I just read Eric Vaughan's article. Yes, Mandrake is fun, and I usually recommend it to Windows people. I have found SuSe to also be very easy to install and configure through the GUI, and I believe either one gives both easier and more complete control than Windows in most regards. On to the complaints.
As far as it goes with the purported lies that Linux users propogate against Windows, please, don't make me laugh. I'm a developer, and am often pressed into service as a network admin, as well. If I were to receive a dollar for every hour I have wasted during the past seven years making up for the fact that, as a whole, Windows and much of the industry-standard software written for Windows is amateurish, half-baked technology, I could use the pile of cash to fund a very nice European vacation.
Let's look at the three issues he raises:
1. and 2. XP doesn't crash, and it's reasonably stable. Well, it depends on what you define as "crash" and what your standards are for stability. Yes, the well-worn BSOD has been getting much less use lately. Thank God. It's about time. Actually, I find Win2K to be more stable than XP. But when the kernel code is so leaky that after a long week of web development it can't fit its paged virtual memory into the available RAM even with all apps closed, then I get severely degraded performance. I'm also seeing lots of "weirdness" such as icons getting overwritten with garbage, and orphaned Explorer instances floating around in the process list, each sitting on 35MB of RAM. I could keep running like that, I suppose, as things grind slower and slower. But why? Better to just reboot--a procedure that is only truly necessary under Linux after a hardware or kernel upgrade.
It also bothers me to distraction that, as soon as I do manage to get a Windows install patched just so that it seems very stable, it becomes critically important to install another "security rollup" or whatever the nom-du-jour is for their latest parade of emergency fixes, and after installing that, it's right back to the phone calls from clients on Saturday asking why their server is down again. And for comparison, I have only ever seen a Linux system become unresponsive or do a kernel panic as a result of defective hardware or of my own incompetence during an attempt to compile a kernel specially tuned for my hardware. The difference in stability and robustness between the two OS's--especially under heavy processing loads--is so dramatic that anyone who says the two systems are comparable in that regard simply doesn't know what they are talking about. When you can flog a Windows web application server at near capacity traffic loads for a couple of years with no reboots and stable memory usage, then maybe we will have something to debate.
3. Ah, yes...the old "Windows is the dominant platform, so it is the primary target" argument. Actually, there are many reasons why Linux systems tend to be more secure than Windows ones. This, however, isn't one of them.
Let's start with something really mundane. It's called "su". Windows doesn't have it unless you're running CygWin, which most people don't do. That's why the normal thing to do in Windows-land seems to be to run as an Administrator all the time. Who wants to keep logging off and logging back into the system every time they need to do something as routine as rehupping a darn service? Nobody--me neither. So we run everything as admins, including reading our email. And then so do nimda and the love bug worms. Arrgh! I have tried a few times to run Windows the way I would run a *nix system, and I've always run into too many problems for it to be practical. Usability concerns aside, it often occurs that software you need to run just takes for granted that it has access to all the resources on the machine. This is part of the Windows culture more than it is the OS itself. In fact, Windows' access lists theoretically provide even finer-grained control over who can access what than you get in *nix. But I've never come across a situation where this incr
Slashdot Mirror
As far as it goes with the purported lies that Linux users propogate against Windows, please, don't make me laugh. I'm a developer, and am often pressed into service as a network admin, as well. If I were to receive a dollar for every hour I have wasted during the past seven years making up for the fact that, as a whole, Windows and much of the industry-standard software written for Windows is amateurish, half-baked technology, I could use the pile of cash to fund a very nice European vacation.
Let's look at the three issues he raises:
1. and 2. XP doesn't crash, and it's reasonably stable. Well, it depends on what you define as "crash" and what your standards are for stability. Yes, the well-worn BSOD has been getting much less use lately. Thank God. It's about time. Actually, I find Win2K to be more stable than XP. But when the kernel code is so leaky that after a long week of web development it can't fit its paged virtual memory into the available RAM even with all apps closed, then I get severely degraded performance. I'm also seeing lots of "weirdness" such as icons getting overwritten with garbage, and orphaned Explorer instances floating around in the process list, each sitting on 35MB of RAM. I could keep running like that, I suppose, as things grind slower and slower. But why? Better to just reboot--a procedure that is only truly necessary under Linux after a hardware or kernel upgrade.
It also bothers me to distraction that, as soon as I do manage to get a Windows install patched just so that it seems very stable, it becomes critically important to install another "security rollup" or whatever the nom-du-jour is for their latest parade of emergency fixes, and after installing that, it's right back to the phone calls from clients on Saturday asking why their server is down again. And for comparison, I have only ever seen a Linux system become unresponsive or do a kernel panic as a result of defective hardware or of my own incompetence during an attempt to compile a kernel specially tuned for my hardware. The difference in stability and robustness between the two OS's--especially under heavy processing loads--is so dramatic that anyone who says the two systems are comparable in that regard simply doesn't know what they are talking about. When you can flog a Windows web application server at near capacity traffic loads for a couple of years with no reboots and stable memory usage, then maybe we will have something to debate.
3. Ah, yes...the old "Windows is the dominant platform, so it is the primary target" argument. Actually, there are many reasons why Linux systems tend to be more secure than Windows ones. This, however, isn't one of them.
Let's start with something really mundane. It's called "su". Windows doesn't have it unless you're running CygWin, which most people don't do. That's why the normal thing to do in Windows-land seems to be to run as an Administrator all the time. Who wants to keep logging off and logging back into the system every time they need to do something as routine as rehupping a darn service? Nobody--me neither. So we run everything as admins, including reading our email. And then so do nimda and the love bug worms. Arrgh! I have tried a few times to run Windows the way I would run a *nix system, and I've always run into too many problems for it to be practical. Usability concerns aside, it often occurs that software you need to run just takes for granted that it has access to all the resources on the machine. This is part of the Windows culture more than it is the OS itself. In fact, Windows' access lists theoretically provide even finer-grained control over who can access what than you get in *nix. But I've never come across a situation where this incr