OneAndOneIs2

There are a number of classic lies. "The cheque is in the post" for instance. The promise of the upgrade fixing all ills is, IMHO, a modern-day addition.

But sometimes you DO get a big improvement when you get the new version. I seemed to achieve that when, some time ago, I re-wrote what's possibly the most notorious of my articles ever, Linux is not Windows

The history of this article is long and complex, and it begins with my hobby of scuba diving. There are many and varied "holy wars" within the world of diving, that rival even "vi or emacs?", and many topics recur on the forums with dull monotony. Questions about some bit of dive gear, or about some methodology or other...

I got sick of posting replies to the same tired old questions, so I wrote a bunch of web pages and started linking to them when needed. It seemed to work. A complete buying guide was moderately popular, but the most linked-to article was on a bit of equipment I never liked at all, called the HUB

So when I stopped reading those forums so much and started dwelling instead on places like LinuxQuestions, I carried the habit over and wrote rebuttal articles to the repeated questions.

And one time, there were a whole load of posts in one go where people were complaining that Linux was crap because they'd had trouble using it, and they'd had trouble using it because it didn't do everything the same way that Windows does.

So they'd spent hours scouring the web for drivers, only to be told that a couple of clicks on the package manager would have done it all for them. And then they'd gotten angry with the concept of package managers because Windows doesn't have one. And then they'd called it a flaw of Linux that it has package managers to automate software installation.

So I wrote a short article gently pointing out that actually, holding up examples of differences between the two OSes as evidence that one is crap is a non-argument. It explained that the two were different, that they were MEANT to be different, and that nobody was interested in being told about a load of problems that were in fact just differences.

So I wrote the article and linked it in a few places where these threads had started. And sadly, instead of accepting the concept it tried to explain, the trolls (for such they were, IMHO) started nitpicking and inventing arguments that proved why the article was wrong or stupid.

So in a genuine attempt to make the article as clear and comprehensive as possible, I started adding to it and editing it to address their misperceptions and deliberate mistakes.

And so it began to deteriorate, as it grew ever larger and less cohesive. In attempting to refute trollish statements, it began to sound abrasive and elitist. It became a total mess.

Worse, it became a mess that was so firmly-established that I couldn't even try to tidy it up: Apart from anything else, it had been translated by then into TEN other languages. (Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Portugese, Finnish, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Dutch) and it was such a sprawling mess that there was nowhere to really begin.

And its poorly constructed, elitist, arrogant, condescending style won me a huge amount of hate-mail and derogatory comments. I started to hate the article almost as much as the people who wrote to me about it, and the only reason I didn't just wipe it off the face of the Web was that I also got a few emails from people who said they'd found it useful.

But it was an itch that I just HAD to scratch. Eventually, I could stand it no longer. It HAD to be fixed! And there was only the Gordian Knot solution.

I went through the whole messy article and made a note of the worthwhile points it contained. I worked out all the other points it should contain but didn't. And then I planned out what I wanted it to say, and how I wanted to say it.

Only then, when I had the whole article sketched out from start to finish, did I start to write the replacement for the unplanned, mutated, evolution-gone-mad original. I wrote it, I read and re-wrote it, and I polished it here and there for several weeks. Only when I was sure that it was as good as I could get it and nothing remained that I could do to it did I pull the old version 1.9.9.9, and on May 24 2006, the new and improved version 2.0 went online.

As a reflection of how successful the rewrite process had been, there's been no need for a 2.1 since, and the feedback I've had from this version has been almost universally positive. Such as the most recent comment left today, the latest in a line of more than two hundred other commenters.

If only the upgrade from XP to Vista had been such a noticeable improvement, eh?