Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 17:48:48 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "Bara Zani" <bara_zani@yahoo.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <jacks@sage-american.com> Subject: Re: freebsd as a desktop ? Message-ID: <000b01c1782c$8e180ec0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <006201c17815$d8960040$fd6e34c6@mlevy> <3.0.5.32.20011128094417.01042450@mail.sage-american.com>
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Jack writes: > Not that my stamp of approval matters, but that > is a VERY opened-minded and logical way of stating > it. Thanks. > When the hardware wears out and upgraded, I will > never load the Win98 again as it is incredibly > unstable crashing/locking constantly with very > few apps running. Win2K is very stable ... It's important to understand that Windows 98 and its toy brethren have _nothing_ in common with Windows NT/2K and its ilk except the name and the GUI. Under the hood, these operating systems are dramatically different--as different as Windows and the Mac. The Windows 98 tribe is junk, essentially; fine for occasional and non-critical home use, but not stable or solid enough (IMO) for business and critical use. Windows NT/2K, in contrast, is a heavy-duty OS that can take a beating and run under heavy loads on lots of hardware and still work. It's unfortunate that Microsoft has developed these two different operating systems and marketed them in ways that obfuscate the dramatic differences between them in system architecture. > ... but not nearly as stable as FreeBSD... FreeBSD is UNIX, a multiuser, timesharing operating system that was mature and stable before most Windows users were born. Any operating system that has been around that long tends to be very stable indeed. Additionally, UNIX was developed in the days when buying ever-increasing amounts of hardware to compensate for really bad software was simply not economically feasible or even technically possible, not even for the most fortunate users--so UNIX is a system that runs lean and mean, even today. > ... but, Win2K can really run the desktop well > all the many heavy apps that this publishing > business needs. I've run NT since it first came out, and I've never looked back. It is interesting to note that NT is more stable than 9x, and it also happens to look a lot more like UNIX. This is not a coincidence; it's a consequence of the fact that certain system architectures are more stable than others, and NT and UNIX follow the best OS design practices much more closely than Windows 9x and its predecessors, which were essentially thrown together out of spit and baling wire. I've seen the code for NT and 9x, and just looking at it you can tell that two different categories of engineers wrote it. The 9x code is written by high-school students, it seems; the NT code is written by people who have clearly been bitten by bad coding practices in the past. UNIX, of course, resembles this latter model, since it has been around for so long. > I see absolutely no reason to use Linux, but that > may change later when it can run the destop > better than Windoze. That isn't going to happen. Linux is a flavor of UNIX, and the architecture of UNIX is incompatible with heavy desktop use, just as the bloated GUI of Windows is incompatible with high-performance use as a server. Short of completely rewriting Linux so that it no longer looks like UNIX, this isn't going to change. I have similar reservations about the Mac OS X, although I suspect that it has already been very heavily rewritten to get around this problem, and it will be ever more extensively rewritten in the future. There's no getting around it: You cannot be everything to everyone, and a good server is inevitably a poor desktop, and vice versa. People who fall in love with one OS and then try to make it do everything are hilariously entertaining, though. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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