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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Lot's of comments (1600) on Heise: https://www.heise.de/forum/heise-online/News-Kommentare/Von-...

Several comments mention "läuft wie geschmiert" which can be translated as mobbed-up / bribed.

While someone being "geschmiert" does mean they were bribed, "läuft wie geschmiert" translates to things running smoothly (like a well-oiled machine).

If you know German, it's the double meaning of the word, it's sarcasm. If you just look at the Duden dictionary, your findings are technically true.

Must be an international thing. In my country as well the act of "oiling gears" means giving bribes in order to obtain something and/or speed up the process by having your papers put on top of the pile.

I'm German (born, raised and lived in Munich) and I do not associate "Läuft wie geschmiert" with bribe. To me it has only one meaning, which is "running smoothly". In this context I'd guess the person said that Linux runs smoothly and from a technical point of view there is no reason to switch to Windows.

I wouldn't take a willingness of many people to accuse someone of a crime as evidence of it. It's also counterproductive, furthering the believe that "all politicians are corrupt" without evidence. If that's the reaction you get for any decision that is mildly controversial, you may actually start considering it.

There's also Occam's razor: less than 2% of people choose Linux on the desktop. Maybe it's just not that good for this purpose.

Linux advocacy has also changed. It's now so entrenched on the server that the quest to get it on desktops is less relevant. A lot of the OSS advocacy was also aimed at proprietary formats, and the web (mostly google docs) has increased competition for MS Office more than OpenOffice ever dreamt of.

I rather have proprietary formats on my hard disk, than open formats stored on someone's else computer.

why? I fail to see the logic, both are bad.

Yes both are bad, hence I rather choose the less bad one.

The one where I am productive and don't expose my data to third parties like Google.

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