OneAndOneIs2

I tend to pay fairly close attention to my access stats. Not so much to the numbers of visitors per day, which doesn't change much, but more where they came in from and to.

Quite often, they've come in to that post on Linux and defragmenting. It's a very popular post, far more so than I ever expected. It's such a dry topic...

A new site showed up in the logs the other day, so I went & had a look. Turned out to be a forum where somebody had asked about the possibility of some defragger or other being ported to Linux.

There were a couple of fairly reasonable posts - the defragger relying on the Windows API and thus not being portable, and then somebody mentioning that Linux isn't supposed to need defragging anyway.

It went a bit downhill then, with comments like "Yeah, just like MS said NTFS wouldn't need defragging. Get real!" and "I don't actually know anything about the topic, but it stands to reason that Linux will fragment, and there are some defragging tools but they're old and not very good."

I usually don't bother with saying anything when I see I've been linked to on a forum. But I decided to make this an exception, so I registered & made a post saying that (a) it's not true there's no defrag tools for Linux, there are several, as listed in Wikipedia, and a new one, shake, is in active development right now; and (b) but in typical desktop use, Linux doesn't suffer from fragmentation badly enough to need one: My year-old ubuntu installation, for example, having only 1.5% of files non-contiguous. I also mentioned that if they really wanted to find out for themselves what the truth was, Linux can be installed completely free of charge, there was no reason they couldn't do their own investigations.

The end result?

Well, the 1.5% was rejected as being inaccurate even if true (which was considered unlikely) because it measured number of files rather than total data on the disk, and the claim that this tiny percentage would be at typical Windows level if measured by the right metric; The experiences of myself and huge numbers of other Linux users who've never experienced fragmentation problems were dismissed totally; and an unwavering conviction that Linux users need defrag tools every bit as badly as Windows users, we just refuse to admit it.

A light-hearted comment that, if they believed the problem was there, they should write the software to fix it, since whether they were right or wrong the community would benefit either way, was met with a frosty "You're the one saying there's no problem, YOU write a tool to fix it" - the logic of which I still struggle to understand.

But it does make you think. Encountering attitudes like that make it a lot easier to understand why people keep buying Windows. Despite all the BSODs, the viruses, the malware, the need for firewalls and defrag tools, they still maintain that Windows is the best OS.

No viruses? That's just because it's a smaller target! - You can accept this argument, at least, even if you don't agree with it.

But when the best response they can come up with is outright denial of the possibility that Linux just doesn't have some of the problems Windows does? Even if the alternative is free and has legions of admirers, they'll refuse to even consider trying it.

Some people deserve to be stuck with Microsoft products. I wish them all the joy that Vista can bring them. And their bank manager ;o)