Worse than that, it is stupid useless advocacy.

People need to tackle things one at a time. Telling someone who is learning a language that they also need to use an operating system is counterproductive. Telling someone that they need to tackle an operating system without giving them any solid reasons is just silly. Claiming that learning something new will make their lives easier is iffy in the short term, and given the proliferation of APIs in open source projects, is pretty doubtful in the long term. Suggesting that they immediately ditch their existing systems, which have lots of data that they care about and all of the applications that they know how to use, is a recipe for utter disaster.

Now yes, if you need a certain level of control of your system, then open source is better. I am not adverse to the right people using it for the right reasons. At the moment, in fact, I am typing into Galeon running on a Debian system. If this system was directly facing the Internet, I would set up and run OpenBSD. In comparison to what I am happy with, Red Hat is an insecure piece of proprietary shite that hobbles its basic update and dependency system because they need something to charge businesses a premium for. Have I established that I am not a Windows weenie yet?

OK, then now you know where I am coming from. So listen up. Please don't throw around counter-productive, useless advocacy. People get burned by it and it makes it harder to apply useful, targeted advocacy when there is an opportunity to make a real difference. As the doctors like to say, "First, do no harm." Please.

I agree mostly with your post, most people need to learn one major thing at a time, but to quibble: A poor carpenter blames his tools. What exactly is proprietary about redhat (all source code is available), and what's so hard about using something (free) like Ximian RedCarpet, which is essentially apt-get for RPMs, with both GUI and CLI interfaces?

I agree that the redhat network system sucks. RedCarpet doesn't. I use debian and redhat daily, and they both work fine for me when you used correctly.

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.

I said "by comparison". And it is an unfair comparison.

Red Hat is a company. From time to time their marketing needs run counter to technically defensible decisions, or what the community might like. This happens rather rarely since they long ago realized the value for them of being very supportive of open source. (They realized this before the term "open source" was cointed.) But it does happen, and as a result the default installation is insecure, their network system is not the greatest, and there is no oversight to keep dependencies and conflicts between RPMs straightened out.

By contrast Debian has no such pressure and has to coordinate a disparate group of distributed people. Which means that they have a well-thought out policy. At any given time, most people have some instance of policy to be unhappy with (the resulting slow release cycle is a favorite), but it makes for a much cleaner organized system and means that over time a Debian system tends to stay better organized than an RPM system. This is something which RPM-based systems could do as well, but none actually have. As a packaging mechanism, RPM and .deb are pretty similar. What differs is the community behind them.

That said, if you need a smoother "out of the box" feel, or better marketing, or other things that companies do well at, you are going to be better off with Red Hat.

You make a very valid argument, and I did fail to adequately address certain essential points. So to clarify a few things:

• By default, I say again, by default, the Red Hat installation is rather insecure. This is almost purely due to installing unnecessary software. This is obviously fairly easy to fix, but it not completely straightforward. Have a look at the Redhat security quickstart, and you should be able to easily secure your system to an acceptable level (definately far superior to windows anyways). I stand corrected, I should have mentioned this point.
• I recently was asked by three friends how to best get started with Perl. They were all running windows and had little experience with programming. I set them all up with activestate perl. One was happy with it, the other two said this sucked. They were obviously referring to more than just the actual executable, but the environment. I then helped them install Redhat (not like they needed much help) and they found it much more usable. Face it, the windows CLI sucks, try getting a really good editor (like kate) for windows, and ultimately the whole perl philosophy goes against windows like operating systems. It simply goes better with OSS.

As for ditching their systems with "lots of data", I did suggest alternatives.

if this system was directly facing the Internet, I would set up and run OpenBSD

I'd properly administer basically any of the open source *nix-like distributions, and probably end up with a better track record.

And my experiences have been all over the map. I have introduced a variety of people to Linux and Perl. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. My experience is that I usually have the best result when I only change one thing at a time, unless they happen to not know anything very well in which case it works best to hand them a configuration that they have good local support for.

As for introducing people to Linux, my favorite is to show them Knoppix and go from there.

And about your "properly administrate" comment, well it seems that you are strutting around claiming to have the biggest private parts. When I see that, I just wish that the idiots involved would put their clothing back on...