Does anything in Linux work *well* 1573

ahh, not so. This is completely different. BSOD=computer needs to be rebooted, in fact, in my Win2k machine, it just randomly reboots, in the middle of work, I might not even be using it. Dreadful.

Sounds like you either have something with a memory leak (top will help), or have you a faulty machine? There is clearly something wrong with that. I had Suse on a Pentium P100 with KDE on it1 and it was much faster than that. Perhaps your memory setup is poor - have you enough swap space? Have you a faulty or partially faulty memory card? This is not standard behaviour at all.

note1: I didn't put it on - and wouldn't recommend that config!

Have you tried Opera, Konqueror and Firefox? It's extremely rare to find something which won't render at all. If you're *truly* desperate, you could get cross-over office and run IE, but it is a rather ancient and low functionality browser.

But it's not, is it? If you're running a server machine, then it needs to say up all the time. Windows2K randomly reboots on me, you can't get rid of the GUI, Linux stays up forever. Linux is way better for reliability.

I've not tried FC3, but Debian can be pretty much automated for all of this, so you don't need to do anything much at all.

But you get no applications. A Debian install will be done within an hour, typically, but with all the target applications you want. When my MS Windows machine is replaced, it usually takes me about 2-3 weeks to get all the apps I use back on.

With what?

I don't know about Fedora. In debian, you can remove packages but keep the configs (remove) or remove packages and remove all traces as well, (purge). Perhaps Fedora does the same thing?

The coup-de-grace for me is the openness - source code, stunning levels of documentation and support. If I can't get something to work in Microsoft Windows, I'm always fully aware that there's a very good chance the problem won't be fixable, so it tends to limit even the degree of effort to which I'm prepared to go to fix problems. Even our 'outsourced' support people will generally want to reinstall the OS if they've been more than about 10-15 minutes trying to find a problem, as their own experience has demonstrated that it's generally quicker. The fundamental problem with that approach is that although a basic install might be fairly quick, as they generally use images, they tend to remove user data in the process, as well as any custom installed packages.

With Debian, there is complete documentation and support: source code for everything man pages info pages debian website package pages public, visible bug-tracking debian user and developer mailing lists specialist lists for laptops, different archs, etc. debian mailing list searchable archives newserver gatewayed versions of the mailing lists debian planet for web-based help, faq-o-matic debian detailed guides linux documentation project detailed guides (user, admin, etc.) LDP howtos (-usr-share-doc-HOWTO-*) usenet newsgroups (comp.os.linux.*) irc channels (irc.debian.org#debian) LDP linux magazine google web searches google usenet searches linux certification courses (Red Hat and independent)

if you're prepared to go 'offline', then you also get: printed books (various, Debian and others, I have some) linux magazines paid-for support So, for me, the coup-de-grace is the freedom, although the price is also nice. If I want information about Microsoft Windows, I generally have few options, dominated by buying expensive books, or looking for paying internet sites. Whilst it can take a while go through all the various linux information resources, it's worthwhile because the chances are that the answer to your problem is already out there.

12Meg of ram as one of my first Linux machines. I'm afraid that XP has phenomenal minimum hardware requirements just to start up, let alone run user packages. There's also the possibility to user older 486 & displaying packages run on a more powerful machine, that way, it's possible to get virtually all the speed advantages of a modern machine using older hardware, with no licensing fees to pay to anyone.

I don't think I'd even begun to scratch the surface of the full range of advantages, but I've managed to put some more of them here.

-- Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk If this is a service economy, why is the service so bad?