Quote: Original post by kRogue

Quote:
Most of the time XP crashes aren't really the fault of XP, but is a result of bad drivers.

there is some truth in that, but, the other cause is misbehaving applications and this is where XP/2000 has issues: a misbehaving application (typically games) should not take the whole system with it as is often the case in Windows. In Linux when an application tries to do evil things the application crashes, not the entire OS.

Balls. I've had Gnome lock up my linux box so badly that I couldn't switch to a different local console or use terminal services to get in to it.

I've also had postgresql, mysql and Ingres lock up a box so badly it had to be restarted.

All of this "*nix never fails" stuff is not true.

So from my own personal experience, using flavours of linux and solaris in production enviornments where they had a lot to do - (and some only ever had to run Ingres really) - I'd say there are times where the only thing you can do is turn it on and off again. Even for *nix boxes.

my reasons:

* peace of mind knowing exactly what my computer is doing at all times. the kernel and most of my apps are open source, there's a uniform standard control of services, and the operation of the kernel is simple, clear, and readily available. with windows, you have no way of knowing what you're computer is doing half the time, because it's closed source, locked way in some obscure, hidden operating system process that you'll never know about. the services have several places they may reside.

* very, very powerful command line. a good shell/command line interface will always be more powerful than the slickest gui, if you know what you're doing. windows is decent, but still can't compare to what *nix can do.

* Beryl. 'nuff said.

* software repositories. easy and uniform install & update of much, much more than just operating system packages.

* 64bit compatibility. since linux and most of its apps are open source, recompiling them for 64bit is pretty trivial. windows 64bit however, ended up only having its kernel made 64bit, while only a handful of its apps & drivers made the jump to 64bit.

Quote: Original post by SiCrane
Most of the time XP crashes aren't really the fault of XP, but is a result of bad drivers.

I too don't know where this "XP crashes all of the time" philosophy comes from. I wonder how much of the fud comes from people who switched from Windows 95/98 to linux, having never given XP a decent shot. XP rarely if ever crashes for me. My experience has been that Linux applications crash regularly. I know that this isn't the same as linux crashing, but what's the purpose of an OS if you can't run decent software on it?

And Ubuntu would lock-up hard on my old computer frequently. I haven't tried it on my new computer yet. I've been debating whether it'd be worth the effort.

I use XP a _lot_, it is worlds better in terms of stability over 95 and 98, but next to when I use Linux (Fedora Core 7) it pales badly in comparison on my setup... I went through some pain first going from Win98SE to Win2000, and then went to XP to get some old games to work...

as for Linux apps crashing, I have experienced far fewer app crashes both in terms of raw numbers and percentages than Windows... naturally one can ask which apps was I running in each instance (as there are loads not available for Linux but for XP) and most apps under Linux are open sourced...

I can honestly say that I have not had GNOME or KDE lock up on me (yet), perhaps here I am (very) lucky... I have crashed X though when I was writing a GL app (I messed up there), but X crashed, not the entire OS and I could restart X from the command line.. but this was the only time I've had X crash...

Quote:
I know that this isn't the same as Linux crashing, but what's the purpose of an OS if you can't run decent software on it?

there is lots of decent stuff under Linux, just not at the shops usually... OpenOffice is more than adequate for my office uses, and I use Firefox in Windows and Linux (sometimes Opera) and I actually prefer my development environment in Linux over Windows...


though I have not used any of the compositing window manager effects as they seem to me to be still in the beta quality stage (and it just looks neat, does not really do anything for me)

but I can say this with complete honesty: XP crashes on me usually atleast once per day (often more) and it is not like I am negligent:
a) Firewall -ZoneLabs as XP's is not as good
b) AntiVirus -avast!
c) sfc --> restore and maintain XP system files (it's an XP utility)


the crash of XP is like this: App crashes and takes XP with it... atleast in Linux if the app crashes it is really hard to take X or (if ever) the kernel with it...

on the stretches where I only use Linux, I get no crashes... but some games that I wish to play are XP/2000 only... which really bums me out at times...

but for work, I prefer Linux over Windows anytime... I just can't trust XP (or 2000 or 9x) too many crashes left a bad taste in my mouth.

Quote: Original post by smr
I too don't know where this "XP crashes all of the time" philosophy comes from. I wonder how much of the fud comes from people who switched from Windows 95/98 to linux, having never given XP a decent shot. XP rarely if ever crashes for me. My experience has been that Linux applications crash regularly. I know that this isn't the same as linux crashing, but what's the purpose of an OS if you can't run decent software on it?

And Ubuntu would lock-up hard on my old computer frequently. I haven't tried it on my new computer yet. I've been debating whether it'd be worth the effort.

