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Dud3! · Rated XXX

Let me just pop in and insert something for dadx2mj:

Forgetting games for the moment, since most games are made for windows, and may or may not run on Linux, let's check the other points since you said something about people with Windows being able to do anything thing with their computers.

Not bashing you at all, just bashing Windows in general.

Let's start simply:

1. You can do just about ANYTHING without restarting Linux, I've even heard of someone replacing the kernel without restarting the system. Just about any change in Windows requires a restart, although 2000 and XP are better about it then previous versions.

2. How many times has Windows completely crashed to the point of not being able to do anything besides pushing the reset button? How many times has ONE stupid applications brought Windows to it's knees requiring a restart? I bet you can't remember how many times, but I can tell you how many times that's happened since I started using Linux at the start of this year, NONE, never, zip, zilch. Everything is seperate, if a program hangs, kill the process, if it completely hangs X, swap to another terminal and kill the process, etc.

3. While bill is bandying about all the great stuff you can do with XP (a lot of the "new" stuff are concepts copied straight from Unix/Linux/BSD stuff), I can throw a wrench in the whole thing with this simple question:

3.a Can you sort a list alphabetically, upper case first, removing all duplicates, and send it to a file called sorted_list AND send only the items starting with A to a file called A_list.......from the command line? HAH! No, you can't, because even simple stuff like that that you should be able to do can't be done without buying a program for Windows to do it. Chances are it will be graphical only, requiring more steps to do something simple.

3.b I have tons of audio and video software, some of it professional quality, on my computer. All of it open source, all of it more complex than anything you get with Windows. Oh wait! All you get with Windows is Movie Maker 2 that only saves stuff as WMV. If you want to get something that you can actually do stuff with, you have to shell out a few hundred bucks to do it. Even if the open source software wasn't free, it would still do more than Windows stuff.

3.c There is so much stuff that you can do with Linux/BSD to actually put your computer to work, instead of you working to make it do something, it's amazing. Computers are meant to simplify tasks and do work for us, with Windows that point has sort of been lost, with Linux that's what it's all about.

4. Open source has one big advantage, developement. Is there a problem with something? Find a vulnerability? Report it to the people maintaing that program and if it's something being actively developed, the problem will most likely be fix in an hour or by the next day! If there's something you think a program needs to have, go in and add it yourself and compile the program again or suggest it to the people that made the program and they just might add it to the next version.

4.a The Linux kernel is constantly being worked on by people around the world. New versions come out every few weeks, and most of the time I find myself with the next-to-latest kernel because a new one comes out after I download the current one! How many times has M$ released a new kernel for you to download? How long does it take for a problem to be fixed? How many features that you suggested to M$ has been added to Windows? That's what I thought.

5. Yes, I'm a total Linux/BSD zealot now after using it and I wish I hadn't got a bad Mandrake 6 CD back in 1997/98 because if I had, I would have been using Linux since then. Better late than never right? The only computer I own with Windows on it is the main computer, which will be staying with my parents when I move, I don't need Windows for ANYTHING! That said, Windows is good for some people, some things, but is really a toy of an OS.

Whoa, did I just do that? OK, stepping off the soap box now, see ya! Wave

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Due to a not-that-interesting turn of events, I am now known as Justin Danger.