, into the arms of Suse, the particular distribution I use. Which was a cute friendly German company, only a couple of years ago it was bought by Novell. Which now has a badge proudly displayed on its Linux front page, "Microsoft endorses Suse Linux Enterprise". I think Microsoft owns a chunk of Novell, so it kind of makes sense, but - aaaargh!