I'm going to take apart your argument item by item, even though we both know that, no matter what I say in contradiction, I'm going to be labelled a "windoze n00b" and unworthy of posting.
I used to talk like this until I tried and used something else.
Lists of reasons Windows sucks:
1) Not very flexible - you can only use one GUI and you're forced to use it and the tools built in. The tools are not very flexible (for example, try making RRAS do NAT on one nic something a Unix firewall can handle). Repair tools are poorly designed, a clever trojan could name itself with characters that recovery console will refuse to delete (I have personally seen this). Most people cannot properly comment because either they are still partially dependent on Windows or have never used anything else. Please, if you fit either criteria, don't comment.
Inflexibility in using a windowing system is not a reason that Windows sucks. It's the reason people buy it. Windows is consistent, and it's interesting how both Gnome and KDE use Windows mneumonics.
You may be right about the trojan issue, but it's not something I've ever seen. I'm also not familiar with RRAS performing NAT -- nor am I familiar with its applications. I would wager with a proper driver it's possible.
Windows is consistent, agreed. KDE and Gnome are not the only window managers available. I personally love Window Maker.
RRAS likes handles rules on a per nic basis ... I haven't found a way to do NAT on one nic in Windows 2000 ADV Server.
2) Requires higher end hardware to run - It's no secret, even old machines are useful ... but for example XP will tear apart an older 400-500MHz machine. Windows grows fatter and requires more, this is no secret. Most Unix flavors can run off of a diskette. Try running a Unix for a whole year without exposure to Windows, then try Windows ... you'll see, then you'll wonder why and how anybody could accept this as the computing standard. I couldn't believe that a coworker's brand new 3 day old laptop was extremely sluggish running XP (someone who might use XP all the time will not notice due to Microsoft's conditioning).
I'm not quite sure how well it does, but I know that a friend of mine runs XP on a 433MHz Pentium III. With proper maintenance, Windows does not grow "fatter" -- but the catch is exactly that -- with proper maintenance. I have bought two laptops in the last four years -- as soon as I get them, I wipe them clean and do a completely fresh install. Dangerous, you say? Hardly! I know how to set up my system securely.
Yes, you have to strip XP of its eye candy features for it to run nicely on those systems. But its still noticeably sluggish until you get used to it.
Please see:
http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html5) Image size. The team was unable to reduce the size of the image below 900MB; Windows contains many complex relationships between pieces, and the team was not able to determine with safety how much could be left out of the image. Although disk space on each server was not an issue, the time taken to image thousands of servers across the internal network was significant. By comparison, the equivalent FreeBSD image size is a few tens of MB.
It is very fat and it continues to grow.
Cuddos to you for wiping your laptops clean. That's exactly what I do.
3) Lack of control and verbosity - No boot diagnostics, error messages are useless or limited. I'll be very brief ... try manually setting your CPU's speed. Exactly, you can't. You also have no control over what drivers and modules load.
You certainly have control over what drivers and modules load through hardware configuration. It seems you don't know what you're talking about in that vein. Proper administrators will set up hardware configurations prior to that being an issue.
You are correct though, in asserting you cannot set your CPU speed.
Please see:
kldload,
kldunload,
kldstat and my favorite,
securelevelI can forcefully load, unload, and even view loaded kernel modules with builtin system tools. With securelevels, I can prevent modules, firewall rules, and certain device nodes from being loaded, modified, and written to during system run time. No other OS I know of has such a feature ... very handy. Unfortunately X likes to write to /dev/io and so I cannot even run the system at securelevel 1. These securelevels cannot be lowered during multi user run time. I do not know of any ways to do this in Windows...Sysinternals has some tools like Process Explorer but thats the best I can think of.
For example:
%kldstat
Id Refs Address Size Name
1 14 0xc0400000 4033b4 kernel
3 2 0xc080a000 20448 sound.ko
4 1 0xc082b000 3f44 acpi_ibm.ko
5 17 0xc082f000 6057c acpi.ko
6 1 0xc0890000 41c4 wlan_tkip.ko
7 1 0xc0895000 6fe4 wlan_ccmp.ko
8 1 0xc1ef5000 18000 linux.ko
9 1 0xc4079000 5000 snd_ich.ko
4) Bad documentation - Wait! There is no useful documentation! Please, don't start on MSDN ...
That's... dumb. Yeah -- MAN pages are *great*. Okay. I have never not been able to find what I was looking for on MSDN. As it turns out, once you get an idea for how the Win32 API functions and how it's generally ordered, it's quite easy to find things.
Man pages are great and they usually list indepth examples. I learned a lot about network programming in Unix just from the man pages. They also have "intro" man pages for topics. See, for example,
netintro5) Easy to run, easy to break - Even windows can break on the most experienced users...but what I find most ironic is that Windows is designed for the faint of heart, but it also breaks most frequently for these types of people. Ever try fixing Windows? Right...usually you just format and reinstall. Even if you know how to manually remove malware, you can never be sure its gone (and don't kid yourself, virus scanners and spyware removers don't always work).
Actually, yesterday I discovered a nice little piece of malware (adware) had tunneled into my winlogon and explorer processes. First, I forbade it from loading through COM, which stopped it from loading into Explorer, but it was still there in winlogon. I loaded up Process Explorer, killed winlogon, and deleted the file before I BSOD'd. Guess what -- all gone! Fixed!
Are you sure its all gone? Might popup again one day
6) Mercy of Microsoft - Microsoft does NOT have to fix their software ... and in fact there are problems they do not fix, for example, the DSO exploit in IE. As a Windows user, you rely on Microsoft to find problems and patch them. Patches are not always released immediately either.
Well yeah, this *is* the problem, isn't it? I was looking today at the WMF vulnerability -- do you know I have *never* seen a WMF used anywhere except clipart? I'm not really sure what the relevance for these things is.
Doesn't make it alright for Microsoft to ignore vulnerabilities.
What amazes me is a project like OpenBSD, totally volunteer driven, has a team of code auditers that look for bugs and security vulnerabilities. That's not even the beginning to security in OpenBSD. I invite you to read their security policy:
http://www.openbsd.org/security.htmlDoes Microsoft have a team of code auditers? I'd wager not...they seem to only respond to problems.
Show Posts
