The question is, who doesn't?

I argue that he wasn't seeing dwarves or midgets, but penguins.

Well, other than the JW guys, I wouldn't call those things "bad luck". Vivid dreams are our natural state of being. Once you can take over the realms of your dreams, you can champion any kind of reality. I'd recommend slow, long breathing exercise, or meditation.

😐 serious.

Keep calm and stay on Linux.

Yup. So I stay the hell away from it.

IMO Linux is a waste of time unless you are really into it for whatever reason. I find Windows the easiest. 😀

Most Likely Scenario: The guy ended up with a serious medical problem that caused him to start to hallucinate at roughly the same time he started using Linux, thus he feels like the two events are connected.

Least Likely Scenario: Aliens.

I feel strangely euphoric at a Linux console.
Is that a sign of mental illness too?

I remember I used to have a real hell of a time installing linux in the mid 90s. You practically had to be a programmer to do it.

I think your friend is on drugs. Maybe the Jehovah's Witnesses slipped something in his drink.

Funny story time.

In the mid-90s I used to think everyone who used Linux was a satanist. Yeah, sounds really weird and bizarre, but just about every person I encountered online for a good year or so used the OS. It was one hell of a coincidence. (pun intended)

It creeps me out to this day.

Back to the topic on hand. I sometimes wonder if the folks behind *NIX purposely went out of their way to make things hard. By far the most baffling is text editors. Really, MS-DOS EDIT is more intuitive at the job of editing simple text and config files (which you will be doing a lot of) than most *NIX text editors. I know I got the emacs diehards all in a huff with that statement, but I could care less if your text editor is so flexible that it doubles as a web browser. I just want to change one line and get out with having to learn stupid multiple key sequence commands for saving and such. I mean really, most Linux books had CHAPTERS dedicated to teaching the task of editing text.

NJRoadfan wrote:

In the mid-90s I used to think everyone who used Linux was a satanist. Yeah, sounds really weird and bizarre, but just about every person I encountered online for a good year or so used the OS. It was one hell of a coincidence. (pun intended)

The BSD mascot is a little devil, of course. See also http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/new89/satan.773.html which has been circulating for years.

Anyway, any time I start to use Linux I end up screaming bloody murder before much time has elapsed.

Back to the topic on hand. I sometimes wonder if the folks behind *NIX purposely went out of their way to make things hard. By far the most baffling is text editors. Really, MS-DOS EDIT is more intuitive at the job of editing simple text and config files (which you will be doing a lot of) than most *NIX text editors. I know I got the emacs diehards all in a huff with that statement, but I could care less if your text editor is so flexible that it doubles as a web browser. I just want to change one line and get out with having to learn stupid multiple key sequence commands for saving and such. I mean really, most Linux books had CHAPTERS dedicated to teaching the task of editing text.

If you want a nice simple *nix text editor, "nano" is fairly standard and gets the job done nicely. Also, have you seen MS-DOS EDLIN?

My favorite example has always been "dir /?", which in MS-DOS presents you with a compact screenful of information telling you everything you need to know, whereas "man ls" goes on for pages upon pages and ls --help won't even bother to pause after each screen of information.

nano is a GNU implementation of pico. Its easy to use, but the problem is that I have run into machines that don't have it installed by default for some reason.... unlike say vi, which is for some reason universally installed on every *NIX I have ever encountered. Edlin is very much like vi in that its a line editor. IBM didn't learn their lesson though, PC-DOS 6.1 came with that stupid "E" editor.

Don't remind me of man pages. I'll just leave this here.

I know where Randall is coming from with that comic. It took me a good half hour to just figure out how to extract a tar file! I can't say I have created a single tar archive from the command line either.

Where I've found linux is awful is in dealing with graphics drivers, monitor resolutions, sound card drivers, wireless nic drivers - if I have to deal with these it usually means an upcoming sequence of: googling and getting nowhere - asking on forums - cursing linux elitist attitudes - reformatting - installing windows.

I used to play Half-Life through Wine on Arch Linux and now it can run natively. Linux is getting better on desktops and I love it. 😊

NJRoadfan wrote:

IBM didn't learn their lesson though, PC-DOS 6.1 came with that stupid "E" editor.

What's wrong with E? I've actually never used the PC-DOS 6 version, but I liked the older E3 which was my go-to editor in DOS before the EDIT days... even then, it had a bunch of features that EDIT never provided as far as I can recall (rectangular block selection and such).

I use Linux, Solaris and AIX as part of my job, and I dont really find it as awful as people here make it out to be.

Its kind of ironic that this forum full of DOS fans has the audacity to claim any other OS is difficult and unintuitive... 😀 Linux is hardly worse than DOS, but is an order of magnitude more powerful.

In fairness, I only use it at the shell. I dont use X or any GUI. But if you try to make it do the same things as Windows, you wont have a good time as its fundamentally different.

Its complex because its powerful. Try learning Powershell, its more difficult than Linux for a beginner and Microsoft is pushing all their products towards it.

If you want a purposely difficult OS look up IBM Z/OS - designed in the days when a computer's time was more valuable than a human's 😀

I started using Linux at first because my lover wanted me to do thing differently, been using it ever since I noticed performance improvements in various minute things... like networking and the fact Wine tends to run some of my games a hell of alot better than native windows, how does that work!?

I think everyone's response of Linux is pretty mature. I mean, yeah, you can write programs to do things that are impossible with Windows, but when it comes to actually getting the job done, DOS/Windows is always going to do it. Microsoft Office, Notepad, Powerpoint, Adobe Photoshop; those are all used by professional workers, businesses, government agencies, you name it.

Pretty much the only place you'll see Linux used is really private organizations and industries. Those places probably have proprietary software developed in house for specialized operations; their software is most likely closed source and nobody in the world knows anything about it, except in house-development and authorized personnel. Could be military, NASA, or PIXAR (can you say Toy Story?). Linux is probably used as simple servers and proxies too.

BTW I haven't heard back from my friend yet... Maybe I should tell him to stay home more often?...

I've been using Linux as my daily OS for over 10 years now. I like it, but I'm strange, and like total control over my OS. I don't recommend it to anyone who isn't ready for it.

Linux is too fragmented on the desktop to even be considered a challenger to Windows in the mainstream. Even amongst the Linux elite, we can't even agree on which Desktop is the best (Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCe, and 100s of variants). Then there are the plethora of distros that change package managers and tweak things in their own ways. It is enough to drive you crazy, and that is probably what happened to your poor friend.

BTW, if you are curious to what I run, I currently run Debian with MATE desktop.

Linux used to be a royal pain in the ass about 15-20 years ago.
With some of the friendlier distributions like Mint or Ubuntu,
unless you have some pressing need for Windows apps, Linux will
do you nicely. I keep a live version on a flash drive for
emergencies. While I don't think there will be a Linux year of the
desktop anytime soon, I do think that if all you do is fart around on the web
and Facebook and send emails, you could probably use Linux as your main OS
now. Where Linux falls down is availability of software that passes the
mom test. I tried getting my parents onto Linux but they didn't care for it.
But some hardware is very finicky with Linux, unfortunately.