That's right. I get the two confused for some reason. Thanks for the correction.

Linux vs. Windows: a quick reflection
 

Hi everyone,

to me, the beauty of Linux can be summed up thus: the power of creativity is in the hands of the people! :)

Just today, I needed someone to copy some files onto my SD card (ext4 format). Good thing I was at their computer with them: when plugged in, their computer (Windows 7, I believe) said: :eek:

Good thing I stopped her from pressing "format." (She didn't understand what she was about to do..)

Wow.
In my experience with Linux (last couple of years), I have seen that every effort is made to provide applications that can "cater" to Windows users and formats.
Yet apparently this is not the case with Windows. Anything not "Window-endorsed" is quick to get re-formatted!

Microsoft doesn't seem to want to "play nice" at all with those who use another OS.

brian

Hi there,

hadn't expected anything else ...

Yes and no. Windows tries to be user-friendly here: It sees a storage media and can't detect a valid file system on it, so it over-ambitiously offers to "make it usable". In this case, however, that might be fatal. By the way, many digicams would react the same way, or other audio/video equipment that can use an external storage media.

But if you install the ext2/ext3 driver for Windows, it will also play nice with those file systems. Rumor has it there's another Windows driver that can even handle ext4 and reiserfs, though I don't know anything solid about it.
But of course, Microsoft won't produce drivers for those file systems, they rather defend their own.

[X] Doc CPU

@ briadc
you forget that as far as M$ is concerned any computer with windoze on it belongs to M$
your just allowed to use it with in limits set by M$

I have a Windows box that I use mainly to listening to "old time radio" shows (it was a gift and it is, I must say, a magnificient machine--runs WUBI like a champ). I keep Windows on it just in case I have to do something for someone who insists on native Windows formats.

Whenever I stop watching old movies and start actually trying to compute with it, I am reminded again of how clunky and awkward Windows actually is.

Yes, it's a burden we all have. Though the next time someone comes to me wanting a Windows box reformatted and no Windows CD/DVD then they will get Ubuntu or Mint installed - I'm really sick of Windows (says he of 4x MCSE experience) and have been for several years now.

I haven't been using Windows on my own PCs now for at least 3 years. But I sure wasn't prepared to have my SD card wiped clean before I could even say no! Fortunately, I stopped her before she clicked "format." From a programmer's viewpoint, I don't think such a set-up wpuld be very professional at all.

Microsoft (if it wanted to play fair) would FIRST ask if you wanted to install the app that would recognize the file system, rather than immediately suggest formatting it..

Brian

Hi there,

yes, that would be fair and user-friendly. But that company has to be forced hard to do something of that kind.
Remember the IE story? When Windows 7 came up, there was a suit before the European court, which finally ruled that for the European market, MS had to offer a Windows 7 package without IE preinstalled.

And obviously, they didn't even comply fully. I purchased a Windows 7 license labeled "Home Premium E", where it said in the fine print on the box that the "E" meant a European version without IE. However, when I had installed it on a test machine, a funny little IE icon grinned at me from the desktop, and it started a fully functional IE8. So the package was a big fat lie.
On the other hand, the latest XP installation discs with SP3 included offer the choice of installing IE, Firefox, or Chrome during Windows setup (and IIRC even a fourth browser, was it Opera?). However, I don't believe you'd really get an IE-free installation if you select a different browser - IE is embedded too deep into the Windows shell to easily remove it, and it would seriously impair the functionality of a lot of software if they really did.

Even nLite does not actually remove IE from the setup package if you choose to do so - it only removes the IE GUI. The browser control for COM/OLE embedding into applications is still there, because the system needs it for many things, one of them being the HTML help system.

[X] Doc CPU

Very interesting..

On one hand I would say that Windows works well with PCs, and seems quite "fool proof." Many Linux distros have bugs in them, sometimes enough to scare people away from actually trying it.
My thought is that the reason for this, is that Microsoft spends years on just one "distro," whereas Linux is made up of lots of distros, each one a full project unto itself. -Perhaps if some of the Linux distros "joined forces" they would come up with a much more solid OS? (also, there are new releases all the time (depending on the distro), and that tells me that maybe they should work on fewer upgrades and make what they have more fool-proof..

brian

just a little out of context:

@
There is ext4 "explorer", another link and mount ext4 drive in windows
although full operation is not quite supported.

Hi there,

thank you for digging that up, I hadn't bothered to search thoroughly because I was nearly sure to remember that there were still some issues about it.

[X] Doc CPU

. . . because Microsoft will not allow a manufacturer to OEM Windows unless the hardware meets Microsoft's specs.

Issues still remain ... unfortunately.

Owing to the nature of this thread, I have merged it into the stickied, and now legendary, Windows v Linux Megathread - found at the top of your favourite General forum.

Hi there,

once a month may be appropriate, and I second the hint about not installing and removing software every other day.
However, Recommending NTFS when someone complains about bad performance is counter-productive. Due to its design, NTFS is a bit less subject to fragmentation than FAT. It does fragment, though. And then, it suffers considerably more from fragmentation than FAT does.

I have one NTFS partition on each of my XP PCs, the smallest of them about 40GB. I'm using that partition as a workspace for video editing, that's the only reason why I chose NTFS at all: Because MPEG video files can easily bust the 4GB limit of FAT32. My benchmarking is just copying a large file (several GB) from that NTFS partition, and I have experienced that defragging the partition reduces the necessary time for that by up to 30%. On a FAT partition, the gain may be noticeable, but considerably smaller.
There's another bad habit of Windows's NTFS driver: When transferring large amounts of data to or from an NTFS partition, it literally stalls for some seconds at irregular intervals. Never seen that with a FAT partition.

Don't use a virus scanner at all. The best protection is an alert mind and an appropriate degree of caution (or paranoia, if you like). Disable unnecessary services, don't click on everything just becasuse it's there, consider all input dangerous until it has proven the opposite.

I do them on Linux, too. Regularly and fairly soon when they're out. But I do not update Windows - because I trust the Open Source community, but not Microsoft. It's a sad fact that the most imminent danger to stability and trustworthyness of a Windows PC comes from Redmond.
When I freshly set up a Windows PC, I decide on a certain patch or service pack level: Windows 2000/SP4 or Windows XP/SP2, more recent versions stay out. And then I make sure that this configuration remains unchanged.

Some do, yes. And I agree that most of those appearing so strongly polarized towards either system probably don't do so because of their knowledge. ;-)

[X] Doc CPU