[wplug] Why I choose Linux

[Tim Lesher]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 03:23:12PM -0500, Alexandros Papadopoulos wrote:
> applications they're running... if they ever got the chance to do both 
> from scratch, they would realize that Windows is actually as hard as 
> Linux to install.

OK, now here I have to call time-out.  I'm as big a fan of Linux as
anyone; I get paid (in part) to program for it.  I've been using
Windows since version 3.0, and Linux since the 1.2 kernels.  At any
given time,  installing the most current Windows has always been
easier than installing the most current Linux distro of the month.  

Over the years, I've used SLS, Slackware, Yggdrasil, Debian, Redhat,
Mandrake, and Gentoo (I think the only major distro I've missed out on
was Suse, and I'm going to be playing with it at work shortly).  Every
year, installing Linux gets easier.  But guess what?  Every year,
installing Windows gets easier, too.

I would say that comparing Redhat 8.0 to Windows XP shows that the gap
is narrower than it has ever been before.  But my most recent XP
installation did go more smoothly than my Redhat 8.0 installation, as
I would expect.

Compared to the OSs of ten or fifteen years ago, both have come
amazingly far (if you would have told me in 1993 that either Windows
OR Linux would automatically detect your make and model of monitor, I
would have laughed in your face, because everyone knows that
VGA-to-monitor communication is one-way).  But we do ourselves no
favors by repeating a mantra that isn't true.

Yet.
  
-- 
Tim Lesher <tim at lesher.ws>
http://www.lesher.ws