-----Original Message----- From: Eric Richards [mailto:e.richards@paradise.net.nz] Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 8:53 AM To: SuSE list Subject: [Fwd: Re: [SLE] Why does it always have to be a massive ordeal?]
One point is, with windows you have to keep reinstalling it all time, like onces a year.
What? The operating system? I've had NT4 on my laptop for three years (somebody else owned it for a year before that) and it's never had a problem. My other system, here at the office has had an NT4 partition for at least that long, and has had other OSes installed and removed several times from its other partitions, but NT has never complained and has never needed re-installing. At home, my wife has had Win 98 on her same machine for years without re-installing, nor much of any problem. Of course, another Win98 machine is dying, but I think that one has a hardware problem. And by the way, for persons who don't have an intimate knowledge of many, many aspects of Linux, you can bet that many problems that they encounter will result in re-installing the OS. You may say that they didn't need to do so with Linux, and could easily have fixed just the part that was broken... but that pre-supposes that they'd have the knowledge and the interest....... and the time... which many people don't. Many people use an operating system as a purely incidental tool to "get stuff done". If it takes one evening to just re-install everything and start over, versus six months of intensive study and experimentation to become knowledgeable enough to repair the problem... which one is a busy person going to choose? I'm not apologizing for Windows nor trying to suggest that there's anything wrong with Linux (or SuSE in particular) I'm just responding to what appears to be some.... "slanted" reporting. There are good and sufficient reasons to prefer Linux over /B/o/r/g/ er, ah... MS products, but at the level of the everyday non-geek user, performance and reliability are not seen as the reasons. /kevin