Go freeze in the dark. I have put my writing on my resume for many years. I never had any employer question my integrity. I back up my statements with evidence and can demonstrate GNU/Linux and that other OS side-by-side any time. I have never had anyone see the demonstration conclude that GNU/Linux was an inferior OS.

The PCs had 72MB RAM and were Pentium Pros. Certainly they could run the OS reasonably well. The OS just would not keep running. They were HP name-brand machines and quite solid. Hard drives were ~800MB-1gB, just large enough to hold all the software and a bit of data. So, they certainly exceeded your phony requirements. I found a manual for one… They were shipped with Lose ’95.

Joey Lawrence wrote, “I call either BS, or gross incompetence.”

You are the ignorant one, coming to my blog and accusing anyone of publishing BS or of being incompetent. How was it that I, being so incompetent was able to get the (sarcasm) very difficult to use GNU/Linux working on five machines in a couple of days and had them run without modification for months to great satisfaction? Those machines were old already but were used for years in that school.

More or less true, but “Which applications?”. I don’t need M$’s office suite nor its server so I don’t need M$’s OS. No one needs M$’s office suite who just wants to create/modify/publish documents, something that most OS can do. No one needs PhotoShop. People got along just fine before it existed and they can after. A few people may find it convenient to use it if they specialize in printing in colour but those are few. Most images are published on the web these days. Indeed, look what Adobe charges for a licence and divide that into revenue. You find only a minority of PCs have that applications. We could go down a long list and find most people have no need of that other OS. Proof are the many organizations that don’t run it. Where I live a lot of people run M$’s OS only because they found it on retail shelves. Lots of people don’t even have a printer.

John Stamos wrote, ““Imagine a world with no M$ or equivalent. GNU/Linux could exist and thrive and all the world’s IT could get done well.”

Truly spoken as someone who’s never set foot near a real corporate deployment.”

Hmmm… You do realize that most people work self-employed or in small businesses, right? So, I’m in the majority. In fact I have been a student and worked in schools that were very large. I have yet to see any organization that had to have M$’s OS on every PC. In fact, we see more PCs selling without it (counting smart phones and tablets as PCs).

The largest school in which I have worked had 4000 students, more than 100 teachers and six principals. No one needed that other OS. The largest organization I have worked for was the Government of Nunavut in the PC-era and no one needed that other OS although most used it. Before the PC-era I worked in an hospital with 3000 employees and all the work got done without M$ anywhere, so don’t tell me M$ is essential or that an application that only runs on M$’s OS is essential. They are not.

Speaking of real corporate deployments, how about Google, eh? Or IBM, eh? Or Munich, eh?

NB: The preceding image was brought to you by “convert junk.png -crop 300×220+200 google_2012-10-23.png” . PS was not required.
QED

That’s a shitty analogy, you don’t run a country like it’s a business. There are different considerations that simply making money for the shareholders.

“One can find equivalent applications or create ones, thus making GNU/Linux perfectly suitable for all cases.”

Unless, of course, there is no suitable alternative application, or a case where the OS just isn’t well suited for (for example, the 8-bit microcontrollers, that neither Linux for Windows proper will run on, those things that power the devices these higher level OSes run on, traditionally the territory of QNX, VxWorks and proprietary firmwares). Nothing is “perfectly” suitable for all use cases.

“The purpose of an OS is to manage resources of computers, including applications. The purpose of an OS does not have to be to run a particular application.”

What you describe is the purpose of an OS’s kernel, the purpose of an OS to to complete a given task, in real, practical terms, that tends to mean running a given application. While that doesn’t *have* to be its purpose, it doesn’t change that in the vast majority of cases it is. The OS is a glorified paperweight with no applications.

“If your purpose is to run malware and re-re-reboot, I stand corrected, but I doubt that is the case.”

Except that this isn’t the case in a properly maintained and secured system. And why rebooting is a dirty word in the Linux world is beyond me, uptimes are less important than availability, and Linux systems need to be occasionally rebooted as well, in the setting of an enterprise or organization, for the same reason as Windows machines: usually hardware and OS upgrades.

“Imagine a world with no M$ or equivalent. GNU/Linux could exist and thrive and all the world’s IT could get done well.”

Truly spoken as someone who’s never set foot near a real corporate deployment.

The purpose of the education system is to educate people, to transmit knowledge, not to indoctrinate. I can only assume that you’re way up in the Manitoban boonies where half-competent teachers and technicians are so hard to come upon, they settled on you.

I mean, do you seriously spout the kind of vitriolic overly zealous nonsense you do here, in your classroom? You’d last a week tops, out east.

Wow, refurbished computers in excellent condition and perfectly functioning, but lacking the (recommended, not minimum) 8mb ram and 386DX (released in 1985) required for Win95?

I call either BS, or gross incompetence.

The purpose of an OS is to manage resources of computers, including applications. The purpose of an OS does not have to be to run a particular application. One can find equivalent applications or create ones, thus making GNU/Linux perfectly suitable for all cases. That many adopt a strategy of using that other OS for 5-20% of applications in an organization is a compromise, not an essential choice. Some organizations do go 100% GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is fit for purpose. If your purpose is to run malware and re-re-reboot, I stand corrected, but I doubt that is the case.

A “thought experiment” is sufficient to disprove oldman’s thesis. Imagine a world with no M$ or equivalent. GNU/Linux could exist and thrive and all the world’s IT could get done well.

Last time I checked governments were some of the largest businesses in most countries and the ordinary people are their share-holders. The government of Brazil did not outlaw M$’s stuff which freely sells there. All they did was ensure a market existed for FLOSS and that market thrived. One could equally state that the government of USA allowed M$ to stifle competition even though that was illegal. That’s a governmental “fiat”, too.

My own government subsidizes the shipping of Wintel PCs to schools which I promptly pave over with FLOSS at every opportunity. That’s a government “fiat” too. Certainly the schools don’t want to work for M$ for $0 training students to use that crap and be exposed to malware the rest of their lives. That’s not the purpose of schools.