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well he claims that he did some "windows support for quite a long time". this can be something as silly as simply handing the newest version of a boxed msoffice-suite from one room to another.

i also did some "it-support" at university, but my knowledge is imho still basic. so i would never state that i am an it-expert, only because i have set up a network a couple of times, added firewalls, administrated user groups and "repaired" ms-systems... :D

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Boy... After reading all this, I really got cold feet to upgrade Linux ver 8.0 to 10.0. The last time I or we (my brother) did this we had to reformat the HD because some how the partition got blown way by the Linux installer. I don't want to loose any data this time! It's pretty hard to deal with something you can't get real or complete information on, and I mean Linux. At least with M$ windows, I was able to get reading material, a book, on the M$ windows98 OS and figure out what the problem is and fix it, allthogh XP is a little... um... "different". I don't like M$ Windows, it's not that user friendly but Linux, without some information... complete reading material, is even less user friendly.

 

Right now for some reason my CD rom quit working with my current version of Linux... KDE or gnome, in M$ Windows, it works just fine... I have no way to figure out why without reading material, or at lest a book, to set down in my easy chair and read...

 

 

What ever...

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Anything with reading material makes it easy.. And as far as I know.. there are TONS of reading materials about Linux. Even Mandrake download version packages their reading materials right on the cd as long as you click the documentation button durring install.

 

Anyway, I do support for a 12 people team. The ones using Windows are usually a nightmare to support. From a non-working SSL e-mail (only in Windows and only when addressing certain e-mail address), making sure they have the newest version of firewall and antivirus, teaching them how to use the firewall so that internal network system such as file sharing still works. (ZoneAlarm Free edition.. the easiest firewall I could find so that people can actually use them), to downloading patches for different version of Windows. The linux boxes have very little problems whatsoever and even if they do, it's usually because the user doesn't know enough or do just plain wrong thing. I keep my Windows 2000 Pro box NOT updated because the last update I did (a half hour download with dialup) actually almost hose the entire OS (aka not booting up), prompting me to work for 5 hours on a Saturday Night trying to make my Windows work again without reinstalling from scratch). Even the XP2 (the 260 meg version) didn't even run properly after 3 days of downloading (using a very poor version of what counts as broadband in poor nation). It didn't even uncompress properly and I was too depressed to download it again. So trust me, I have my fill of Windows update problems. Mandrake on the other hand is CAKE to install and update. The example actually happened in my office when one person installed only disk 1 of Mandrake 9.1 without knowing anything about Linux installation and actually make it working (not complete of course, it is after all only one disk). I installed Mandrake 10 for her since she was too busy with her work and frankly, I think 9.1 is very out of date.

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I was a little surprised to see the thread getting locked as well.

 

In addition to the argument already mentioned, patch management is increasingly difficult on Windows type of system (because of the number of patches to test, manage, and look at). The continuous point release upgrade on many free software would likely prove out to ease the system management process in the long run.

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This article is very interesting as well, with respect to the manageability of Windoze vs. 'Other OS-es' (Linux, BSD, MacOS, Unix, ... ).

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/19/in...d_in20_minutes/

 

This is frightening... if this is true than that means new zombies are being made available for the 'benefit' of crackers every day! :ph34r:

Edited by Darkelve
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Darkelve, it is true! In Windows 2000 Pro, or Win98SE for that matter, I sit back and look at the Zone Alarm Log and watch it add a blocked probe (incoming) sometimes on a minute to minute basis. I have yet to see it add something in more than 10 minutes to the log file.

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I've watched sygate log 1500 critical in 10 min. I once installed win2k and got a worm before I could login and get sygate installed :o so I could go to WU. Talk about frustrated. Installed>borked>reinstall :lol:

Edited by bvc
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  • 2 weeks later...

I don't know what this guy is talking about (in regards to windows being more stable then linux). I have two examples for this.

 

1)Using the same laptop, with linux it took 2 hours to install and configure, upgrade everything. From there I was able to im, use office, and web browse without trouble. Then I needed to put windows 98 on it (2000, and xp wouldn't install on it). It took over 2 days just to get the dumb thing to boot up properly. I had to download over 30 drivers to make the video and sound to work properly. It took another 2 hours to install the instant messager of my choice, browser, office etc. Then after 2 days of constant running it starts bugging at me. With linux I had over 3 weeks non stop before I had to reboot and thats because I was fooling around with something. With windows, programs just crash for no apparant reason, I get errors up the wazoo and I wouldn't doubt there being a virus or two on it by now even with virus scan. Tell me gents, which of the two would you choose?

