[Mimedefang] OT: Choice of desktop OS (was Re: watch-mimedefang)

[Les Mikesell]

On 2/16/2010 10:33 AM, Ben Kamen wrote:
> On 2/16/2010 10:02 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>> Windows 2000 is a decade old now - and was not even intended to be a
>> desktop OS. And you need to defrag after making big disk changes. If you
>> don't already see why this is a bad comparision, try installing a
>> 10-year old Linux server distro and try to update it to a current
>> desktop piecemeal.
>
> So what MS gives us now is a modern OS in which they STILL patch
> regularly to fix things that should have been fixed a long time ago....

As does every supplier of complex code.  It's a feature.

> (and I'm not saying Linux is immune, but there's a level of pride for
> producing solid code that comes with the personally driven contributers
> of the OSS community than any company worried about the bottom line.)

I take it you don't read the changelogs on linux distribution updates to 
see the historic bugs that are still being found and fixed.  You should.

> But even more offensive is the level of control that was attempted in
> Vista that has lost its fanfare and is probably successfully implemented
> into Win7. (and now with MS inserting the new version of WGA which
> caused a lot of false positives last time in a fashion even more
> deceitful than that with WGA.)
>
> As an example: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
>
> Sigh.

Vista is irrelevant. If you read any trade literature at all you would 
never have touched it in the first place.  Just like any X.0 version of 
a linux distribution.  But realistically, the problem in Vista was 
changing the driver interface, something that Linux does with every 
re-compile and enterprise distributions have to work around by 
backporting some of the updates into old kernels without breaking them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com