Stan Beer wrote a piece at iTWire, bravely titled Ubuntu fanboys on Linux Today arise for wireless input rant. It's a reaction to comments he received after writing his earlier article, in which he described his problems with Ubuntu recognizing his wireless mice and keyboard. In this editorial, I'll try to explain why his second piece is wrong, where he's abusing the facts, why the response he got is his own fault and that the whole deal is a rather cheap shot at getting traffic.

First of all, let me say what's wrong with the original article. Mr. Beer practically asked for negative comments. I finished reading his second article with an impression that Mr. Beer asked for help and was badly treated by people who replied. This was not the case. He didn't ask for help, instead published the article at a site which doesn't allow users to post comments and - on top of that - wrote things that aren't necessarily true. The piece starts with the following words:

Hands up all PC users who have a wireless mouse and keyboard [...]

I didn't have to look far to falsify that statement - my wireless mouse works without any problems. I didn't need to hack anything besides plugging it in. The original article has some other statements that aren't true (probably due to author's lack of knowledge, I don't have a reason to suspect that they were intentional), but it's outside of the scope of my editorial. The article was quoted on another site and that's where those problematic comments were made. So commenters weren't really replying to the writer himself. He didn't ask for help, which is another reason for commenters to post their opinions and not answers to his problem. He made a shortcut - found a problem, didn't do much to solve it (besides googling... Ubuntu Forums are where his next step should be) and went straight to claiming "you can't use Linux if you have wireless input devices". Every single time I asked a technical question on UF, I was guided to the working solution. The only negative feedback I managed to get was when I asked a question which was repeadetly answered and easy to find. Even then, it was a kind notice.

Now lets get to the second article. It's entitled Ubuntu fanboys on Linux Today arise for wireless input rant. Those unfortunate comments were made on a non-distro-specific site, thus their authors didn't have anything to do with Ubuntu. I see it as an attempt to attract more visitors - Ubuntu is a hot topic and it's much easier to grab attention when you write about it.

The use of term "fanboy" is an exaggeration as well. Some are a bit offensive, but not all of them. Some (including the very first one) are what can only be called a constructive criticism. If anything, some posters were childish elitists. In fact, While Linux in general has a fair share of fanboys (as every movement built around ideals), Ubuntu community seems to attract less fanboyism, as the distribution itself lacks a radical approach to anything - be it pureness of Debian, l33tness of Slackware or do-everything-by-yourself-and-have-a-perfect-setup approach of Gentoo. Not that any of those things are bad - I'm just saying that these ideals attract a greater number of "vocal" users (which are still a tiny minority).

I'm still amused by how a handful (less then 10!) of negative comments made by a pretty much random users served as a material for a full-blown article article on how nasty Ubuntu community is.

Also, he assumes that commenters had knowledge about things he didn't write in the first article. One of them criticized Beer for not thinking that the problem might be in the manufacturer of malfunctioning hardware, which is Microsoft. MS has a long history of actively making sure their products will not work well with products of their competitors (it took me 20 seconds to find the first example). In his second article, Beer says that devices are made by Logitech and simply re-branded by MS. It remains unknown to me how the commenter was supposed to know this.

Mr. Beer didn't bother to reply to the ones he disliked so much. Instead, he decided it's better to write another article, again on the site that doesn't allow anyone to comment on. And now folks like me somehow make it to read the piece at iTWire and leave with the same impression - a guy had a problem and found nothing but abuse when trying to solve it.

And finally, there are comments to the follow-up article. I read them all (well, only those posted prior to me writing this words - Ubuntu lets me do many things, seeing the future isn't one of them ;) ) and haven't found a single one that would be offending in any way. In fact, I found them to be more responsible then Mr. Beer's article. There were people apologizing for their comments posted to the first article, some simply agreed with the author, others didn't, saying he made a story out of nothing. One of them would certainly get +5 insightful on Slashdot. Stan wrote:

but it’s also clear that you don’t actually understand the base concept of the open source movement.
This base concept is called ‘contribution’.
The idea is that if you see a problem with an open source component, what you do is investigate and attempt to determine if there is a fix, and if you can’t see one – then you post a request for assistance on a blog or a forum and include all the stuff you found when attempting to fix.
In this way, even if you don’t get a result – any one else coming up against the same problem can see what doesn’t work for you.
In this way, you’ve made a contribution. A small one, but nevertheless it’s still a contribution.

Why were they different from comments to the first article? My guess is that the second article - while IMHO still not fair - at least raised an issue (fanboyism). The first one just angered those who bothered to make an effort and make a comment.

Mr. Beer, you claim to be a IT pro with 25 years of experience in IT. Moreover, you say your blog is in a "in-your-face" style. You should know by now that the Internet is a populated by people of all personalities and ages, writing whatever they want. All you did was write that Ubuntu sucks and its community will eat any newcomers alive. Luckily, none fo this is true.