[CLUE-Tech] Enthusiasm for Linux

[Sean LeBlanc]

On 10-24 23:34, Jay Seven Ess wrote:
> On Friday 24 October 2003 18:38, Chris Terry wrote:
> > When I first made my switch to Linux (about a year and a half ago), I
> > was willing to accept the fact that Linux is very different from
> > Windows, in archetecture, focus, and attitude.  
> 
> Its been 4 or 5 years since I switched. RedHat 5.x was a lot more 
> frightening for a windowz user to switch to then todays slick and shiny
> distro's.  For all the annoyances of support, features, etc. I still
> stay on Linux because there are lots of issues on other platforms as
> well. Just to list a trivial and arbitrary few things...
> 
> I don't miss rebooting
> I don't miss having a windows registry
> I don't miss daily critical updates
> I don't miss the continuous stream of viri, worms, etc
> I don't miss updating virus definitions
> I don't miss BSOD's
> I don't miss cramming my work onto a single Desktop
> I don't miss defrag'ing the hard drive
> 
> Of course there are lots more important reasons I left out. Feel
> free to add to the list. 

I'm running FreeBSD mostly, but the same applies:

I don't miss spyware.  
I don't miss spam, thanks to SpamAssassin.  
I don't miss web bugs from spam that does get into my inbox (that's sort of
a mailer thing, though: I use Mutt) 
I don't miss popups (although that's really a browser thing, and Mozilla
Firebird handles that wonderfully)

Regarding the registry....I absolutely HATED that idea when it first came
along, and I still hate it now. Even though NT 3.51 brought a lot of
much-needed stability (I'm talking compared to Win3.11) M$ really started
pushing this stupid idea around the same time - the registry was around
earlier in 16-bit Win - and all developers bought into it, and it continues
to this day. It was at that moment that I knew for sure that 95% of this
industry is run by lemmings.  When an "industry leader" says jump, they ask
only how high, not the real question, which is "why?" or "justify that to
me".  Even many of the co-workers I've had over the years never really
grokked what I was getting at when I said the registry is seriously flawed. 

A co-worker recently had the spot his registry resided on go bad. Guess
what? The machine had to be wiped and re-installed, since nearly every app
uses this to store configuration. Talk about a single point of failure. Of
course, when I saw that, I wanted to run the backup utility to save the
registry on my machine. I can't, since my box's floppy drive was
cannibalized at some point before I got there, and the utility wants a
floppy...there might be another way, but it sure is opaque. Ease of use, my
ass.

This site here sums up much of my feelings about the registry. I ran across
it by accident about a month or two back. I wish this was around back when
the registry was first being pushed as the Next Big Thing. I always felt
like a voice in the wilderness. The NT line has *some* good things going for
it (at least that's what I tell myself when I have had to use it every day
at work for the past 8 years), but the registry is not one of them:

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/registry.html (his rant is partway down the page)

Besides the reasons he gives, another is that when you are dual-booting
multiple MS OSes that share the same drive, you still have to install
programs twice to get those to work due to the registry. So, when I was
dual-booting 95, NT 3.51, and NT 4.0, I had to install Office 3x, even
though the actual program resided in the same dir. 

You could say that the /etc tree has some of the same problems, but at least
you can back it up with relative ease, and general-purpose apps usually
don't put config info here...

-- 
Sean LeBlanc:seanleblanc at americanisp.net  
http://users.americanisp.net/~seanleblanc/
Get MLAC at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mlac/
enhance, v.: To tamper with an image, usually to its detriment.