On Thursday 09 March 2006 05:24, Sven Burmeister wrote:
Hi!
Am Mittwoch, 8. März 2006 18:30 schrieb Graham Smith:
You are trying to compare apples and oranges. Does Mickysoft provide patches for all the applications you are running on Windows XP, I mean things like Adobe Photoshop? The answer is plainly no. MS only supports the OS. It doesn't really support MS Office but expects users to upgrade to fix a potential problems.
You are right to a point, yet comparing apples and oranges yourself, because MS cannot provide any updates to software they do not own, i.e. Photoshop, since you mentioned it. Further, Firefox, Winamp and some other apps have their own update mechanisms, which they do not in Linux, but that is another topic. If an app uses a library supplied with Windows, i.e. the core, then those get fixed too. Sooner or later. ;) In the end, the user get security fixes for the core(-apps) from MS and other apps have found their way around. The only thing the user has to care about is to install only apps that do have an update-mechanism. I am not sure about Photoshop, but Acrobat-Reader does have one.
What apps are there that do not have their own update mechanism in windows, that are used by a normal desktop-user?
And MS does support security-updates for MS-Office, at least they did for 2000 and security updates is all I am talking about, except for the GUI, which they even supply service-packs, i.e. bugfix-versions for.
Compare that with the SuSE Linux distribution which contains over 3,000 applications. They support all security related problems with these packages for a period of two years.
Ok, so exclude everything that is not core, i.e. office, amarok and alike, not KDE though, since Windows does supply a GUI, even if it's only one and they do supply bugfixes for it and not only security-bugfixes.
So there you have MS offering support for the core plus GUI, including one media-player, one E-Mail app, one Paint-app and so on at a price of ~100 € for x years.
And as I said, the argument that SuSE gives you more software on the CDs does not really count, since it is free software, so no added money value but just saved time because not having to download and install it separately.
The point I was trying to make was SuSE does provide security updates for all those apps. That does cost SuSE a lot of man hours to package and provide those updates.
Also remember that you can install SuSE on all your computers for the price of one copy of the distribution. With Windows you have to buy a copy of Windows for each machine. Now taking this information into account who do you think is ripping you off?
Nobody was talking about ripping off! I was just comparing security-fix lifecycles anf bugfix-updates for things that come with XP home.
Since I am using Linux only, you can be sure that I am not trying to bash Linux or anything like that, it is just comparing what a desktop user gets for the money and of course needs. You could easily double the number of packages on the SuSE CDs and not add any value for a normal desktop-user.
Sven
Also you missed my point regarding you have to purchase a copy of Windows for each computer. Whereas you can download the SuSE Distribution for free and use it in as many computers you have. So I can't see how you can complain about the cost regarding the SuSE distribution and their support when comparing with Mickysoft. -- Regards, Graham Smith