Windows vs Linux, Pros and Cons

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-02 08:03am

Darth Wong wrote:
His Divine Shadow wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:Pros of Windows:
Unstable relative to competing platforms (as opposed to its own predecessors).
With the latest iterations of windows since 2000 I don't think thats true, I have better stability on XP than on Mandrake 8.2
You must have one seriously fucked-up MDK8.2 install if it locks on you. I never had MDK8.2 lock on me. Mind you, it might depend on your definition of a lock. Are you talking about a GUI problem which forced you to log out and lock back in again, or are you talking about an actual OS hard-lock?

I'm guessing it's the GUI(KDE3) that locks but I can't seem to get back to the command line and I'm left with rebooting it.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-02 11:25am

Lord MJ wrote:X windows needs to be replaced on BSD and Linux and replaced with a new graphical front end using OpenGL.

It would be like creating OSX for the pc, it would be superior to Linux.

Oh, and Mike, is the gui/os integration present in 2k/XP? I'mnot exactly sure, but I think M$ may have actually improved thier OS engineering here. The only times I've had XP crash is due to flaky harddrives, one of which died totally not too long ago.

I've had Linux freeze once and crash once, on the same harddrive, but I think something else caused that crash, more than likely a kernel fault.

The problem is that most apps are made for X, so there is little incentive for OSS developers to create a replacement. I mean Fresco AKA Berlin hasn't really progressed much, but it has only 3.5 years of development against X's 10+. Look here:
http://www.fresco.org/index.html
I think X works fine, they just need to standardize cut and paste and widget styles, and stability.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-02 11:26am

Oh and the windows GUI is still integrated.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 12:59pm

Lord MJ wrote:X windows needs to be replaced on BSD and Linux and replaced with a new graphical front end using OpenGL.

It would be like creating OSX for the pc, it would be superior to Linux.

It would be nice to see a competing GUI, but it would eat up open-source programmer resources that might be better used to improve X. And it would still have to handle X calls or no one in his right mind would use it.

Oh, and Mike, is the gui/os integration present in 2k/XP? I'mnot exactly sure, but I think M$ may have actually improved thier OS engineering here. The only times I've had XP crash is due to flaky harddrives, one of which died totally not too long ago.

Buggy video drivers will crash Windows2k/XP every time. The GUI/OS integration is just as present in the "industrial-strength" version of Windows as it was in Win95. People respond that it's OK if your video drivers aren't buggy, but that's a rather ridiculous defense of stability: "it's OK if you don't tip it over". Doesn't change the fact that it's easily tipped over. Also, the entire OS can become unresponsive if it's having trouble accessing a CD in some cases, which is simply insane.

I've had Linux freeze once and crash once, on the same harddrive, but I think something else caused that crash, more than likely a kernel fault.

I've run Linux on many, many machines and never had it crash. But I generally don't do stupid things with it, and I just hit ctrl-alt-backspace to get back to the login prompt if something crashes the GUI. I also have my home machines networked, so no matter what happens, I can always ssh in remotely.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 01:00pm

His Divine Shadow wrote:I'm guessing it's the GUI(KDE3) that locks but I can't seem to get back to the command line and I'm left with rebooting it.

Hit "ctrl-alt-backspace".

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2003-02-02 01:12pm

There was at least one time that it locked up totally.

I left the computer on in my dorm room when I went home, and I had been sshing in remotely. Suddenly I was unable to log in anymore.

I assumed the worst
1.) The computer was hacked
2.) Hard drive failed
3.) Fan failed and the computer cought fire, and the building burned down.

Turns out that the problem was that the OS simply locked up, indicating a kernel fault.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 01:15pm

Lord MJ wrote:There was at least one time that it locked up totally.

I left the computer on in my dorm room when I went home, and I had been sshing in remotely. Suddenly I was unable to log in anymore.

I assumed the worst
1.) The computer was hacked
2.) Hard drive failed
3.) Fan failed and the computer cought fire, and the building burned down.

Turns out that the problem was that the OS simply locked up, indicating a kernel fault.

