Linux v Windows?

[fodders]

Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux is not fit for the enterprise. But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service attacks. :P

According to a post on the Netcraft Web site, Microsoft changed its DNS settings on Friday so that requests for microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft's own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux.

An Akamai spokeswoman declined to comment, except to confirm that Microsoft is a customer :P

[Naked Snake]

Heh. I'd love to see a Windows Linux distro, BTW. That'd be quite 1337.

[Arioch]

And Microsoft isn't using Linux in its enterprise networking. So where's the news?

[Remilia Scarlet]

BBG said:

Heh. I'd love to see a Windows Linux distro, BTW. That'd be quite 1337.

Hmm...would it, though? That almost seems sacreligious. And who knows, Microsoft could just screw it up, introducing all those memory errors into Linux. Not to say Microsoft/Windows is bad, but I'm just not too keen on the idea of a Microsoft distro of Linux. But, this is all coming from a recently converted Linux enthusiast :)

And...think of the SCO (it was them, right). Microsoft may not want to deal with that.

[Rellik]

Knoppix is amazing, now if someone would make a distro that was as much of a no-brainer to install average users might actually start to use Linux. I understand that a lot of Linux guys feel there's this "elite" factor to using Loonix, but if hey were serious about taking on Microsoft they're gonna have to make something a little easier to install and manage. If someone could put together a solid release with all the basic stuff that plain windows comes with that was easy to install, maintain, upgrade and expand, they could absolutely crush Microsoft. It's like the linux community doesn't want to take on MS though, even though their stuff is vastly superior in so many ways. Knoppix is a great example of how powerful linux is, you can run the entire OS from a CD, using only your computers memory! How totally bitchin is that?!?! If I can remember how to install it again I'm gonna throw it onto my P200.

It's too bad Linux isn't focusing more on the average PC user.

[Draconio]

I tried Linux once. I thought it was crap. That's IMHO of course.

[Fredrik]

Linux (the kernel) is as good as or better than the Windows NT kernel. The graphical user interfaces, hell any interface (graphical or not) ever shipped with a Linux distribution blow donkey ass though.

[Disorder]

Windows XP is great.

[Shaviro]

Disorder said:

Windows XP is great.

Indeed it is!

[DooMBoy]

Windows98 SE forever!

[beezee88]

DooMBoy said:

Windows98 SE forever!

Quite right too. When ME (a dodgy stepping stone between 98 and XP) came out, windows went waaay downhill. No DOS (!), so Doom.exe is fucked (huzzah for SPs:). Also, it comes with shitty shitty Media Player 7 :@ Windows 98 was as good as it ever got.

These days, windows is designed for totally non-techy people. Windows 3.11 kicks however, as while not being fully open-coded, it was close enough as it listed every working file in the hefty manual and gave instructions on how to become "A Power User"!

Also, in all my time with old-school windows, I have never come across the much-feared 'blue screen of death' (or whatever the equivelent is). Why does ME, XP etc crash out so much!?!?!?

slighty off-topic: howcumzit games like wolf3d et al gave legthy documentaion on how to free enough memory and to set up IRQs and DMAs to make the game run as intended, but now all the advice you'll ever get is 'buy a better computer'?

[Lord FlatHead]

DooMBoy said:

Windows98 SE forever!

I hate these people. Unless you have a perfectly good reason to stick to Win98 (compatibility issues, for example), please do everyone including yourself a favor and upgrade to WinXP. It's just the best version of Windows yet, and last time I checked Windows was a very good general-purpose operating system.

beezee88 said:

Why does ME, XP etc crash out so much!?!?!?

You are right in your assertion that ME is shit. However, XP rarely crashes on me. And I've only had to do a full system reboot after a crash a couple times in the past two years or so that I've been using XP.

[beezee88]

Lord FlatHead said:

ME is shit.

and I'm stuck with it, cause my comp is on it's last legs (as all of windows secret data logging, crappy registry, and general hackability means that your comp gets fucked out eventually) so I can't install XP and I can't afford a new machine anytime soon :@

a wee question: Last year I was considering downgrading to 98, due ME's shitness. Is this illegal or something? I think I read that somewhere on Microsoft.com. I know someone who does it, but it involves hacking the program :S

[Fredrik]

Windows 2000 has never crashed for me except in a few cases that were directly related to crappy drivers.

