Does anything in Linux work *well* 1572

Mark Kent

I'll give you that.

, reliability, uptime,

While I can't say that the Linux kernel itself is at fault, I've had far more problems with Gnome and KDE than I ever had with XP.

On three separate occasions within a two week period, Gnome would just die on me. I mean I would be sitting there, doing whatever I was doing, minding my own business and "boink!" I'm looking at the login screen. Literally instantaneous. All open apps were instantly end. Not a BSOD exactly, I suppose, but very little functional difference.

So I switched to KDE. No boink, but instead what happens is every once in a while it will just slllooowww tttoooo aaa ccccrrrrraaaawwwwllllll. The only thing moving is the mouse cursor. Click on the KDE menu and it takes over three minutes to come up. Click logout. Another 2 or 3 minutes before it acknowledges that. After maybe 15 minutes or so I can finally get to a point where I can reboot.

safe and

I'll give you that as well. But using Moz 1.7.5 in both XP and Linux I find some sites that render just fine in XP that won't in Linux. No clue why. It doesn't seem to be a matter of plugins. Sort of a mystery to me.

printing about as painful

I never found printing painful in Windows. It's not bad in Linux either (I have an Epson, so that probably helps), but see my previous post on the subject in this thread.

no viruses,

OK

no reboots,

I have yet to run this machine longer than a few days without rebooting. Again, not necessarily because of the kernel, but Gnome and KDE aren't as stable as XP in my experience. And that for me is an apples to apples comparison.

I guess. I'm not sure how I would know if it wasn't. I know the fw that comes with XP is f***ed, so the firewall I have on the Linux side is better practically by definition.

regular, rapid updates, for free,

After I installed FC3 I immediately had 167(!) updates waiting for me. So I fired up up2date and told it to go for it. The next day I end the process because it didn't seem to be doing anything. Tried again. Same results; it was hanging on the "Checking updates and resolving dependencies" thing. So I ended up doing them 10 or 20 at a shot. Took about 3 more days to finish the job.

Last time I installed XP from scratch (new hd) it took maybe an hour total to dl and install the updates.

no activation,

Okay.

Okay.

Faster and better Quake3 performance than on Microsoft

I'll trust you on that.

support for every file system known to man, support for at least

yep, yep, yep

In fact, amazing hardware support.

To me the hardware support seems very wide but sort of shallow. Everything works but I have about 80% of the functionality I had under XP.

Easy and simple package

I want to get rid of the Fedora version of OpenOffice and install 1.1.4 from the website. But after an update the package manager proclaims that I can't remove it because I no longer have it installed. I'm sure there's a way around that, but I haven't invested the time to figure it out. How do I get rid of that thing?

Did I mention the price?

That's always the coup de grace isn't it? How can you possibly criticize something that's free? But it's kind of a straw man argument. If it doesn't have the functionality you need, then it really doesn't matter how cheap it is. How grateful would you be if someone left a junk car on your front lawn? I'm not suggesting that's any kind of an analogy to Linux, just trying to prove the point that the free argument only goes so far.

That's very cool. Of course, I only have one computer at the moment so it's a moot point, but I'll give you that one as well. Very nice for businesses.

Well... sort of. I could run XP on 128 MB of RAM, whereas FC3 with KDE claims to need 192 MB minimum. Before you object, just consider that the only really valid comparison is GUI to GUI.

But it's true that if you are ok with a CLI -- or a very lean DE -- then you can run Linux on a lot older stuff.

I know the feeling. :)

Look, Linux has advantages, no doubt. But it's not nearly the slam dunk you want to make it out to be.

Rod