Or flaky memory, or an undervolt situation, etc. I always run PC's on UPS units and do thorough memory and system stability checks; maybe this is why I don't get the mysterious lockups that some people get.

I once ran into a guy who was having massive lockup problems on Win2k but not on Win9x, which just blew my mind. Turned out that the top half of his 1GB of RAM was shit, and Win9x simply wasn't using it.

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2003-02-02 01:16pm

Well for an OpenGL front end. Some commercial company can take the from what I hear, near perfect, FreeBSD 5 kernel, and develop an OpenGL front end to it, and release it commercially. WIth the kernel remaining open source, but with the front end being a commercial product (with adequate documentation of the api for developers) they could even engineer it so that X apps could be emulated in the new graphics scheme.

Such an operating system would kill Windows in the desktop market if not for the fact that windows is already deeply entrenched, and lots of marketing capital would be needed, plus OEM agreements.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-02 01:29pm

Darth Wong wrote:
His Divine Shadow wrote:I'm guessing it's the GUI(KDE3) that locks but I can't seem to get back to the command line and I'm left with rebooting it.
Hit "ctrl-alt-backspace".

There have been times that didn't work.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 01:31pm

His Divine Shadow wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:
His Divine Shadow wrote:I'm guessing it's the GUI(KDE3) that locks but I can't seem to get back to the command line and I'm left with rebooting it.
Hit "ctrl-alt-backspace".
There have been times that didn't work.

Odd. Assuming your machine doesn't have flaky RAM (which is more common than people think: I've junked more than a half-dozen DIMMs for failing thorough memory tests even though they pass the bullshit test in the motherboard's POST), can you ssh into it? Or is it a standalone machine?

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-02 01:31pm

Darth Wong wrote:Or flaky memory, or an undervolt situation, etc. I always run PC's on UPS units and do thorough memory and system stability checks; maybe this is why I don't get the mysterious lockups that some people get.

As do I, and to boot I honestly can't remember the last time I experienced a crash.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-02 01:38pm

Darth Wong wrote:Odd. Assuming your machine doesn't have flaky RAM (which is more common than people think: I've junked more than a half-dozen DIMMs for failing thorough memory tests even though they pass the bullshit test in the motherboard's POST), can you ssh into it? Or is it a standalone machine?

Well that brings up the issue of the net-connection through my ISDN which is flaky as it is, which strangely does not work unless I go to the control panel equivalent and use the test "connection button" to dial in.
For me to actually SSH into it I'd have to run it and see if it crashes whilst being online all the time(that costs money, it's pay per minute spent online) and then go to work and try and SSH from there, needless to say it would be quite haphazardouds and definitly expensive operation to undertake,

Now this is the same machine that I run XP and NT4 on, they've been working fine, the NT4 partition dates back to 1998 I think, it's been ghosted and copied and god-knows-what and it's still working.

The XP install is about 1.2 years old and running fine.

I've also ran SiSoftware Sandra(*nix version ought to exist) on it and it reports no faults in the memory DIMM's

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-02 01:58pm

Darth Wong wrote:
Lord MJ wrote:X windows needs to be replaced on BSD and Linux and replaced with a new graphical front end using OpenGL.

It would be like creating OSX for the pc, it would be superior to Linux.
It would be nice to see a competing GUI, but it would eat up open-source programmer resources that might be better used to improve X. And it would still have to handle X calls or no one in his right mind would use it.

Exactly why RMS should can it and kill the "HURD". And it's Linux, not GNU/Linux: http://librenix.com/?inode=2312

The problem with the BSD license is that everything can be turned into closed source at a whim.

Buggy video drivers will crash Windows2k/XP every time. The GUI/OS integration is just as present in the "industrial-strength" version of Windows as it was in Win95. People respond that it's OK if your video drivers aren't buggy, but that's a rather ridiculous defense of stability: "it's OK if you don't tip it over". Doesn't change the fact that it's easily tipped over. Also, the entire OS can become unresponsive if it's having trouble accessing a CD in some cases, which is simply insane.

