Why I returned to Windows

From: gunzip (none_at_none.com)
Date: 08/24/04 

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:18:03 +0100

After 5 years of trying to be a productive web developper on Linux (Red
Hat/Mandrake) I've concluded that I get a lot more done on Windows,
especially where software management is concerned. The sad fact is that most
open source software works better on Windows than on it's "native" platform
UNIX.

To give you an example I use Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl, mod_perl and
PHP for most of my work. On Windows it's trivial to run Apache 1.3 and
Apache 2 switching between services as required. I can also run PHP4.3 with
Apache 2 and PHP5 with Apache 1.3. Setup takes a few minutes. When an update
is released I simply unzip the package and replace the PHP directory. Same
with MySQL and now PostgreSQL has a Windows binary. OpenOffice is orders of
magnitude faster on Windows than on any 2.6 kernel. GIMP can access all the
 fonts on the system unlike its *nix version for which special font
configuration is required.

On Fedora Core, like most distros, upgrading software is a major headache.
Running 2 versions of Apache is non-trivial. Even less trivial is running 2
versions of PHP. Getting one version of mod_perl to work with HTML::Mason
proved impossible because Fedora comes only with Apache 2 and
mod_perl/Apache2 is still buggy. I just tried upgrading my PHP4 from 4.3 to
4.8 via yum and was told I didn't have libxsltbreakpoint.so.1. I Googled for
this and it appeared to be part of libxslt but when I installed a new
version of this there was no trace of lib xsltbreakpoint. These are not
uncommon experiences. Basically Linux software management is to Windows what
Noah's Ark is to the modern motor car - and I'm not even a fan of Windows.
Why should I waste days trying to do what I can do in minutes on Windows -
upgrade essential web development software?

Linux is still wallowing in dependency hell. Don't give me yum, YAST, apt,
rpm or any of the other crap the Linux community has come up with. Anyone
considering moving from Windows to Linux should ask themselves one thing -
do they intend to upgrade their software in the future? If so, stay with
what you have becuase you'll be sorry.

"Desktop Linux" is a myth, except for a few corporate shops which have a
strong Linux bias to begin with. Linux has always been a good choice for
servers but, please, no more "desktop" Linux. It was never made for it. I
know Windows lacks stability but for non-sysadmins who need to be productive
and who don't have all day to discover the details of how everything works,
you're better off on Windows.

gunzip

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