On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 11:27 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > 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 Make a bet? Video drivers, alone, and the feeping creaturism of the base web browser create significant risks. RHEL and CentOS have much, much tighter basic privilege handling. The complexity of the NTFS ACL structure, for example, is so frequently mishandled that it's often ignored and simply dealt with as "Administrator". The result is privilege escalation chaos. This turns out to be one of the problems with SELinux, in fact. It's so powerful and complex, and ill managed in many instances, that many developers simply disable it and ignore it, especially for web applications. (Don't get me going on the pain of integrating locally built Lilac and Bugzilla with SELinux: eeewwwwh!) > 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. Not as big, serioiusly. The separation between "userspace" and "kernelspace" and "root access" was much better than it has been in the Windows world. >>> 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 Or need to play Half-Life. (Games are why my desktop is Windows, it runs CentOS comfortably in VirtualBox.) > 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. Sadly, freenx is abandonware. So is neatx. (I've been working with them lately.) The clients and servers from NoMachine are pretty good, and play nicely on CentOS. (I'm using them now for personal use, which their license allows.) The new NX version 4 alpha release is very, very alpha. We'll see how it works out in the long term. I've been trying to pay them for licenses, but the licensing model hasn't fitted anything I can *explain* to the people who sign checks.