I have a flaky cdrom which forces linux to repeatedly attempt to access it for 3 minutes, putting up annoying error messages, and cannot be stopped, unless I type sysctl -w dev.cdrom.lock=0, and manually eject. To suppress and ignore error messages I have to kill klogd and reload it with different options. Stupid flaky hardware. Windows XP is stupid though. Crashing when accessing corrupted disks is dumb. At least under linux you can cancel it.

Oh and badly written kernel modules (AKA drivers) in theory can crash linux since they become part of the kernel when loaded, so any bugs in the module are equivelent to bugs in the kernel itself. nVidia's drivers loaded as a kernel module in conjunction with a GLX file. If there happens to be any serious bugs in the module, then... Then again this is in theory. I'm guessing the modules are written well anyways, since you seem use an nvidia card with no problems. The only 3rd party modules I load is the one for my winmodem, which is flaky (keeps disconnecting, anyone know anything about init strings for Rockwell HCF modems?) , but has never crashed the OS.

And I've never heard about Linux multithreading being inferior, please elaborate.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-02-02 01:59pm

Pu-239 wrote: I have a flaky cdrom which forces linux to repeatedly attempt to access it for 3 minutes, putting up annoying error messages, and cannot be stopped, unless I type sysctl -w dev.cdrom.lock=0, and manually eject. To suppress and ignore error messages I have to kill klogd and reload it with different options. Stupid flaky hardware. Windows XP is stupid though. Crashing when accessing corrupted disks is dumb. At least under linux you can cancel it

You made a thread about that last time, remember what happened?

edit:
To clarify, it will not crash, it will appear to lock for a minute as it retries a few times then tell you, I repeat, it does not crash.

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2003-02-02 02:03pm

And I've never heard about Linux multithreading being inferior, please elaborate.

Until very, very recently Linux had no multithreading. It's just now that Linux has kernel level threads. And these threads aren't used by many developers yet.

Whenever you wanted to do multithreading in Linux, you would fork over to one of the third party libraries, such as POSIX witch the pthread library uses in C.

Solaris has kernel level threads since at least Solaris 2, and the NT kernel has had kernel level multithreading since at least Windows 2000. The FreeBSD 5 kernel also has kernel level threading.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-02 02:15pm

Lord MJ wrote:
And I've never heard about Linux multithreading being inferior, please elaborate.

Until very, very recently Linux had no multithreading. It's just now that Linux has kernel level threads. And these threads aren't used by many developers yet.

Whenever you wanted to do multithreading in Linux, you would fork over to one of the third party libraries, such as POSIX witch the pthread library uses in C.

Solaris has kernel level threads since at least Solaris 2, and the NT kernel has had kernel level multithreading since at least Windows 2000. The FreeBSD 5 kernel also has kernel level threading.

I see. However I thought SMP was only useful with multithreaded apps, and I think Linux supported SMP for a while now

EDIT: I thought it was implemented in the GLIBC linuxthreads package.
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/linuxthreads/

I'm a newb, so I don't know much about programming

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 02:26pm

Lord MJ wrote:
And I've never heard about Linux multithreading being inferior, please elaborate.
Until very, very recently Linux had no multithreading. It's just now that Linux has kernel level threads. And these threads aren't used by many developers yet.

Is January 1999 considered "very, very recently?" That's when they added multi-threading to the 2.2 kernel.

Solaris has kernel level threads since at least Solaris 2, and the NT kernel has had kernel level multithreading since at least Windows 2000. The FreeBSD 5 kernel also has kernel level threading.

Linux has had it for 4 years now; I really don't think that qualifies as "very, very recently".

EDIT: unless there was something about that which did not qualify as "real" multi-threading?

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2003-02-02 02:34pm

I'll have to talk to my CS colleague that is far more knowledgable in systems than, I about Linux kernel level multithreading.

However last year in my Systems class, I was studying the different threading implementations in Windows 2000, Solaris, and Linux, and it explained that except for a few routines Linux had no real kernel level multithreading, though serveral workarounds have been constructed to give the appearance of threading.

