I hear what you're saying, and I didn't say that the underlying code hadn't been changed in Windows, just that a lot of problems therein remained, and that a lot of time has been wasted changing things that weren't broke.
I come from a background of using and developing for both OSs but not getting terribly deeply involved in the internals of either, I must admit.
The thing that irritates me most about Windows, and I know I'm not alone, is that everything is wrapped up in a GUI that "any idiot" is supposed to be able to use to manage and configure a pretty complex system. (If only they didn't keep changing it). It doesn't take much to go wrong before you have to throw the GUI away and start poking around in the internals, and with Windows that's not documented, nor easy. Time to re-install the whole damn lot unless you really know your way around it.
Linux suffers the same thing to a degree. it has nice easy GUI based configuration tools which are useful as far as they go. However, underneath that are some much more comprehensive and documented command line tools that will get you out of trouble where the GUI tools throw in the towel, if you are prepared to have a dig around.
Case in point. I have just spent all morning trying to get a troublesome device driver working on a Windows box. It wouldn't talk to the hardware it should talk to. I swapped the hardware - no change. Tried it on another machine, and it works fine. The uninstall wizard bombed out with an error when I tried to re-install it, meaning it will now neither install nor uninstall. I'm left trying to manually remove all the files, registry settings, etc. and working totally blind. Eventually I manually uninstall it and re-install. Still doesn't work. It worked yesterday, why not today? In the end I just reached for a new machine because there's nothing short of re-installing the whole lot that can be done with the old one.
Had this been a Linux box I would have been able to look at the documentation on the module / daemon involved, find its' configuration and check it, maybe turn on some logging to see why it's complaining and I probably would have got to the bottom of it. Hell, I could even have cracked out the source code if I'd wanted to. However, I suspect it wouldn't have decided at random one day to stop working in the first place.
I'm not convinced about the windows command line. If it does make a load of stuff accessible there's no documentation available to the average user to make use of it. It doesn't come close to a unix shell at any rate.
The main reason for my interest in Linux, however, is that I have a few machines at home. I'm not prepared to pay for Windows, MS Office, Visual Studio, etc. etc. on each of them so I can dabble, so I run something that does what I need and costs me zero. Nothing particularly religious, I just prefer not to pay 500 quid for something that's available free. I've discovered that both OSs have their strong and weak points, and if windows were the free one it'd probably be on my PC ;-)
Anyway, aren't we supposed to be talking about Omegas here?
Kevin
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Topic: Vista or XP??? (Read 4020 times)