[24hoursupport] Re: Win98 SE upgrade
- From: "Douglas O." <dsoliver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: 24hoursupport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 15:22:01 -0700
I'm not sure I can agree with all of this.
> There is an unfortunate and rather unwarrented and unfair
> snobbery toward Windows by many Linux users. Linux
> definitely has some advantages over Windows, but Windows
> is, by far, easier to use and has the most software
> available for it, so it has some advantages over Linux.
In terms of being easier to use, it is not much more difficult to use, per se.
The hardest hurdle is installing it, which is usually a breeze these days. Yes
there is some hardware incompatibility to contend with, but more and more that
is disappearing with HP, Dell,IBM, and others making an effort to incorporate
Linux into their systems.
> Which is "better" is more a matter of, among other things,
> taste.
Absolutely. I use both on a dual booting machine. Linux is FREE for the
download. You can get distress for around $6 on cd from many vendors. The boxed
sets have the advantage of coming with printed manuals.
> Interestingly, to me anyway, is the fact that the Mandrake
> graphical interface is basically a shell that opeartes
> over the standard command-line Linux environment.
There is no such thing as a Mandrake graphical interface. All versions of Linux
come with the ability of using both a GUI, usually X11, and a terminal
interface. There are floppy versions that load into ram and provide a fairly
complete environment including basic text processing, networking, simple games,
and more.
> Back in the Windows 3.x and 95 days, all of the Linux people
> howled and jeered at Windows because it was a "shell over
> DOS, and not a TRUE operating system".
Still true with winME, though Microsoft tried to hide that fact by making it
hard to simply boot into DOS. I'm one of those oddballs that actually likes DOS.
> Now we have the same basic situation with Mandrake and other Linux
> distributions, but the Linux people aren't making fun of
> that.
I think that perhaps the Linux folks were annoyed with Microsoft's insistence
that DOS wasn't the hidden engine under Windows. This, of course, was and is
not
the case with WinNT4, Win2K, and WinXP.
All in all, as Ron says, it's a matter of choice. Linux is free to use, copy,
and
modify. It's very stable--no blue screens of death. Microsoft has put millions
into creating a user friendly operating system. Though my ultimate choice is
Macintosh.
P.S. I forgot to mention that Linux now has OpenOffice available for it. That's
basically an Msoffice clone, which is also free. You can get it for free to use
on windows at www.openoffice.org. Linux also runs such favorites as adobe
acrobat reader, netscape 4x and 6x, eudora, and thousands of other pieces of
free software. If you want to see more, go to www.linux.org and www.gnu.org.
Cheers -- d
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