[Arioch]

beezee88 said:

slighty off-topic: howcumzit games like wolf3d et al gave legthy documentaion on how to free enough memory and to set up IRQs and DMAs to make the game run as intended, but now all the advice you'll ever get is 'buy a better computer'?

The distinction is no longer necessary. Which if you were a true power user, you'd know already.

True power users don't go out of their way to make computing more masochistic for themselves.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Fredrik said:

The graphical user interfaces, hell any interface (graphical or not) ever shipped with a Linux distribution blow donkey ass though.

You know, they have a GUI that is almost exactly like Windows. I think it's called Lindos. Even so, I find KDE and Gnome much more enjoyable to use than the Windows GUI anymore. Partly because of the multiple desktops feature. And because I've never ever had Linux crash on me. Nor any program.

[Rellik]

Just try out Knoppix, for the most part it works exactly like a windows system, except it looks way better and it's free. :)

[Draconio]

What about hardware compatibility?

[Aliotroph?]

I keep a Knoppix CD around for when I need to go Linux-ing. That thing has a frightening ability to find all my hardware and run it in 1/100th the time Windows takes and it all works off the CD if you want! KDE is a much nicer GUI than the shite that comes with XP. I can't use XP without going back to the classic interface.

IMHO Windows 2000 Pro is better than XP because it's cleaner, still has better compatibility, and eats up less RAM. I can count the crashes I've had in the last year on my right hand. They were all do to bad alpha-version movie players or bad ATI drivers.

Windows ME was full of crap. It's horribly unstable, and doesn't add anything you couldn't do in Win98 except built-in zip file support. At least Media Player is better now. 7 was crap but 9 is decent, even if it screws up the picture on divx movies.

The only real problem I have with Linux is with a many old, crap applications people are always using with it. They either half work or they're unstable, or hard to use. The newer ones are getting better though.

[beezee88]

Arioch said:

True power users don't go out of their way to make computing more masochistic for themselves.

I guess so. The bad old days of dos weren't always much fun, as I saw after browsing through an old DOS 5.0 manual :)

[Sephiroth]

given XP i can see why alot of people, business types, use linux now. yes windows i good, i love win2000 and earlier versions.
but the fucked things up with XP, i have had so many probhlems with XP, and so has nearly everyone i have talked to.
I know admins that refused to use it on company systems when the company questioned them about upgradeing to XP. they stuck to 2000.
my mom's compnay is a large mac user, for graphics and such. however all the servers, file servers and printing servers are PC. for the longest time they used win98 and winodws 2000. last month they switched to linux for all the lowever servers and openBSD for the massive file server. She says the love it.

personaly to me it really comes down to cost. honestly windows is a good product but too expensive when there is something just as good and nothing beats free.
currently linux is taking control of the server end of things, and windows is loosing. XP seems to show this as it is made user friendly, and pretty, for the novice folk.

if microsoft made a linux distro they would have to obey the open source rules, and that aint microsoft. however i am surprised they have not done so yet

[fodders]

Lord FlatHead said:

I hate these people. Unless you have a perfectly good reason to stick to Win98 (compatibility issues, for example), please do everyone including yourself a favor and upgrade to WinXP.

I can understand the "Do yourself a favour" part, but how is he doing everyone else a favour by upgrading to XP?

[Arioch]

Not hardly. I absolutely can't stand it when people don't know the utter basics.

Microsoft does do open source, in a roundabout fashion to provide connectivity and compatibility with certain *NIX services. In fact Microsoft releases at least one product under the GPL, although you are not likely to ever hear about or use it.

As an aside, the balkanization of the desktop is the worst nightmare of all. And you poor blind fools are rushing towards the abyss. Support issues compound on each other with each new variable.

There are many areas in which Linux lags behind Windows, and not just in the spitshine polish of the UI. Here are some top issues I can identify right off the bat:

1) Filesystem reliability. Default filesystem for most Linux installs is still ext2, which is the single least reliable filesystem ever, lagging, in fact, quite a bit behind FAT. The potential for killing your partition in a random reboot is just too high with ext2.

Moving on up, you have ext3 and reiserfs. Reiserfs is coming into fashion now, as is ext3, but ext3 is almost exactly like ext2 except with journaling, which will prevent most of ext2's major mishaps perhaps, but with an insanely heavy performance decrease. On the other hand, Reiser likes to corrupt any file that you may have had open if your computer reboots itself, whether or not you've made any changes to it whatsoever. I've had it eat at least 4 configuration files off of despayre, not to mention the uptime logs. These are big concerns.

