Re: why not like linux ?
From: Spiro Trikaliotis (news+200405_at_trikaliotis.net)
Date: 05/17/04
- Next message: Jeroen Koeter: "Re: WDM driver debugging with windbg"
- Previous message: Spiro Trikaliotis: "Re: WDM driver debugging with windbg"
- In reply to: Maxim S. Shatskih: "Re: why not like linux ?"
- Next in thread: Maxim S. Shatskih: "Re: why not like linux ?"
- Reply: Maxim S. Shatskih: "Re: why not like linux ?"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Date: 17 May 2004 06:07:12 GMT
Hello,
although it is getting "somewhat" OT here, I quick answer to some of
your points.
One remark: Points which are removed usually mean that I agree with you
most of the time.
Maxim S. Shatskih <maxim@storagecraft.com> wrote:
> a) shell does the command line wildcard expansion, so that the app
> does not know the command line as typed by user.
Sometimes, this is an advantage, sometimes, it is not. An app *can* get
the wildcards by the user escaping them (depending on the shell, it is
\*, for example, in bash) if it needs them.
> 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.
And now, these days? It's the other way round. Where was Win 3.1 when
X11 allowed working remote, starting one application on another server
and seeings its output - and only this one - on my local machine? When
was this capability built into Windows?
> The functionality was a bit poorer due to lack of OLE in UNIX (still
> lacking it).
Using Winword 2.0 these days, I really knew why I hated OLE. Did you
ever try to work on a document with many embedded OLE elements? Winword
crashed, and it crashed the working file, too, so your only chance was
to make (very!) regular backups.
> X11 has no means of converting bitmaps of different depths - UNIX
> people need another library called SDL to do this.
Ever heard of "one task, one tool"? Yes, it seems to be much more
comfortable to have everything in one place. Anyway, whenever you want
to do something the author did not thing about, you praise an author
using the "one task, one tool" philosophie, while you hate one which did
not.
> d) lack of decent removable media handling. Typing "umount" on any CD
> change is boring.
For Linux, get another distribution where this is not needed.
Did you never get bored by the need to "remove" an USB flash card on XP?
Isn't this the same problem?
> Windows can be installed on any partition on the drive. FreeBSD
> requires the partition to be in the primary table (among the first 4).
Oh, obviously, you forget Windows 95/98/Me, do you?
> Now Linux in particular. Lack of support compared to both FreeBSD and
> Windows. Lack of patch distribution scheme.
You're comparing apples and oranges. FreeBSD and Windows are whole OS
("distributions"), while Linux is not. So, you have to compare FreeBSD
and Windows with a particular distribution, like Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE,
Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, ...
Please, don't tell me that these distributions do not have support or
patch distribution schemes?
> 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.
Although I don't know FreeBSD that much, I don't see why this should not
be possible with Linux distributions? With Debian, you can even upgrade
across the major versions, BTW. ;-) "man apt-get" or "man aptitude"
helps you out.
Even the small company or the student can learn these concepts, as they
are freely available with the main OS. Can the average user of XP Home
or XP Prof do this himself? Not to speak about remotely, on a text
terminal? Can XP even be started (and worked with) without the GUI?
(Remember: One task, one tool!)
> 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).
... which is almost the same concept as there is with most Linux
distributions.
> 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.
Could you please tell me where I find the Microsoft internal's CVS
server (or the like), I would like to keep up with development version
of Windows.
> 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.
I don't know that much about Red Hat - I've learned to hate it, not to
use it - but there is much support in most Linux distributions. No one
ever tells you "it is the XXX's fault, try to contact them". They
contact them themselves and try to figure a way out.
Ever tried this with Microsoft?
> 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.
Well, that's the reason I hate Red Hat (and SuSE, btw, is not much
better). It is not good practice to patch the kernel to work around
problems in userland. Furthermore, it is Red Hat's way to tell you "if
you want to upgrade, buy our new versioon".
So, the bottom line is: Don't use Red Hat, use another distribution.
The good thing is: You have a choice! For hard liners, there is even
Linux from Scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ ;-)
> 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.
Guess what? I've seen Linux server farms, too.
> But Linux???? sorry, how will you do updates to the machines???
For debian:
[0] If you want to compile a package yourself, do that and put it in an
appropriate place on your network.
If you want to upgrade a distribution's packages, skip this.
[1] (apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade) on one machine
[2] <test the package!>
[3] rollout (apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade) on all machines
[4] done
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to bash MS for Windows, nor FreeBSD,
nor do I think that Linux is the holy grail. Anyway, speaking of the
systems, one should try to be as objective as could be, and choose the
tool (in this case, the OS) by objective factors, not by means of a
religious war.
I'm sorry for this OT post.
Regards,
Spiro.
-- Spiro R. Trikaliotis http://www.trikaliotis.net/
- Next message: Jeroen Koeter: "Re: WDM driver debugging with windbg"
- Previous message: Spiro Trikaliotis: "Re: WDM driver debugging with windbg"
- In reply to: Maxim S. Shatskih: "Re: why not like linux ?"
- Next in thread: Maxim S. Shatskih: "Re: why not like linux ?"
- Reply: Maxim S. Shatskih: "Re: why not like linux ?"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Relevant Pages
|
