Mmmm, yes. Sounds good to me. A foursome...sorry, I'll have to go and have a cold shower.

Not agreeing with the original OP on this, but i do somewhat see his point to the initial post. Firstly, i like Linux (mainly use RedHat), i don't use it as my home PC as i (currently) play games and whilst i could use WINE or one of it's kind, i prefer the easy route (i.e. not messing around with PC's at home).

(Though to be fair i'm slowly moving to console gaming these days so that may change).

However back on point. I could turn some of these posts around and say that many of the "issues" in Windows, with regards to stability is down to the user and not the OS as per below.

I've built and supported a number of secure web-hosting environments (Windows OS - 2000 and 2003) which only needed to be rebooted once per month and that wasn't down to unstability but patching. Before then, we found (when doing an audit of servers on the network) an NT4 server in a remote branch which had be up and running for nearly 18 months - no reboots, no crashing. The users didn't even know it was there (nor did we until we found it), just that their application worked and that's all they cared about.

Like wise, my Vista home machine regularly stays up and running for a month at a time, and only reboots (again) as i install patches - and sometimes much longer as i tend to forget and travel (due to work) alot. I think the longest it was up and running before i decided to install the pending patches was around 3 months (yes it stays switched on constantly)

I run a Windows OS and i don't have a firewall installed and my anti-virus is switched off (it gets turned on once in a while for an update and a scan) and i have never had a virus or spyware on my box - sitting behind a NAT and changing the default subnet address is sufficient for me. And this is the way i have run a home machine since back in 1997 with regards to Windows OS.

My home machine hasn't had a reinstall of the OS since i bought it, which would be over 18 months now.

Can't recall that last BSOD i had either.

Yet reading some of the posts in this forum you would believe that Windows OS's are so unstable it's unbelievable - when it's more likely to be down to the user than the OS itself. I still struggle to understand how people can get virus's, struggle to keep a microsoft OS stable, but are able to use Linux. I've always been under the impression that to use Linux regularly shows that they have a decent understanding of IT in general and therefore able to understand the do's and dont's of using an OS and more so surfing on the internet.

As i said, not a bash at Linux, i like it - and when i'm fully moved onto a console for my gaming fix i'll most likely install it on my machine at home, if only because i fully support Open-source and nothing to do with any issues with my current installed OS.

Yeah, if you smack yourself in the finger, don't blame the hammer.

Yeah, I don't reboot my laptop much. :)

Oddly enough, the Windows-XP box on the next table has been running continuously without rebooting for more than two weeks, and I never have to restart the thing "to resolve a problem." And the OS/X box has been running continuously for about that same amount of time (having been restarted only to apply a software update).

Really, it isn't true that "computers are inherently unreliable," or that they "fail mysteriously," or that they "just change overnight all on their own." If you know what you are doing, you can make any of the mainstream operating systems run rock-steady for calendar years if you want them to.

People are unreliable, those with "friends in their head" more so than others, but anywho...

Computers, in comparison, are extremely reliable, IMHO.

I can do relatively light computer work on my XP boxes without freezing or crashing, but then moving into heavier demands they freeze or crash. I can do much heavier computing tasks on my linux box (approximately same hardware) with no problem. I crash and trash my linux box only because I don't know what I'm doing and I poke around in the OS a lot.

The test is this: At any given computing usage or load, which OS gives you the fewest performance problems: Linux or Windows?

I also have Windows XP running for long periods of time. But it's in a virtual environment on top of Linux. It operates as my web server (ASP), and from its birth has never been used to browse outside of itself, other than to install patches. But that is the crux, isn't it? I don't want to use it to browse the web, because I don't want it to get infected. Even as non-administrative user, I have seen Windows machines get infected.

As soon as I've learned PHP, I'll be moving my site to apache, and getting rid of Windows.

Depends on the set-up of the OS and the coding of the application.

For a business you could ask which is;

a) easier to determine
b) cheaper to fix (i.e. including wage / support cost)

For a performance problem between a LINUX server vs Windows server?

As the OP, I'm glad to see some respondents acknowledge that Linux isn't perfect. To be honest, I like Linux on older hardware. I'm currently using Linux Mint 6 XFCE on an old AMD Duron white box, mainly as a downloader for large files. I just wish it wouldn't surprise me with another necessary reinstall when things go suddenly haywire.

LQ members that have got common sense tend to say something to that effect. The rest you will just take as responding to your invective. As in what you sow, really.


Sure, that's why you wrote something like they must pry products from this particular vendor founded to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800 from your cold, dead fingers, uhuh...