You must be quite lucky on the Windows XP front, or perhaps I'm very unlucky - I've got a clean install (OEM, in fact) right now with no plugins or registry alterations affecting Explorer installed, and yet Windows Explorer often crashes, taking the whole desktop shell with it. I just generally use my laptop running Arch Linux now, which has never crashed or locked up on me yet. Your mileage may vary, I guess.

About Ubuntu - is there any chance you used Automatix on it? It's the leading problem with most Ubuntu installations, as it generally tends to mess with files which the package manager is already in charge of, and remove files without thought.

I'm not sure about your point of the applications though; I use the same general set of applications on both Linux and Windows, none of which have ever crashed on me, despite having used Linux for the past four years. In general, there are few high quality applications for any operating system, and most are badly written and tend to crash. Given the low percentage of quality applications for any OS popular enough to attract attention, this seems like FUD whether you apply it to Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X.

I always wonder how you keep XP from crashing?! Seriously, directly after its plain installation it hangs, is slow, and crashes on my desktop. Not to mention what happens after using it for awhile. To my mind, all these fairy tales about XP has gotten really stable is simply bullshit, or these users don't exhaust their computer. Maybe I use XP an hour per week, and for me it crashes frequently, can't even remember when this happens on my *nix boxes the last time.

No doubt, Linux can crash too, but this happens so rarely. Actually I don't know if my latest installation even crashed once.

Wtf are talking about programs crashing? This has nothing to do with its operating system. Beside of this, software for Windows is not any better.

Quote: Original post by DeusFacticius
* very, very powerful command line. a good shell/command line interface will always be more powerful than the slickest gui, if you know what you're doing. windows is decent, but still can't compare to what *nix can do.

You are misinformed

Windows has no quake style console :P.

"About Ubuntu - is there any chance you used Automatix on it? It's the leading problem with most Ubuntu installations, as it generally tends to mess with files which the package manager is already in charge of, and remove files without thought."

(Accroding to resreach from canebridge) Automatix is not save to use. But yes it should work.

I've never seen apt removing files without thought. Can you specify what exactly happens?

Quote: Original post by hydroo
(Accroding to resreach from canebridge) Automatix is not save to use. But yes it should work.

I've never seen apt removing files without thought. Can you specify what exactly happens?

Very sorry to hijack this thread, but some highlights from the report from the Ubuntu Technical board on Automatix:

Quote: - Automatix checks that other package managers aren't running at startup (by grepping for a static list of application names in the proces list), but doesn't enforce this by carrying out any locking of its own. This leaves Automatix open to race conditions.

- May well leave the system in an inconsistent and unbootable state, and is carried out without warning. This is entirely unacceptable and will leave a stale lockfile in any case:

if ps -U root -u root u | grep "dpkg" | grep -v grep;   then     killall -9 dpkg

- Passes --assume-yes to apt-get, which will (as a result) happily remove packages without giving the user an opportunity to intervene. This is especially bad when removing Automatix modules - any package that depends on one of the packages being removed will also be uninstalled, even if the package was originally installed via something other than Automatix.

- Has no concept of file tracking, so will just remove entire directories. Makes no attempt to ensure that a user-installed version is not already installed in the same location, so effectively assumes that the /opt namespace belongs to it.

- Will remove Ubuntu repository packages in favour of tarballs with no warning.

All in all, I think it's best to avoid using it, as it will work... sometimes. apt is not at all the problem, but Automatix's misuse of apt, it's practice of installing tarballs as replacements for managed packages, and generally running roughshod over systems is.

First of all the command line tools are a moot issue. Both "Unix Services for Windows" and Cygwin (which is the much more powerful option) have implementations of all the command line binaries we have come to expect.

As far as systems crashing, we have come to an age where this has become extremely rare. These statistics do not prove anything and it may just have to do with the various software and drivers I have installed on each platform, but for me I have the following experiences.

windows xp:
I can honestly say it has not gone into an unrecoverable crash in the last year despite my constant use of it. It still from time to time can lag the entire system, but this is nothing that can't be handled by killing off some processes.
solaris 10:
This is the stablest OS I have used, I have never experienced an unrecoverable crash on this system and in general it handles user level crashes very responsively
ubuntu:
This causes crashes that force me to reboot on average 1-2 times per month. This is not so bad as to make it unuseable, I suspect the issue is that my Ubuntu system utilizes lots of drivers for hardware where Linux may not have been a priority.

It is true that Linux is by default more secure from remote attackers, but it is as trivial to compromise a physical Linux box as it is to compromise a physical windows box. The reason I use Linux is the same reason why I use Mac, Windows, Unix, and other flavors of operating systems. One thing that attracts me is the idea of platform agnostic software and it is a fun challenge to develop cross platform software. In the end however, developing good cross platform software makes choosing an operating system less about what software support it has and more about the actual merits of the OS itself (scheduling, memory handling, etc.)