Does anything in Linux work *well* 1568

snips

On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 10:34:52 -0500, allex

First, you seem to confuse "great" with "perfect". They're not the same thing at all. It is trivial to find hardware that isn't supported in Linux, but is in Windows... and equally trivial to find hardware that's supported in Linux, but not in Windows. No system is perfect. Grasp this, internalize it, understand that it is cold, hard reality, and you'll be well on your way to coping with OSen in general.

This buttumes Windows has a driver... or can support the device. I've got hardware around here that nothing later than Win95 will even boot on, yet will run current versions of Debian without hbuttle.

Reinstalling is rarely necessary to fix problems. There are some cases; at one point, for example, I completely hosed all the permissions system-wide, which was simply a matter of my poking around whilst running as root, which is a bad idea in the first place. In another case, I'd been playing around with "cooker" - which they warn you up front is likely to have any number of problems - and, well, it did. I managed to completely kill the entire rpm package management system.

That said, if you avoid running as root and you avoid "cooker" or similar things ("testing", whatever), it should be nigh-on impossible to do enough damage to require a reinstall.

That's just it - it generally does work well right out of the box. It won't always, just as Windows won't always, if you have some particularly odd or unsupported hardware.

Rebooting once a week, or even once a day, or even once an hour is fine, as long as it is by intent. Many people shut down their systems at night, or after work, etc, and no big deal. It's when the reboots happen other than by intent that it's a problem - say because something locked up, or the system spontaneously rebooted, etc.

As an example, I ran Win2K Server for a while. Solid enough, it basically stayed up until I took it down. At one point, I applied the latest SP to it, though, which turns out to have been a mistake. The previously solid server now automagically started rebooting itself once a day. That sort of thing is unacceptable. Intentional reboots don't really matter, unwanted ones are a PITA.

There's more than three, but OpenOffice seems to be the "big player" these days.

What awful font problem? My fonts are crisp and clear and very readable, and if I want, I can install additional fonts with ease.

They do? Funny. They run just fine here.

Especially in price tag. :) Sure, there are apps for Windows which don't have a serious equivalent in Linux; the opposite is also true. That has nothing to do with the OS, it's strictly an application issue. If Windows were the absolute worst OS ever created, if everybody hated it with a pbuttion, if virtually nobody used it, but you needed to run some application that only had a Windows version, you'd run Windows. That wouldn't make Windows good, it would simply make it necessary.

The same sort of learning curve you had with Windows, it should be noted. Unless you happened to have someone else - system vendor, the office sysadmin, whomever - install and configure it for you, you went through the same sort of thing learning how to install, configure and maintain Windows. To expect Linux to magically bypbutt all this is silly.

That said, once it is installed and configured, you don't need to hand-hold it the way you do with Windows. You don't need to constantly update your AV and anti-spyware apps, for example.