I have actually used Linux on a server for quite a while. And it has worked well. Then again, the server is made of very old hardware and isn't required to do anything fancy.
But as for workstations? Worst. "Operating" System. Ever.
Today I had the pleasure of learning how to recover data from a disintegrated reiserfs partition. And no, the included tools didn't know what the fuck to do with it; they just told me to do this and do that and then they told me that it still doesn't work. Surprise. Oh yeah, they also blamed me for resizing the partition. Too bad for them that I had never resized a reiserfs partition in my life.
One would expect a stable version of reiserfs - which has been around for like 6 years - to actually work. With a stable, long term support version of Ubuntu. With a version of Beagle that is coming from the official repositories of the said Dapper Drake distribution. Well, it fucking doesn't.
Yesterday, I had a nice 30GB /home. Then I installed Beagle. Which worked well. After that - this morning to be exact, Beagle had been indexing during the night - I rebooted into Windows, then I turned my computer off and went to work. I came back from work. Ubuntu wouldn't boot, because reiserfs couldn't find superblock on /dev/mapper/pdc_blahblah (it's a on a pseudo software RAID-0, that's why it's a mapped device). Or to be exact, Ubuntu would boot, of course, as the /root was still working as it should. It's just not very useful if your /home has vanished.
I did as the crappy included tools told me, and it achieved absolutely nothing. Well, it did find a superblock - since I had created one - but couldn't mount the partition due to excessive corruption.
So, I booted into Windows XP. Which is an Operating System. That implies that it actually, you know, Operates. Like works. Doesn't bork all the time. Doesn't lose my data. And funnily enough, a Windows based data recovery program can read the partition enough to get the most important stuff from there. A recovery program that has a price tag of >$400, but I'm not feeling particularly bad about "borrowing" a copy for personal use. Hey, if they sue me, I'll just send the bill to Namesys or Canonical. They are the ones who fucked up my data to begin with.
But seriously, this if fucking unbelievable. I've used PCs with hard disks in them for more than 15 years. Prior to this, I have lost a partition once. Read that again; once. And it wasn't even a real partition, just a virtual one, created with the Almighty (heh heh) DoubleSpace, in MS-DOS 6.22 I think. I have never even seen a seriously corrupted NTFS partition, they seem to be able to take a severe beating and just... work.
Not so with reiserfs. Which is supposedly far superior to NTFS. Of course, it's an Open Source shit, after all.
I seriously think that lifeless nerds and murderers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser) should just stop dabbling with this programming shit and leave it to people who actually know how to program. Like Mel (http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html). I bet Mel could make a great OS.
With the introduction of Visva, Linux has the change of a lifetime to make its break to the desktops of masses. But bitches, it won't happen like this. You have to first get your act together.
Thus, I shall commemorate this occasion with my latest piece of "art":
(http://borgborg.org/linux_small.jpg) (http://borgborg.org/linux.jpg)
PS. Don't even get me started about how plugging my cellphone into USB port will cause a kernel panic. Because that would imply that the Linux sucks. Oh wait...