On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 21:20, Salman Khilji wrote:
But what I find interesting and disturbing, is that out Windows machines at work don't crash. I work with scientists. And they never say their machines crash. They are doing constant scientific data analysis, and technical document preparation. I should ask more of them if their machines crash. But so far, I have been very disappointed to find, of the three guys that I talk to regularly about this, that they say their machines run for weeks without crashing. This disappoints me because I can't honestly argue to them that Linux is more stable. In fact, with the instability of the flagship Konqueror, that they would most certainly encounter if they tried a modern Linux, while clearly it is not representative of the stability of the underlying Linux, they would likely get a bad taste about that.
BTW, long gone are those days that Windows machines would crash a lot. Today Windows 2000 almost never crashes in daily work. XP is 2000 based and is supposed to be more stable, so things in this respect don't look good for Linux.
Salman
I am going to give everyone my opinion on this. XP and 200 are fine in terms of stability unless you are dealing with servers. I still find that Linux or <enter you favorite Unix system here> is much better in terms of stability for mail, pop3, dns, and web servers. This is where *Nix systems excel. The real reason for using a Linux system as a desktop is the need for having a Unix-like operating system on your desktop. Who needs this? CS students who want to learn Unix and program in a load of different languages. Sysadmins, Unix programmers, Network admins, database admins and other professionals who are tired of doing their work through a terminal or Exceed session then having to switch gears completely to write documentation, surf the net and get their email on a Windows box. If there was no market for the professionals I just listed then the companies like Exceed would go out of business tommorrow and Unix companies would stop making workstations all together. They have not. It is a nice niche market and I hope SuSE and Rehat do well in this. Still, they have to remember this focus market in terms of shaping their products. Sure, there will be people tired of the windows way of doing things, that hate macs and want to try a different way. Some will use linux and like it. Others will run screaming back to Redmond when they understand that linux does not and never will do things exactly like they already understand how to do things through their Windows boxes. -- Johnathan Bailes BAE Systems ESI "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." - Doug Gwyn ---