Xieroth
RealPoor Sensei
Joined: 17 Oct 2002
Posts: 1902
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 Posted: 01/23/05 - 11:57 Post subject: Linux Smells..
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I saw this on /. I laughed my ass off.
It started about a week ago. I’m a computer science major at a local university so I decided to give Linux a try. Up until now, I had been happy running Microsoft Windows XP Professional on my desktop, an x86 machine. I proceeded to gentoo.org and downloaded the newest release, burned it (a live CD), popped it in and rebooted my computer.
After a short boot, the system came up to a bash prompt. I started following the directions on the Gentoo site to compile the operating system from scratch. Hours passed; days, even. I ate, breathed and slept Linux these days. My system was finally back up and running, with the newest kernel and all the trimmings.
As time went by, I began to like Linux much more. However, I did begin to notice a disturbing trend; I began to skip showers. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to retain my hygiene; I just didn’t have the time. Between recompiling my kernel to support keyboard input and recompiling X to display video output on two screens at once, I did not have time to take a shower. Not only that, but I didn’t want to take showers.
After a month lacking a shower, I started to wonder, are there other Linux “enthusiasts” who have forsaken hygiene for their operating system? I found a local LUG to find out. Coincidentally, that night I stepped into a talk being given by Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda and Jon “CowboyNeal” Pater, with a special guest being Linus Torvaulds, the author of Linux.
I asked them, when you began to run Linux full-time, what happened to your showering habits? They all responded to me in turn. Rob said that, being an ugly, zit-faced n**d all of his life, he never saw much of a point to taking showers. He said that they were “usless” and that “people in Europe didn’t take them anyway, which is where Linus is from so it’s all good.”
Pater just stared at me blankly; apparently he did not understand the question. I began to think he might be having a medical problem of some sort when he quickly flipped out a hamburger from between his stomach rolls and chomped down on it, complaining about how difficult it was to fit his obese body in a shower stall.
Linus, however, had the most interesting answer. He told me about his childhood in Switzerland, the country of his origin. He said how it was a custom in Switzerland to not take showers; everyone was filthy in his home country. He watched people on television taking showers and wondered what it was all about, so he took one once on a weekend trip to Spain with his boyfriend at the time. He found it revolting; without the fumes caused by body odor, he could think clearly and not in his Swiss cheese induced haze. He began to hate those with proper hygiene and wondered, how could he stop it? How could he prevent the automaton of cleanliness from dominating the country?
His solution was simple. He was somewhat gifted on his feet and had a quick mind, and he had somewhat of an ability with programming and computers. He bought a plane ticket bound for Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States. There, he infiltrated SCO’s world headquarters and stole the source code to UNIX, SCO’s operating system crown jewel. Back in Switzerland on holiday with his boyfriend, he changed a few variable names and repackaged it as Linux. But, in an effort to further his means, he took the features out of the operating system that were useful and replaced them with convoluted Makefiles and ncurses-based interfaces. These diversions were put in for one reason alone; to take up so much time that no one could run Linux and maintain the proper hygiene from showers.
Through an amazing amount of luck, Linux has permeated the Internet; but, its use does not come without a cost. Specifically, when we run Linux, we can’t take showers. We can’t brush our teeth. We can’t comb our hair.
Why, you ask? Simple – because Linux is an operating system for people who don’t take showers by people who don’t take showers.
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