Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 13:15:50 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Bill Pechter <pechter@lakewood.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: So, FreeBSD can't be a very popular OS, why? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971028114236.25207H-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199710281220.HAA01526@i4got.lakewood.com>
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On Tue, 28 Oct 1997, Bill Pechter wrote: > I've become a Unix fan and partisan in the war for better home O/S's. > I've purchased OS/2 (not too bad) and Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 and > (while OS/2 is ok) I find there's not much stability in the Windows world. Stability on personal computers is hard to judge objectively. When learning about a new system, you gradually learn what things not to do; you learn where quirks are and work around them. After using the system for a long while, this quirk avoidance becomes more or less automatic and you tend to forget exactly what the quirks are. You achieve a stable harmony between you, your applications, and the system. For any given person, the system they use regularly is probably more stable for *them* than other systems. How long does it take to find this stable state? Personally, my patience ran out before I was able to achieve stability with OS/2 (The Warp was okay. The Connect part, not so much). I'm moderately comfortable with Win95, but scared to make any changes because I don't know it well enough--I add something to the system and seemingly unrelated things blow up. I've re-installed Win95 from scratch on a number of occasions where tweaking something caused apparently irreversible damage. If I lived with Win95 more, I probably could have avoided the damage in the first place, or at least understood how to repair it. There are probably just as many ways to shoot yourself in the foot on a Unix system (assuming you are root), but I (usually) know enough not to pull the trigger when aiming at myself. With Windows, it seems that the bullets bounce and hit me even when I don't think I'm aiming at my foot. For a Unix novice, Unix would have bouncing bullets too. If you can't seem to find a stable state, that is a pretty good indicator that the system is ill-suited for the task. Where you really have problems on any system is when the system designer quietly points the gun for you and all you have to do is pull the trigger. Application installation procedures that silently "upgrade" system DLLs on Windows are a nice example of this. -john
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