Linux, to be (Like Microsoft) or Not to be?

David writes "Stephen Shipman delivers a very articulate and concise view of how Linux fits in server and end user environments. He expresses his view in response to Nicolas Petreley's 'rant' in Linux Journal. He points out the subtle implications of efficiency versus consistency." From the article: "[...] efficiency (as measured by keystrokes) isn't the only metric for ease of use. Consistency must also be taken into account. Microsoft has made a lot of hay (and green) by flogging consistency".

Comments

What's a "single user" problem?

[argent]

No matter how they pass XP off as a multi-user environment, it carriest considerable baggage of being single user - case in point: the pop-up key-stealer, when apps suddenly thrust themselves forward and steal a keystroke for the [ignore] [retry] [cancel] [OK] whatever prompt and vanish if it meets the input expectation.

Of all the things you could propose as a reason for considering it "single user", that's the oddest. It's hateful and frustrating, and more prevalent in MS WIndows than X11 or Mac OS, but it's more prevalent in X11 than Mac OS, and more prevalent in Mac OS than 8 1/2.

You could have pointed to the single-application-instance shared with Mac OS (which Firefox has imported to X11). Whether it's services, desktop applications, or just logged in users, it takes a huge effort to have two instances of ANYTHING running in Windows.

Their virtual terminal and user switching required years of development work from Citrix, Xerox, Metaframe, and other companies to figure out what parts of the user environment should be shared, what should be duplicated, and what should be switched from instance to instance... and you still can't have two login sessions under the same user id.

For applications that run as services there's been even less work done to get around the problems... so it's actually more cost effective to build "blade" servers or run multiple copies of the OS in virtual machines than to run multiple webservers or other applications in the same instance of Windows.

I mean, I had a 486/50... this is a machine that wasn't powerful enough to run one instance of even NT 3.51... and I was running multiple webservers on different addresses under the same kernel. This kind of thing is routine and easy in UNIX, because it was designed for multiple users (and thus multiple instances of every possible resource) from the very start.