Time for a rant, the Digg crowd has been annoying me for some time, it's the same old anti-Microsoft Linux and Mac crowds, only probably some of the least mature out of them. I've just noticed that in the technology section the following was in the top 10 'Vote to have Linux Dell PCs available Worldwide'.
What the hell? How come something like that possibly get in the top 10.
So we come to Dell's IdeaStorm, this was a website set up by Dell so customers could make suggestions to them, it started off great and has had many good suggestions for Dell to make, like having options to not pre-load PCs with lots of bloatware.
However it was abused by a lot of Linux zealots, who have frankly wrecked it with endless anti-Microsoft nonsense. It started off with a suggestion for Dell to sell PCs with Linux pre-installed (they have done this in the past), thousands of Linux fans signed up just to vote saying they would love to buy a machine with Linux on. So after a few months Dell released such a system, it was something like $200 more expensive than a system with Windows on it (not surprising when you have to consider the additional support costs Dell would have to manage).
Now I have no objections to Dell selling PCs with Linux on, but IdeaStorm has been ruined, all the other great ideas like not having lots of pre-loaded bloatware installed get swamped by thousands of these zealots, despite them being in the minority, that isn't how a democracy works.
Now what are they doing? Trying to get the Linux PCs sold worldwide, I really hope Dell has the sense not to decide this based on their troll-infested IdeaStorm website. How are the trolls doing this? By using multiple accounts and legions of anti-Microsoft children and/or trolls to cover the web in links to this post on IdeaStorm.
For Dell, who were lead on to believe they'd get significant sales from having Linux installed on PCs, I'm sure are not happy about this, all those anti-Microsoft children, with their 6 different accounts voting and leaving comments like 'I'd buy a Dell Linux PC', and then Dell only sell about 7 systems.
Come on grow up, there are so many more pressing matters in the world you lot can direct your energies into, instead of childish OS rivalries and trying to flood every community on the web with your propaganda.
Some of the worse cases coming from the Microsoft support newsgroups, where perhaps a dozen of these trolls hang around urging people to download and install Linux. In many cases these aren't computer savvy users, yet they're being told to format and install Linux, led to believe all their problems would go away. The trolls don't stay around afterwards to hear that their computer won't boot anymore, or that even if they can get Linux installed, none of their hardware works properly, or they can't get on the internet anymore.
This shows how utterly stupid the trolls are, by pushing Linux on the mainstream at this point in time, when Linux is utterly not ready for the mainstream, they're only creating a bad reputation. These people, normal every day computer users, who have been duped into installing Linux, will probably never go near it again, and when one of their friends talks about it, they'll just repeat their bad experiences like 'I had to edit all these texts files for 3 days just to get my modem to work and then the browser kept crashing and I had to pay £100 to pay somebody to fix my computer and put Windows back on it'.
I think we need to start a campaign 'Say no to Linux trolls', heck I'd be willing to bet most Linux trolls run Windows anyway.