twitter's Journal: Mythbuster Recommends Ubuntu over Vista.

Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman pans almost everything about non free software and sees Ubuntu as an ideal escape. Vista takes a hit as the pinnacle of all that is wrong. The article page is headlined with an image of a crashing Vista install and is derided as buggy and bloated. The whole thing is worth quoting.

Computer operating systems loaded with stuff I don't want and will never use.

In the tech world this phenomenon is known as software bloat or feature bloat. It's a well-documented problem and a frequent complaint about Windows OSsVista in particular. In addition to being buggy, the extra features tend to bog down your system by demanding more processing power and memory. Computer-makers: Don't load up operating systems with features and then make us sweat to figure out how to get rid of the fat.

Most features can be set up as options. Why not start with a computer loaded with basic stuff that works 100 percent of the time? Then, give us the option of adding the bells and whistles. There's another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since most Linux OSs are free, there's no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.

And high-tech companiesstop messing with us on your treadmill of upgrades while making the old stuff obsolete. It may be that any software company that didn't routinely upgrade its product would go out of business. But what if the rest of the world worked this way? Oh, I lost a sock. I need to get a whole new wardrobe because the replacement sock is version 2.0.1, and the stores now only sell version 2.0.3.

It's hard for most gnu/linux users to imagine a distribution that comes with less software and features than Vista does, but the world is catching on to the root of the problem. Sooner or later they will figure out that free software is not just the best solution, it's the only solution.

Discussion is here