Fragmentation in the Windows World

Greyfox writes "While various members of the Industry press have been raising the spectre of potential Linux fragmentation, we've been seeing some very real fragmentation in the Windows world. This story details the fact that there are now 7 different versions of the Windows 98 second edition and they're not all the same product! Add that to the assorted versions of Wince, NT (3.whatever to 5.0 betas) 95, and the die-hard 3.1 users who are STILL out there and you have a real mess on your hands. And programs for most of these versions of Windows are much less portable at the source code level than UNIX programs are. I've got a fair shot at taking any given UNIX program (Say, Gnome) from Linux to HP/UX to SCO or Solaris and having it work without any (or any major) changes to the source code. Most of the time you'll have to write your windows code from scratch. "

Comments

Re:Not necessarily fragmentation, but still a pain

[Salamander]

My experience was a little different. I installed a new disk drive in my system, making the new one the primary IDE master (I do SCSI at work, don't want it at home) with the old one as primary slave. I could still boot Windows 95 - yes, 95, not 98 - via LILO off the old drive and it would figure out what happened and be happy. When I tried to boot Linux off the old partition it wasn't happy because what used to be /dev/hda was now /dev/hdb etc. So I restored the old hardware config, booted Linux, fixed up LILO and /etc/fstab and so on and so forth, and rebooted. Still doesn't work. Maybe there's some step I forgot, but if anyone here says it's my own fault for not remembering to change /etc/shove_this or whatever then I don't ever want to hear a comment from the same person sneering about config.sys and win.ini and "that just works on Linux" because there's just as much nobody-could-have-known crap on Linux as on Windows. I've been working on UNIX kernels longer than Messrs. Torvalds and Cox, and it's entirely reasonable to say that the OS should be able to figure out something as simple as this and deal with it instead of crashing. Remeber, even lowly Win95 managed it, and Linux fell over itself.