The multithreading features that do exist in the kernel aren't widely use, developers seem to go with the libraries than utilizing kernel threads.

That's why I believe Sun's Linux JVM uses POSIX threads, while the JVMs for both Solaris and Windows use kernel level threads.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-02 07:25pm

And Wong about the alternative GUI- you can run X on top of fresco (or is it the other way around?). Of course I think they should kill Fresco and work on X.

EDIT: Other things they should kill-
GNOME or better make it compatible with KDE- share common components, common clipboard, etc, make GTK have the ability to set the themes to look the same as default KDE, etc.
http://www.gnome.org/

GNU HURD- More time than Linux and they haven't gotten anywhere. Instead of working on it, RMS complains about binary firmware in the Linux source code, occupying less than a few kilobytes,

. How the hell are you supposed to compile the thing for embedded processors anyways even if you do have the source. Nowk kill the Hurd already.
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html

RMS also needs to quit bitching about Bitkeeper, GNU/Linux vs Linux, and for example the UDI (Uniform Driver Interface). Would you rather have working hardware or no hardware?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/udi.html
A lot of things in drivers need to be kept secret to maintain an edge, since they contain info on the hardware.

OpenBeOS and everything else in the SF kernel projects list that isn't Linux/BSD/some other established version of Unix. BeOS is dead. Accept it. Then again there might be room for both- BeOS for multimedia to replace Macs, while Linux for everything else when world domination is achieved

EDIT: www.openbeos.org

RPM- Needs to be replaced with APT. Unfortunately it's already part of the LSB standard. However the LSB standard might help reduce the annoying dependency problem
www.rpm.org

More later.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-02-02 07:45pm

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-02 08:00pm

You know, some of this should really be classified in the propeller-head category. The kind of person who's asking what the general user benefits of Linux and Windows are is probably not the kind of person who cares whether someone's using library-based multi-threading or kernel-based multi-threading.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2003-02-02 08:39pm

I've noticed that most Mandrake users here have 8.2. Any word on 9.0?

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2003-02-02 08:40pm

Yeah I figured that. It interests me more because I actually develop applications, mostly in Java, where threading is major issue.

But as from a user perspective, I've found my experience with WinXp to be much better than my experiences with Linux. I don't see much need to use linux on the desktop anymore. And I have my own linux server already, so any server side linux development I'll need to do can be done on that server.

I do plan on resintalling another Linux instance when I get a second harddrive, or I might be a real dare devil and install FreeBSD 5.

Shinova · Post by **Shinova** » 2003-02-03 12:56am

I read somewhere in an internet article (forgot where) that Microsoft has this "software-assurance" thing that requires all windows users, home and business, to upgrade their software at a certain date (July 31st?).

Is this true?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-02-03 01:15am

Shinova wrote:I read somewhere in an internet article (forgot where) that Microsoft has this "software-assurance" thing that requires all windows users, home and business, to upgrade their software at a certain date (July 31st?).

Is this true?

Sort of.

Microsoft is trying to get all of their customers to stop buying licenses for software by jacking up their prices. They replace the option of license purchase with an arrangement that's more like a rental deal. You pay Microsoft on a monthly or yearly basis for their software.

They call it "software assurance" because bundled into the cost of this software is the cost of upgrades, so you get the latest versions of everything send to you. Microsoft brags that the cost of buying into this scheme is lower than the cost of buying software and then upgrading every time a new version comes out.

However, as many people have noted, most companies don't upgrade automatically to every new version of every piece of Microsoft software that comes out. How many companies went and ripped out every copy of Office 97 to replace it with Office 2000 when it came out, and then did the same for Office XP when it came out? That's fucking nuts. So the end result is that the customer is going to pay more money this way, since the prices are being compared to a totally unrealistic scenario.

Of course, the customer isn't happy about that, which is why Microsoft is slowly but steadily making their licensing practices and prices more and more unreasonable and inconvenient, in the hopes of pressuring customers into the new rental scheme.

Basically, Microsoft wants to destroy the concept of software ownership and replace it with pay-per-view.