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October 14, 2003
Shilling for Microsoft
Posted by Arnold
David Weinberger obviously has been bought off by the evil empire. In the comment section on this post, he writes,
As for getting linux: I have linux on a separate machine. As a desktop system (gnome and kde) I've found that it's far less stable than XP. Not only do I have to spend hours finding the command line commands for doing simple things, but the system freezes and crashes frequently. E.g., I just had to reboot in order to restore sound. Now, it turns out that I could also just have killed the right process (artsd? something like that), but how the hell am I supposed to know which is the sound processing process? So, while linux is rock solid as a server, my experience as a desktop end user is that it's not yet ready for desktop end users.
Comments (2)
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1. David Thomson on October 15, 2003 12:03 AM writes...
I have been saying for years that Linux is essentially only for nerds. The rest of us desire something far more user friendly. It almost always takes a Microsoft that employs full time professionals to improve software up to this level. Linux depends mostly on “donations” from its true believing adherents. That’s usually not good enough. Oh well, I’m probably a Microsoft stooge. I earn around 10% of my income directly from Microsoft. Sadly, my soul is bought and paid for.
I, however, wish only the best for the Linux crowd. Somebody has got to keep Microsoft on its toes.
Permalink to Comment2. Zonker on October 16, 2003 08:22 PM writes...
That's interesting, because I've used Linux as a desktop system for years now and I've experienced nothing like the pain described by Weinberger -- though I've certainly had my share of pain on Windows systems.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually experienced crashes that were unrelated to hardware. (I've had a few hard drives die on me, but I think we can all agree that it doesn't matter what OS you're running when your hard drive goes belly-up.)
I don't know which distro he's using, or what kind of hardware its on, but I have four fully-functional desktop machines running Linux -- three desktops, one laptop -- and have experienced no problems with any of them. My youngest brother lives with me and runs Linux on one of the machines, and he's also had no problems -- or at least none that he's informed me of. Two machines are running SUSE, one is running Mandrake, and one is running Xandros.
I'm extremely skeptical when I hear people making statements about how Linux is less stable than XP in any situation. I can buy arguments that Linux is a little rougher around the edges than Windows, and frequently complaints about Linux are basically tied to the fact that Linux doesn't look and act exactly like Windows, but stability is not an issue unless you're dealing with unstable releases of software (such as people who run Debian unstable and wonder why they have issues...) or faulty hardware.
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