Re: Linux, over hyped by the Linux community, discuss.

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:56:21 +0000, kobold wrote:

Linux, buggy and unstable at the application layer, always in some half
baked beta release even when it is declared stable, poor and often
lacklustre hardware support, rarely supported and seldom back by big
software developers and hardware manufactures, fine as a web server yet
poor as a desktop OS, not quite as secure and immune to viruses and worms
as many of the myths would have us believe, after all this time as a free
OS still with a tiny market share even though many of the Linux community
claim it to be far superior to the competition, the OS of choice for
paranoid anti capitalist anti conformist geeks, the Linux community are
often in complete denial with regards to the competition.

I have heard all these things said about the Linux OS and the people who
use it. Is there any truth in these rumours?

Is anyone willing to discuss these allegations sensibly without just
posting a load of abuse and completely one sided debate?

In my experience running Linux for the past four or five years; Linux is
superbly stable - I've never seen Linux crash short of a hardware problem.
I've seen Xwindows become unresponsive a few times - that can generally be
resolved by doing <ctrl><alt><backspace> to log out of Xwindows and log in
again. Most applications are also quite stable - very few core dumps -
much less problem than BSODs on most MS versions I've tried. One anecdote:
a couple of years ago before I retired, I noticed that my Linux desktop
workstation was indeed acting funny. On reboot I ran the manufacturer's
SCSI diagnostics and found that one of the SCSI drives was very sick. It
contained one of the system partitions. I replaced the drive, recopied the
files from the system backup, and had everything running normally again in
a few hours. About that same time, I was presented with a flat panel LCD
which I attached to my office system running MS W2K Pro. During a reboot
after installing and changing the desktop resolution to match the flat
panel W2K crapped all over itself - it started to boot then reset. The
resident MS guru attempted to fix it with the repair disk. That failed. He
tried to do a system restore from the system backups - that failed. After
four or five tries, he finally reinstalled from scratch. I've never had
problems like that with Linux.

Hardware is a bit spotty in some areas. Some peripherals designed for MS
only don't work - because the manufacturers will not supply drivers and
will not release information to allow proper drivers to be written - most
notorious are 'winmodems', though the biggest problems are 'winprinters'.
Printers that do PostScript or PCL always work. HP, Epson, Brother, and
Samsung have very good support. Mostly if a printer works with MAC and MS,
it will work with Linux. Scanner support is pretty good - HP and Epson
support very well. There is a 'linmodem' howto at www.tldp.org that helps
with winmodem configuration - I have a cheap winmodem that came with my
old Compaq 7470 - and it works very well.

I've been running three Linux computers on the internet via my DSL
connection for over three years with no particular firewall setup and no
anti-virus software. I have never seen any malware infestation. Some folks
claim that is due solely to 'security by obscurity' - it doesn't really
matter to me; my systems are on 24/7/365 with no problems.

As for 'ready for the desktop' - over a year ago I installed Mandrake
Linux on the public access internet computers at the Portneuf Free
Library. To date, there have been NO complaints. The computers are in
constant use from opening time until closing. In 14 months, there have no
malware infestations. I took my time doing the install and setup. I
installed the browser plugins I knew people would want. I installed
OpenOffice and AbiWord and Gnumeric (spread***), and set up the network
HP laser printer. A customer satisfaction survey a few months ago showed
universal acceptance, and a few of the responses indicated that the
patrons were unaware they were not running MS. Before the changeover, the
director was called to the floor at least twice a day to help patrons with
internet problems. Since the Linux install, she has not been called at
all. I have been called twice - when power outages upset the IP address on
the HP printer. In both cases full operation was restored in less than
five minutes.

In Linux perfect? Hell no. But in my opinion, it is much better than the
usual alternative. I've found it to be quite solid, both secure and
robust. The software installation methodology has improved a lot over the
last couple of years. I now run (K)ubuntu on most of my systems. To
install software, I go to the start menu, open the system folder, click to
start synaptic, do a quick search for the package I want, click to select,
click to install. The configuration is usually taken care of and the
package works immediately - with no system reboot.

I've been a computer professional for 30+ years - did scientific software
support and development at DOD test centers. I've used RT-11, RSX-11,
Vax-VMS, Univac, IBM mainframes, Unix (several varieties) and Linux at
work. I've used Commodore 64, Commodore 128, CP/M, CP/M 86, and a few
more. I'll be glad to discuss whatever issues you have; and I'll say up
front that, in general, Linux works very well. When buying hardware it
pays to do a little research first, to see what will work (or what won't).
There are a few gaps - IMHO most notably tax preparation software and
greeting card software. I surf, do Office type apps (mostly WP and
spread***), develop web sites, manipulate digital images. I used to
supply scientific support for digital signal processing. I'm happy, and so
is my wife - who is not a techie.

.