If you used Windows before, why did you switch or now use Linux more 5088

Michael Heiming

I think I run my machine under extreme load all the time, at least the processors are under extreme load. When I run dbms applications, the hard drives get loaded up pretty much too, hitting 50 MBytes-second for extended periods. At the moment, it is loaded thus:

08:33:30 up 2 days, 6:55, 3 users, load average: 5.19, 5.22, 5.18 124 processes: 118 sleeping, 6 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle total 8.8% 387.2% 3.2% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu00 2.0% 96.4% 1.1% 0.2% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu01 3.1% 96.3% 0.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu02 2.4% 96.7% 0.6% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.1% cpu03 1.1% 97.6% 0.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.2% Mem: 4100844k av, 4060740k used, 40104k free, 0k shrd, 130972k buff 1495644k actv, 1873480k ind, 68860k inc Swap: 8193076k av, 0k used, 8193076k free 339100k cached

I am not doing much IO at the moment. The reason the uptime is so low is that there was a 4-hour power failure Saturday evening (my entire town, and the next town, all lost power) and my UPS is only good for 68 minutes. Also the UPS monitoring software is set to do a controlled system shutdown after 3300 seconds of failed power, which it did.

Sometimes I like that. Especially when writing, compiling, and debugging programs. Sometimes I find it a nuisance, such as when running browser or newsreader and wanting either to notify me of incoming e-mail. I know I can run all at once, and sometimes do, but it is a bit aggravating. Mozilla was better in that respect than running FireFox and ThunderBird together. My guess is that the kernel does not see much difference between the two, however. This is only a very minor complaint and YMMV.

I find I like emacs for most administration tasks in preference to vi(m), but for some tasks, vi(m) is better, so I use both.

This is a really big plus IMO. Once I needed a program like grep, but I did not want to see the lines in the various files that contained the strings; all I wanted was the filenames. I just took the source of grep and diddled it to do what I needed. That was in UNIX, not Linux, but the principle is the same.

Computers do not pay my bills anymore, but they did for 25 years or somewhat more. I do not make a religion of operating system selection anymore than I make one of programming languages. I liked Algol 60, I could use the various FORTRAN compilers. I used about a dozen buttemblers and liked Bell Labs FAP which had a great macro-buttembler in it, IBM's MAP. I wrote a compiler for a specialized language in SNOBOL4 (actually SPITBOL). But also COMPbutt (for CDC, IIRC)... I wrote in C for UNIX machines for a long time, and have used C++ almost exclusively for the last 15 years or so. If you have to, you can program almost anything in almost any language. I do not rhapsodize like that. But if my life depended on writing and executing programs (say for the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital where I was to be a patient), I would go with Linux. If they were using Windows, I would try to find an alternative treatment program no matter what the medical problem might be.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 08:25:00 up 2 days, 6:46, 3 users, load average: 5.20, 5.19, 5.15