Why do people switch to Linux 13499

On Sunday 30 October 2005 12:55, Mark Kent stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Yes. I have had to reinstall a few Windows machines on a couple of occasions. I already had some difficulties in that respect with my NT 4.0 - video card not recognized, soundcard not recognized, et al - and quite a few times I had difficulties with getting stuff set up properly in Windows 98 SE.

Now I know that 98 SE is old, but from what I've seen by simply sitting at a Windows XP machine, I'd rather not touch that one for maintenance.

Lots of times, albeit not so much on my own Windows NT machine at the time. I didn't use my computer that frequently at the time, and I preferred not to mess with it once it was set up properly.

I have however done multiple support jobs for others - their most recent Windows version being WinXP Home - or was it Professional? Anyway, it was my neighbor's machine and he had some hijacker installed that would pop up love ads on his desktop at random times, even when his browser was not open.

I had to call in the help of a friend who knows more about Windows than I do, and who led me to a site where I could download some tool - I forgot what it was - to find all the files and registry keys buttociated with this phenomenon...

My own NT machine at the time was not connected to the internet. Yet, my most recent ex was in constant trouble from viruses, trojans and spyware, and such "apparently accepted normal behavior" as Outlook Express suddenly no longer working or certain settings or icons suddenly getting lost.

First she had Win98 SE, now she's got Windows XP Pro. The "apparently accepted normal behavior" occurred in both versions of Windows.

No, I can't have. ;-)

Yes I have, when I was running NT. Especially since OS-2's HPFS filesystem did *not* require defragmentation. It actually avoided fragmentation in runtime, just like the GNU-Linux filesystems do.

Oh yes, I have. And often it would turn out that some things were simply hidden from the list of installed software.

On NT, that was possible, but quite hard to set up as I had to figure out for myself what permissions to give to non-privileged users. NT defaulted to ownership and group "everybody" and with everyone having read, write, execute, modify and delete permissions - if I recall their names correctly, that is.

That was very hard to do. Lots of stuff just didn't work anymore.

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)