Re: Just My 2 Cents
On Wed, Dec 09, 1998 at 12:45:07AM +1100, Richard Lyon wrote:
> I guess the 'real' truth is that most of the microsoft stuff is actually
> quite good. With the latest versions of service paks installed things
> are very slick on windows NT.
"quite good"... mmmh. Certainly not for my needs, but my needs may be very
unusable. Microsofts design goal is to hide as much as possible. But this
also means that I loose control over what happens.
For example file sharing. The SMB protocol makes the clients broadcast to
find a server in the network. This is highly annoying, but removes one
configuration option from the client machine.
I prefer control over convenience.
> I have debian and winnt-workstation running on two machines on my desk.
> Sure at first glance it appears that linux is faster, but look at all
> the services running on NT and what they do for me.
Do you have a list? I know only Win95 machines, and they don't even have a
telnet daemon running. Sure, it would be useless anyway ('cause DOS is
crap), but... My Linux machine has telnet, ftp, http, xdm and a dozen of
other daemons and services running without me noticing. Most time they are
sleeping anyway, so they don't slow down the machine.
Maybe I don't know what services you mean.
> If I install new
> hardware on my winnt box at least I don't have to compile and link a
> new kernel.
Well, this is indeed a good point. But often when I install new hardware in a
windows machine, I have to reinstall Windows because all the drivers mess up
with the system. Modules make it quite easy to provide a similar
functionality under Linux. The Hurd will offer more functionality in this
area (as a Microkernel), and I hope pre-compiled drivers will be possible
(also a better hardware detection would be nice, but remember that we are
fighting against closed hardware protocols and specification).
> Another interesting comparision is application installation.
> I wonder how many people really prefer to use dselect to the microsoft
> way of doing things.
Install Shield is just crap compared to dpkg. If you compare dselect with
Install Shield, you are comparing apples with oranges. It is true that
dselect is "old fashioned", but apt, the new front end, will be better.
dselect is really only a front end to dpkg. Dpkg does handle the package
installation, upgrade and removal. Dpkg does keep track of dependencies
automatically, and does not ask, if you want to overwrite a shared library,
just because one is newer than the other ("Do you want to overwrite
XXX.DLL?" is a question where you _can't_ know the answer. This is _very_
user unfriendly, and it is common in the Windows world).
Actually dpkg does keep track of every single file in the system. Which is
far better than everything I've seen under Windows.
> Both systems to be very stable and reliable.
I don't have much experiences about Windows NT. But I use WinNT + MSIE in
university sometimes. WinNT installation there does not allow anything but
using MSIE (it's a internet workplace). But still it is crashing or hanging
quite often.
> Perhaps a more interesting question is; how many unix applications would
> windows users like to run on their machines?
If you ask me, many. Still, I think this is the wrong question. Most
standard Unix commands and applications could not unfold their whole power
on a Windows machine (because of limitations in the file system and the
operating system design as a whole). For example, there are powerful text
processing tools under Unix, but most files under Windows are in a
proprietary binary format (word .doc uments for example). The text tools
would be almost useful on a windows machine (for example "grep").
> Maybe the real benefit of linux is that it encourages people not to have
> one dimensional thinking and consider alternatives.
This is the problem of Windows users. They think computers have to crash
once in a while. And you have to reboot after changing the network protocol
or the IP address.
Marcus
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