TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH sits at a table eating lunch with FAITH and HACKER-LAD arguing on either side of him.) FAITH: ...and how can you stand using those cryptic command names..? HACKER-LAD: Heh..! At least there ARE command names! BASTICH: (Thinking) Terrific. I'm stuck in the middle of another OS war. Maybe if I just concentrate on eating I can shut it out...
PANEL 2 (Another angle showing the back of HACKER-LAD's backwards baseball cap, which reads "SMACK YOUR MAC".) HACKER-LAD: If I want to delete a directory in Linux I just type 'rm -r *' and it's gone. On the Mac, I have to drag the little folder icon into the trash can and tell it 57 times that "Yes, I'm absolutely CERTAIN I want to delete the file," and then I have to tell it to "empty" the trash can to remove the files I ALREADY DELETED!! BASTICH: (Thinking) It's not working...
PANEL 3 (Close up on BASTICH as his friends continue their argument.) FAITH: Yeah? Well when was the last time I had to recompile my OS kernel just to plug in a new SOUND CARD? BASTICH: (Thinking) I don't understand why they have to argue as if this were some grand Holy War. Can't we all just get along?!
PANEL 4 (FAITH and HACKER-LAD close in on BASTICH as they argue even more.) HACKER-LAD: Never, because your kernel is already so overloaded with extra device drivers in the name of Plug 'n Pray, I'm surprised you have enough RAM left to run your so-called "applications." FAITH: Okay, lets settle this. Bastich what do YOU think? BASTICH: (Thinking) Uh-Oh
PANEL 5 (Close up of BASTICH.) HACKER-LAD: Yeah, tell us, 'Stich. Which is better? Linux or the Mac? BASTICH: Well, you know, personally, 1 prefer to use windows 95...
PANEL 6 (FAITH and HACKER-LAD gang up on BASTICH, who now slouches with his head in his hands.) FAITH: WINDOWS 95?! HACKER-LAD: What're you THINKING?! FAITH: Do you ENJOY being enslaved by Microsoft? HACKER-LAD: Do frequent SYSTEM CRASHES turn you on? BASTICH: (Thinking) Sigh... well, at least I got them to quit fighting each OTHER.
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1997 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
It's nice seeing the three roommates all together again.
This exchange is emblematic of the kinds of OS "debates" that rage on to this day. All of the grievances against each OS came from my own experience.
Windows 95 was, indeed, my OS of choice at this time - mostly because Macs were too expensive and Linux was still too rough around the edges to be my daily driver. I had a Linux partition so I could play around with a home Unix system, and I ultimately switched to MacOS shortly after the release of MacOSX. To this day, Macs feel like the best of all worlds with a mature GUI and decent app support sitting atop a proper Unix core.
Of course, with the web and cloud computing, it really doesn't matter what OS your browser and ssh client are running on.