Personal computers and their OSes are not intelligent. Still, for some reason that completely eludes me, certain people tend to blame computers for fsck-ups while in essence most PEBKAC. Since you haven't managed to post any relevant details here that's all there is to say about that, maybe except that most reinstalling is unnecessary reflex.

IMHO, the Windows OS has always been an imitator, originally of CP/M and now of *nix. Microsoft's innovation came from the tight integration of their applications, essentially creating the first seamless desktop "environment" for end users. That's what most people mean when they say "it just works".

If Microsoft ever ports Office to Linux they'll control 100% of the market for such productivity suites.

I wouldn't want Office, they refuse to fix bugs in a timely fashion, I don't even doubt that the excel exploit that allows someone to take over an entire 2000/XP/Vista is not patched yet, it's been 2 months now and because of compatibility they won't want a close a hole? I mean cmon..

All one has to do is craft a excel file that runs rundll32.dll and they can do what ever they want (UAC doesn't even question it) just think about what you can do with that for a sec and then look back at linux... no thinks .. I like my OS the way it is, I'll stick with the semi broken doc files of koffice and openoffice thanks.

I would not call Linux unreliable, but yes, I've had a lot of trouble before like the OP. Sometimes, I was not even sure if the next day, my computer would boot up.

Today, things got a lot better for sure. However, I must say, some updates do break things. Remote Desktop no longer works in Ubuntu 9.04. It was working fine before the update. I had to Google the problem, as usual found similar problems and as it is turning into a common issue in the Ubuntu community, found no solution. See, it was working before, they broke it and I've no idea who will fix this and when. I don't have time to fix it myself. It is weekend and I will spend it with my family and friends. I already spend a good 40-50 hours/week with a computer at work fixing things.

And since I got the OS for free, I just have to "accept it", "wait for somebody to fix it" or "fix it myself". If I had paid for that, I'd been screaming already: "It was working, you broke it, so fix it."

I'd say that updates breaking things is pretty common. It happens at work too and every developer here faces the same issue once in a while. How fast you actually fix it is what it matters. Ubuntu had already a few days to fix this and it is not fixed yet. Work-arounds exist, sure, but the real issue remains.

I realize some distributions break less than others, especially the ones without an automatically update system/less end-user friendly. But again, those are not for me, because I don't have time to fix/update everything manually.

It is because of things like these that Windows is still used so much in working environments: Support. I've had great experiences with Microsoft support.

Notes before somebody flaming me:

1 - This applies to my current problems with Ubuntu and some other previous distributions. Not Linux as a whole;
2 - Microsoft support may work differently from one country to another. In my, it is awesome.

Actually Linux is rather unreliable at times when under heavy loads, I mean I keep expecting a crash, but never occurs. Such shoddy workmanship, they should really take a page from Microsoft on that. :p

Also I don't have any common sense at all, I rely on uncommon sense to get me by. :D


Joking aside: The biggest no brainer issue that a new user will have with Linux is hardware. It is not so much the more obscure piece of hardware, but the everyday stuff, the majority being wireless and going down the lest from there, maybe video, audio, etc.

Also different distros handle things differently sometimes, plus taking into account the type of hardware the user has, will result in different issues with different distros.

Mmm...

At work, I installed IE8 to test it (release version, not beta). It has broken the active desktop setup we use, and "Explorer View" in Sharepoint no longer works. Oh, wait a minute, we did pay for that operating system... (and I won't mention ME, or Vista);). As for Crito's comments about MS Office - I might have been tempted for Office XP / 2003 (security concerns notwithstanding) but IMHO 2007 has been such a step backwards in the usability stakes that I'd rather have OpenOffice at work instead.

And if it was Microsoft who had broken something - would they be listening to your screams???

Not to deny that there are problems chez Linux, but 'tis swings and roundabouts. Overall, I feel I've had fewer problems with Linux, and I definitely enjoy the experience more. Can't say everything's bad chez Microsoft, though. The other day, I found that the scheduled restart on one of our Win 2K3 servers had been failing. Looking in the event log, the uptime was a little over 20,000,000 seconds (or more than 33 weeks) with no problems that we'd noticed.

Actually, you can run into exactly the same problem when installing a "stock" version of Windows. There is a reason why we have vendor-specific "OEM" versions of that OS.

The main reason why you might suppose that "Windows has no such problems" is that someone else has done the configuration work, and someone else besides has installed it. (All of which is quite sensible, o'course.)

Also... given that Linux runs natively on more than twenty-one very different hardware platforms (from IBM mega-mainframes to portable phones...) the "target" that a distro writer must consider is considerably larger and more diverse than what Windows must deal with.