XFS is another likely candidate, which has a lot more features, is a lot faster, and was originally used by SGI. But it's not even in the Linux kernel, so you'll have to compile it in yourself.

NTFS is far more reliable than any of these options.

2) Multimedia. You will often depend solely upon the built-in Linux drivers for whatever you have in terms of graphics or audio. Configuration for these things have become slightly easier in terms of Linux distribution specific scripts, but those scripts are by no means standardized, and support for certain hardware will never be anything close to "good". For example, there is no audio channel mixing on my laptop's sound chip, so I can only have one audio app running at a time (including whatever audio feedback exists for my X session manager), and depending on what version of the kernel I'm running I may or may not need timidity to play MIDI from games such as Doom or from scummvm (and it may or may not work).

Xf86 does not support my graphics hardware with the "recommended" driver. If I try to load X using that driver X will hard lock and bring down the system. Therefore, I use the slower VESA driver, and since it uses the framebuffer device, it means I cannot dynamically change the resolution to do anything in fullscreen but at 1024x768, despite the fact that X RandR should enable that support.

Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP all work fine in the same configuration without the need for any 3rd party drivers.

3) Power management. ACPI support (and on occasion, APM) is still hit-or-miss, depending on your chipset. A motherboard chipset that does support ACPI, and has ACPI features enabled in Windows, can often cause the Linux install to lock up on boot. I do not expect this situation to improve dramatically or substantially in the near future.

4) Networking (and other) drivers. What the kernel stock drivers says it support is often different from what it really does support. Two different cards that use chips that the a given driver claims to handle can have wildly varying headaches (duplex, transmission speed, etc). Wireless networking is a different nightmare.

Another issue with the kernel is that many drivers have not been updated in years, and may or may not even be able to compile with the current Linux kernel release version. 2.4.20 for example (and only fairly recently replaced), had enormous problems with the IDE chipset drivers, an issue only partly resolved with 2.4.21.

People, by and large, are not being paid to fix this. If you really want support for a particular piece of hardware, you are adviced to write support for it yourself. Without any form of decent documentation. Good luck with that. As an aside, ask Jon Dowland about his experiences writing SCSI drivers for Linux.

5) Ease of configuration. As a purely intellectual exercise, try to manually configure each of the following (or at least read up on the various items):

a) BIND vs. Win2k DNS
b) ISC dhcpd vs. Win2k DHCP
c) NFS vs. Windows filesharing
d) NIS+ vs. Active Directory

And last but not least: third party software vendor support. I for one do not see many people going out of their way to provide support for Linux, even if Linux gains a bigger market share.

Carmack himself says that providing support for Linux is not profitable for id, just something that's done for good will.

And then look at NWN, for example. It took something like a year after the Win32 release for them to put out the Linux client installers, and the copies they put on CD are riddled with bugs that require, at the easiest, a downloaded workaround script. Now imagine every company doing that.

Balkanization is a Bad Thing, and even if I agreed with any sort of assessment that Microsoft is bad (which I don't) I'd think a very hard thrice before I'd welcome the many varieties of Linux to the desktop.

And I've been using Linux in a role that it's actually fairly good at for over 3 years now.

[Shaviro]

Sephiroth said:

Rant about XP

The only times I've heard about problems with WinXP, it's because of the users' crappy, outdated hardware from the mid 90's.

[fodders]

Attack on a LINUX system housing the GNU project, with the intent to compromise software at the source intended for other LINUX systems. This should end for once and for all the claim that cyber-terorists are only interested in targeting Windows machines

[kain]

i am quite happy with windows 2000. its been very trusty.never had a blue screen, no dos issues ( runs every single dos program, game, i have ever tried ) so i will stick to it, unless i can get windows 2003.

[Arioch]

fodders said:

Attack on a LINUX system housing the GNU project, with the intent to compromise software at the source intended for other LINUX systems. This should end for once and for all the claim that cyber-terorists are only interested in targeting Windows machines

The funny part is that the GNU FTP site was compromised back in March or so, and not discovered/reported until just recently.

[spank]

the irony...

[Fletcher`]

DooMBoy said:

Windows98 SE forever!

'98 and dos6.1 are oldskool's friend. :)

[Goat]

i cant help myself i have to post it, it seems so right...


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