On 2/11/2011 9:58 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > >> Be careful with saying such things. A lot can be said about Windows as an >> operating system and Microsoft as a company. But be very careful about > > Yes, there can, and has been, a lot said. A *LOT* of it has not been > positive (at least since WinDoze 95). I can go on for a while, though it's > OT, as to their *lousy* design decisions, and then there's all the > lawsuits that they lost, where they paid to cut out competetors. But those have next to nothing to do with their current products. If you go back to '95 and look at the security/design flaws in shipping Linux products it is not pretty either. Pretty much everything had wide open holes in required network services like bind/sendmail/ftp as well as the kernel itself (wade through the changelogs on any of the programs if you aren't convinced). I do agree that pre XP/SP2 versions of windows were badly broken and still resent the trouble they caused, but it's probably time to forget that. >> talking about its users, you do not know the reason why they run another >> OS than those which you love. > > Lack of knowledge and/or choice. Or lack of problems. Since MS started enabling a firewall by default and supplying regular updates it mostly just works. I still run XP on my work laptop, close it to sleep with running apps, open to wake up (in seconds) on a different network, bouncing between wired/docked and wireless undocked transparently and it runs for months at a time. Another laptop at home does the same with Windows 7 (minus the dock). It has been much easier to use windows running the NX client with freenx on Linux than to keep working video drivers for native X on linux. I can boot into Linux on my work laptop, but why? The only real reason is if I want to access an ext3 formatted disk via USB and that turns out to work just as well under vmware player, keeping XP's more agile network management and leaving my other open apps running. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com