I have to agree with nixternal about the #1 support issue at the local store. I’ve worked professionally in IT since 2000, and our time used to be much more dedicated to setting up networks and dealing with some bugs in programs that were causing users trouble. Now a lot more of our time and energy is spent doing the following:

- Cleaning up after a malware infection (which is far worse than cleaning up after a typical virus infection)
- Mitigating malware infections

With the second, it is always an uphill battle. We constantly get complaints that so-and-so cannot install an application on their computer and therefore we are hindering their productivity to even accusations that we are working to promote our own job security by requiring them to call us to install said applications. We refuse to give blanket adminstrator access for the users to their machines, and instead only do so when some (retarded) program requires that we do so (*cough* Quickbooks, for example) or when management has been thoroughly warned about the consequences of fulfilling the request.

There is a cultural problem here that Microsoft has not figured out a real solution to. The average American does not want to have to think about what they’re doing; he simply wants the computer to do what he wants without any effort and without any thought required. Thought and minimal effort is considered bad these days (just watch TV anytime, you’ll get the drift). Windows has always shipped with the assumption that the average home user is always going to be using administrator rights at all times. It would be a big travesty if, in order to install something, the average user had to log off and log back in. Now they tried to fix this with the UAC in Vista, but I am skeptical about how well this will really fix the problem. It does the opposite – bombards the user too often with warnings that the user gets desensitized.

At least in a more unixy environment you are less likely to hose an entire system if you install or run a malicious program, and this is a difference in engineering.

And on a note about the parents never having gotten infected: A truly good virus or malware application can hide itself so well you won’t notice it. Also, even a former employee of mine always said the same thing about his own machine. He ran his machine at home (or maybe it was at a different job he was working at) without an antivirus, and eventually he did get infected. Basically, and especially on a Windows machine of any type, running on a network without any antivirus protection is like going to a brothel and not using a condom… It’s not a question of if you’re going to get a virus, it is just a matter of when.

Still, a few bring me back to this platform when I need it. I find it to be barely tolerable if I turn off all the “effects”, but still one of the most frustrating things, other than completely lacking a decent terminal, is that I can’t alt-click drag windows around to move and resize them. It’s such a simple window management task, that I often get lost and frustrated with windows installs to the point where, if I am forced to use windows even to play games, there’s usually a nice little debian VM in the background.

Also, I’m going to add to this with another feel-good story of having successfully switched my folks to Ubuntu for a solid comfortability test. So far it’s been a few weeks without any calls, but then again, maybe they *arent* using it.

Desktop Linux and Mac aren’t big enough targets yet. When and if they ever reach that point we’ll see the same results but in new ways.

As far the security of packages from a distro itself. It works now because the scale is small (per distro) and offers little to no commerical applications. I could only imagine the kind of anti-trust talk that would happen if MS switched to central repo.

The only real way a computer/os will protect the user 100% is very strong control. Authorized apps, authorized content download locations, etc. Similar to the current model many cell phones use.

I of course would never like this kind of system..

“We can lament that MS could have done more to stop the expansion of malware industry but that would gain us nothing.”

@Bane: I can honestly say I never thought about this, but it is true unfortunately.

Don’t get me wrong, I know Microsoft has done a lot for the IT world and I am thankful that they did what they did, even some of their dirty, unfair tricks to rule the world. They had the guts to try and innovate in the 90s and early 2000s. If it wasn’t for their advancement who knows where the computer world would be today.