liam's picture
Mon, 18/12/2006 - 9:29am — liam

There’s little worse than being bailed up by evangelists of any stripe. For every clean-eared guitar-playing Book-of-Romans-quoting genuine religious transmitter of zeal, there’s an Amway seller, a jazz purist, a true believer in Fords over Holdens, someone whose every Austrian economic hypothesis is measured against Popperian falsifiability, or someone who votes Green because they got done over for Labor preselection in 1979. The common feature is an unassailable presumption to impose moral values on other people, regardless of convenience, appropriateness, right, and certainly regardless of embarrassment. Damn it, I don’t care if you believe that video games threaten children’s moral fibre, and it is meaningless to me what you think about the Greens’ many progressive social policies.

And so it is with operating systems.

Ubuntu Christian Edition has been out for a while, for those people whose religious sensibilities are just too fragile for an operating system without Bible study tools and anti-masturbatory filtering software. Yes, it’s a linux distribution, so it also fulfils the evangelist quotient of anti-Microsoftism and niche cachet. It’s the usual stock-standard brainwashing and cultism, fed by implied guilt and feelings of spiritual superiority: “You’re still running Windows XP? Aren’t you worried about your eternal future? If you just accept the GPL as your personal salvation”, etcetera.

I for one now will be rebooting using one of the two fingers in the famous salute of the evil and powerful and hailing, in the tradition of rock and roll, the Dark Lord. Thanks be to the minions of Evil for Satanic Ubuntu.

(The secular, non-religious ubuntu, which does a very good job in difficult circumstances on my decrepit as-yet unreplaced laptop, can be gotten here).