I spent some time on the Ubuntu forums this week. I also
looked up the definition of the word “Ubuntu” online, it means “human kindness”
or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity,”
which makes sense for some free and open source software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)).
There were many posts in the “New to Ubuntu” forum that were
over my head, but some of them were easy enough to understand.
A post called “projector woes” piqued my interest—a
professor who is running Ubuntu on his laptop has run into problems using his
computer with projectors. This is an issue because he uses the laptop to teach
his classes. Forum moderator QIII responded to the professor’s post, asking for
hardware specs and some other information. QIII also said something I found
really interesting, “I'm going to say something that may Linux folks would
consider anathema: If we can't get this fixed, use what works -- if that's
Windows, then so be it. You have a job to do” (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2242019).
I thought this was interesting because QIII acknowledges
that sometimes certain applications or peripherals (in this case, the three
different projectors the professor uses in each of his classrooms) just work
better with a certain operating system (in this case, Windows). It’s not that
the Linux OS can’t run these things; it’s just that they’re designed to be run
by the more popular Windows OS. I was surprised that the idea that some things
work better on some operating systems would be “anathema” to Linux users. For
example, we all know that many servers run better on Linux, so why is it odd
that some projectors run better on a Windows machine? It seems like if it’s a
hassle to get the projectors to work on Linux, the options are to find a simple
workaround or use the OS on which they work better.
I don’t anticipate taking this “If it doesn’t work, then
trash it” philosophy very far in this course, but I really appreciated QIII’s
candor about the topic.
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