My Professor Says Linux Sucks and Is Not Real Unix. 2865

Floyd L. Davidson

Of course he's a troll. But this is such a common tactic. Rather than try and allow a direct side-by-side comparison of Linux and Windows, this "student" claims that his professor is claiming that Solaris is better than Linux.

The comparison is valid. A $25,000 sparcStation is probably going to be much better than a $500 Walmart Linux machine. It's a sucker punch gambit. For me to try and say "Your professor has no clue, get real and get Linux" would have shown be to be uninformed, grossly biased, or just foolish.

Sun makes a great Hardware-Software combination. This is why it would be inappropriate for me to try to claim that Linux on Intel is superior. If you have the cash, and you want the very best available, a top-of-the-line Mac or Solaris is really a great choice.

I'm looking at the Sun site in another window and I haven't had much luck getting a current price list. I did see that the Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation, which has some pretty impressive specs for a Notebook, will be selling at a base price of about $3400. I could get a Thinkpad for about $900, and a Dell for $600. But the Sun model has some pretty impressive specifications, including dual-core CPU, 1. SXGA+ 15 or 17 inch display, and other goodies.

Sure, if I had the resources, I'd love one. If I were spending someone else's money, I'd want one. But when I know that I have to fork over enough to buy a used car, a 3 week vacation at a nice resort, or any number of other "fun" things, it's a bit more of a price than I might want to pop for right away.

Our hypothetical professor wants to spend someone else's money, and cannot really use "discressionary" income. Perhaps he'd rather get 10 Sun SparcStations than 30 or 50 Intel Workstations, or 80 Linux workstations.

I'm trying to create the type of typical scenarior where someone might walmart special running Linux. Hide the price tag, and of course Sun Wins.

Sure it will. But the point is that this is hardware that has been optimized for Solaris by Sun. Nothing wrong with that either.

A common misleading tactic when WinTrolls are comparing Linux to Windows is the attempt to install Linux on a machine which they often KNOW is not certified to run Linux, and often contains hardware KNOWN to be Linux hostile. Then they base their "evaluation" of Linux on a faulty installation based on the misleading buttumption that any effort was made to select compatible hardware, and compare 20 minutes of experience with this "crippled" installation with 10 years of experience with Windows systems which were custom configured by the OEMs to run with Windows.

Very true, but the "typical" Linux basis for comparison is standard "Wintel" hardware that has been "converted" to Linux.

I bet it's beautiful up there right now. Try to get some sleep. :-D