How many computer scientists…

I love Windows. Windows XP is an amazing operating system. Vista was a bit of a disaster but then it was always going to be when it had to follow XP, possibly the best operating system ever in the history of computing.

If you’re thinking this is heading towards a Linux bashing blog post, you’d be right 😉 .

I mean seriously, all I want to do is play media. The kind of thing you can do fresh out of the box on any Windows install. Let’s ignore the fact I’ve been trying to get Ubuntu to play DVDs for years. Let’s just take a look at what happened on Saturday.

I brought up a computer to use as a media computer to play through the sound system so we could access all the music. Actually I bought two, an Ubuntu box and a Fedora box. Two distros, one of them must be able to play a simple MP3 file right?

Of course, given the nature of my writing, they couldn’t. What was really interesting though was not the fact that Linux can’t even play MP3s out of the box, but how hard it is to get Linux to play them. It took us three, count them, three, computer scientists sat round for an hour to get them playing. So you can’t even use the excuse “oh it’s just you Chris” because there were three of us trying to work this one out.

We managed to get it working in the end, albeit it not very well though I’m not sure if that was Fedora’s fault or not so I’m not holding it accountable for that one. But there you go, XP for the win.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.