If you used Windows before, why did you switch or now use Linux more 5086

Adam McCarthy

Is you "Graduation Project" a homework buttignment? Was the buttignment to run a poll in UseNet?

I use Linux almost exclusively.

The reason I switched is that I was getting at least three Blue Screens of rest per week with a machine that was only on a couple of hours a day, and even when it was up, applications would crash all the time, even those supplied by Microsoft. I also could not stand the fact that different Microsoft application programs (e.g., Microsoft Office Professional and Microsoft Visual C++) required different versions of some libraries, so whenever I wanted to run one of these applications, I had to reinstall it. Furthermore, it was almost impossible to write systems of cooperating sequential processes connected by messages since I could not get to the main program loop which was hidden in the development environment, so programs would deadlock waiting for IO from the mouse or keyboard, when it was never going to get input from there, but would not pick it up from a message queue. The opposite, where it might be waiting for a message queue when the input was about to come from the mouse or keyboard could also be a problem, but did not exist in the software I needed to write. In Linux, you can see your entire source, especially the main message loop, and you need have only one message queue anyhow, so the problem does not even arise. So, except for trivial single-process applications, I could not even use Microsoft Visual C++ that I paid big bux for.

God help me if I ever needed to run Microsoft Office Professional and Microsoft Visual C++ at the same time: it could not be done.

Windows 95 was just an incompetant collection of programs, not a consistent operating system and essential utility programss and libraries. It was just one step up from DOS, which amounted to a silly program loader.

BTW: A friend once though she had written an operating system. It was just a program loader. But she was a good programmer. Her program loader took only 256 instructions. DOS was somewhat bigger than that.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 08:15:00 up 2 days, 6:36, 3 users, load average: 5.09, 5.21, 5.14