"Forced into"

It's hard being a student sometimes from a minimalist perspective, especially on a campus that is technology integrated.

That sounds great in theory, until you realize that everyone does things a certain way, and it's not how you want it.

If I had my say, I'd turn in all of my essays via mail and they'd be plain text files. Death to printers! But I don't get my way. I have to type the document using a proprietary office suite (that never works and always messes up the basic formatting) and then print it using the campus' exclusive and not-open printing network (that never works and always messes up the basic formatting). This forces me to use programs and systems that I don't want to use, and I'm forced to do things that I can do on my own with a lot less inherent complexity.

Recent releases of Fedora and Ubuntu have been pretty compatible with said infrastructure, with minor hiccups here or there. It takes work to keep up with those evil little schemers in the IT department, who live to make my life a living hell (and it seems they do this to everyone else too - their installation image of Vista is stuff of legend as far as totally borking everything). But when it came to my lovely Fluxbox/Debian installation, I was out of luck! Even after installing all kinds of printing and wi-fi and office junk, it still didn't work. So I'm installing the Fedora 14 beta, to help with crushing bugs but also because Gnome is thankfully compatible with many of these moronic decisions.

I strongly dislike having to warp my internal principles just because some IT department jokester thinks it's funny to make their printing system proprietary. I cannot stand having to convert my files to docx because teachers won't accept anything else. The more they build their infrastructure around custom applications for Windows and Mac, the harder it is for me to keep my Linux installation in order. You would think that the Mac's growing popularity would have them embracing unix-like ideals, but you would be underestimating the stubborn nature of public higher education.

I look forward to the day when I don't have to deal with this and can pursue my own computing efforts.