Waxing Philosophical

[Mike Barnes]

I was looking back over the list archives the other day, and noticed
that it's coming up on one year since I first started trying to build
some Fedora Core 1 packages on the Alpha. This leads me to something
I've been wondering for a while ...

What is it about the Alpha that's got me doing this? Why spend twelve
months compiling, tweaking, hunting down patches and clues to build a
system on this platform when I could go out, spend a couple of hundred
dollars on a PC, and just download and install a recent Fedora Core
build?

Is this the same mania that classic car restorers suffer from? It's
not like I do anything spectacularly demanding on my Alphas - I'm not
into numerical computing or anything that demands huge addressable
memory spaces. My primary home system is a nice dual-processor G4 Mac.
It works fine. My main mail and web server is a dual Athlon box that
is perfectly adequate to the task.

I need a Linux or Unix-ish system to mess with from time to time, and
that's where my Alphas have come in. I like them. There's "something"
about the nice, familar blue of the SRM console that I just don't get
from a PC's BIOS setup. The lines of the DS10 case are pleasing in a
way that my admittedly "sexy" G4 isn't.

So why? What does this platform have that I've never seen in the Sun
or SGI systems that I've messed with? What makes me feel strongly
about the fate of the Alpha line when I couldn't case less if MIPS was
discontinued?

Not looking for answers. Just needed to write down the questions. Carry on. :)