Re: why not like linux ?

From: Maxim S. Shatskih (maxim_at_storagecraft.com)
Date: 05/16/04 

Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 18:06:52 +0400

> As always a smell of "inferior copy" around a Microsoft product.

Sorry.

I'm too lazy to list the "inferiornesses" of UNIX (even good UNIX like FreeBSD)
compared to NT. Some of them do still persist. Some do persist for 20 years.

"UNIX Haters Handsbook" listed some. Like:

a) shell does the command line wildcard expansion, so that the app does not
know the command line as typed by user.

b) swap _partition_ instead of swap file. Combine this with non-resizeable
filesystems in most UNIXen and to resizeable NTFS and pagefile.sys.

c) X11 "does not enforce any policy". Yes, IMHO that's why X11-based UNIXen
will never be major on the desktop. And never were. The only major UNIX on the
desktop is Mac OS X, which has a sane policy-enforcing windowing system, and
X11 as a toy to please Linuxoids.

Note: Windows 3.x GUI runned fine in 4MB of memory (well, it needed 9MB to run
the whole MS Office simultaneously). At the same time, the UNIX's X11 GUI
required 16MB just to start up. The functionality was a bit poorer due to lack
of OLE in UNIX (still lacking it).

Let's look more: in GDI, colors are specified as RGB. In X11 - sorry, but as
device-dependent pixel values. X11 has no means of converting bitmaps of
different depths - UNIX people need another library called SDL to do this. GDI
can do all of this, and could do all of this even in Windows 3.x, where GDI.EXE
was 220KB and the card driver around 100KB. X11 server was > 1MB in all UNIXen
of that time.

d) lack of decent removable media handling. Typing "umount" on any CD change is
boring.

e) Byzantine disk partitioning schemes like FreeBSD uses. Windows can be
installed on any partition on the drive. FreeBSD requires the partition to be
in the primary table (among the first 4).

Now Linux in particular. Lack of support compared to both FreeBSD and Windows.
Lack of patch distribution scheme.

In FreeBSD, there is a notion of "world", which is the source for the kernel
and all essential base OS apps (/usr/bin). The set of apps is rather rich,
includes Perl, for instance. You can synchronize your source control with
FreeBSD.org and pull patches at source level, then automatically rebuild the
whole OS. You can even upgrade across the minor OS versions, BTW.

Any other FreeBSD software is installed either as packages (upgradeable from
the same tree) or as "ports" which is a source package maintained by
FreeBSD.org (but not necessarily written by them).

So, you have a central point of support for the whole OS. You can guarantee
that it is the same as on the machines of their authors - if you want so.

The same is with Microsoft, though patches are binary. Windows Update is the
same thing technically.

Now compare to Linux. RedHat and similar companies bear no responsibility over
anything. The kernel? Hey, it's Linus's private property, distributed from
kernel.org. The shell? "bash" is from gnu.org. The command-line tools? Again
from gnu.org. And so on.

Yes, you can download the source for a newer kernel, build it and boot it.
After this, a good deal of startup scripts from RedHat will broke, broke due to
/proc structure changed in the new kernel.

Amazing level of supportability. Just imagine installing such an OS on a server
farm or in the corporation. I can imagine FreeBSD in such role and saw server
farms (mainly website hosting) on FreeBSD. I can imagine Windows in such role
and saw server farms (mainly running Exchange) on Windows. But Linux???? sorry,
how will you do updates to the machines??? 

-- 
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation
maxim@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

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