Ubuntu Causes Girl to Drop Out of College [video] (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Causes Girl to Drop Out of College [video] (2009)

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24 pointsantfarm17 comments

I too dropped out of school because of Linux.

Mandrake quickly led me down the rabbit hole to Gentoo where I got to learn how operating systems actually work hands on by tuning and building my own from source.

My college was still trying to teach me that no computer needs more than 64MB of memory (misquoting bill gates), and the CS teachers didn't understand computers enough to use anything but windows XP.

I dropped out and continued learning software engineering, sysadmin, and security engineering on my own. Three topics no college had any current or relevant courses on at the time.

Dell was right to steer people towards operating systems that give users freedom. A subset of those users will take advantage of that freedom to learn far more about technology than their coursework will cover.

Will that make them different? Will being different require them to solve more problems themselves and rely less on others? Yes and Yes.

That is a feature, not a bug.

Reminds me of a old tech support story where someone called support when the power was out and the rep said “Do you still have the box? great, return it. You’re too stupid to own a computer.”

If we are going with humour posts I just want to add this link as a reply:

https://youtu.be/WRWrmT0ovPE

Woah, that's fucking brilliant.

Omg, is that how Americans pronounce "Ubuntu"? It's Oo-boon-to!

No, it’s how ignorant newscasters read a teleprompter. Nobody familiar with the distro says it that way.

There's nothing funny about this story. It's very plausible and could still happen today to anyone not aware that a PC laptop might be sold with something other than what they're used to. It's really a story about how crappy Dell was, first putting a 'Recommended' tag on an enthusiast configuration, then support tricking the consumer to keep at it until it was too late to RMA. On top of all that, it makes both Linux and Dell offering a Linux configuration seem bad and that's the worst part from my perspective.

The issue was with a consumer unwilling to learn how to use a tool that was totally adequate for the job.

This same story could of been made about an Apple computer the windows internet setup cd didn't work on.

I once had to go use a library computer to learn how to get the computer I had at home online before. There is always a choice other than whining to get other people to solve your problems for you.

This is from 2009.

Reposts of older content happens quite frequently on HN.

Might need a [2009] tag on the title tho.

To be fair, back in 2009, Linux was nowhere near as compatible with Windows apps as it now is.

The counter argument is tho, once she got back online, Open Office would have been good enough to do her school work in.

Probably she would open one of the Word files on the online school website, and see that the formatting is broken enough to be unreadable...

It depends on the complexity of the document, and we're talking OpenOffice from 2009, which wasn't as advanced in term of compatibility.

Given that 'antfarm is the submitter of the story, I don't think they're complaining that it's from 2009, but clarifying, i.e. they forgot to put [2009] in the title.

If you think this news was randomly picked by reporters and has nothing to do with Microsoft's PR machine, you have a lot to learn.

ksaho's comment links to a video where the Youtuber heavily implies that the reporter just wanted to meet a young and helpless woman and be a hero in front of her.

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