2)At work I run around day in day out working with windows machines (XP or server 2000). I have contant problems which keep my job very busy. If some file didn't get corrupted, or the server for some stupid reason erased a user, I have to fix a computer which despite admin rights only install, got a ton of spyware installed on it. The only computer I can honestly say I have rarely any trouble with is the website/email server which is run by Redhat 9. Egads. I'll take the extra 5 minutes install. Evolution has never failed me (although I use mozilla mail now). Yah konquer isn't the best, it never was meant to be the best. But at my job site, linux would work so much better. I wouldn't have half the problems I do now if it wasn't for the fact that Windows is on most computers.

 

Tell me gents, which version of this statement do you believe:

a)Windows saves you money over linux.

b)Linux saves you money over Winblows.

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I am getting more and more educated about Linux and here are some of my observations as neither an "M$ basher" or a "penguin hater". Note that I will point the negatives to linux only in this thread, because we are all aware of the positives or we would not be on this forum

 

- Open office is a great product but is not compatible enough with MS Office: like it or not, MS Office is a standard in the business work. Heck even the IEEE mandates that all working documents be MS Word or PowerPoint (instead of PDF for example)

Until that changes I will have to use Word for my professional needs. I know there are "translators/filters" but t it's annoying to see that progress bar when you open the document in Open Office, and the warnings that you might loose formatting info when saving as .doc files. And while MS Word support is prety close, support for Excel files and Powerpoint presentations is sketchy.

 

- multimedia doesn't work out of the box. at least not with a Mandrake install. I had to go get the DVD decoding library (yes, I understand why it's not included) and win32_codecs and that sort of things or some multimedia formats wouldn't work. I still get some formats that won't play.

 

- a bunch of web sites, especially those with streaming video, don't work properly in linux (check out the UEFA site for example). Yes, it's the site designer's fault for using microsoft proprietary techniques, but again, as an end user, there is a bunch of content you can't get to.

 

- hardware installation isn't as easy as under windows. Just count how many "my sound card isn't working" threads are in the hardware forum. Yes, the problems can usually be fixed, sometimes easily, but it didn't work out of the box.

It took me forever to get my printer working properly, turns out it's a bug in printerdrake. I learned a lot in the process and manually edited the config files, but it took me forever to figure out the problem, and I'm a geek!

 

- There are very few games for linux (there are some, I run UT2004 under linux). I'm a gamer and my gaming machine will always be a windows machine because of that.

 

 

A lot of those problems are not in themselves failings of linux, but they do impact the end user's experience, especially for a "desktop" machine.

 

 

 

The main use for my linux machine is a 24/7 machine that I can use for P2P, serving a web page, as a gateway into my LAN (using SSH port tunneling), and "just to learn it" as a desktop machine.

It is making great strides, for example play UT2004 while chatting with my friends over teamspeak. But to get there I had to manually install NVIDIA drivers, mess with alsamixer and cryptic settings to get the mic working in Teamspeak, and the in-gmae voice chat, text-to-speech and voice command recognition don't work under linux.

Edited by papaschtroumpf
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I am also neither a "MS basher" or "penguin hater", but I think MS is getting a bad wrap here. Everyone keeps saying that upgrades or installations, or virtually anything to do with Windows results in crashes or problems. I've built 5 computers by hand, all running different versions of Windows (98, 2000, and XP) and never had any problems. As far as adding new hardware or drivers, no problems there either. I've seen my Windows 2000 system crash a few times, but that's because my RAM went bad. After I replaced it, all was good. I've just recently started using Mandrake Linux, and I like it, but my experience with it has been lukewarm so far. I had to install twice just to get it running and once it was installed, I found out I had to get several updates to get some of the software working (GAIM, Kopete). Sometimes it locks up multiple times during the boot process and I have to keep hard restarting until I can get to the login screen. It took me two days to get K3b to work. I've had less trouble and frustration in the 7 years of using Windows than the 2 weeks of using Linux. True, Windows has its flaws, but so does any version of Linux. When I read that Mandrake is supposed to be the most hardware compatible distro, I shudder to think what the other ones must be like! :D I like Mandrake Linux very much and hope to one day be able to completely migrate over to Linux, but until then I will have to have my Windows crutch close by.

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