How linux is no better than windows
Posted on September 17, 2009
Filed Under: Internet and web sites.
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wndows
osx
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linux
First off, I am of the camp that every OS sucks. Seriously, not one of them is perfect. They all have strengths (Widows strength mostly being their marketing group), and everyone has serious crippling weaknesses. And right now, it's some of the weaknesses in Linux that's irritating me.
My laptop just came back from the shop -- I've been using a mac mini to work in the mean time -- and I finally decided I could switch from Windows to Linux. So I download the latest Ubuntu and fire it up. The sound is great, the images and UI are acceptable. So I start finding the software I need to do my job. Netbeans is a fine place to start (Eclipse being the next thing I plan to install). So I use the fancy Add/Remove software which connects to the web and lists millions of packages I can get for free. FREE is awesome. Needless to say, I click on Netbeans and click again to start the install. The progress indicator kicks up and politely informs me that 110 packages will be downloaded and installed. 110! I start to long for the simplicity of my woefully under powered mini.
Of course advocates will tell you that these 110 packages are managed automatically by the system, and will be cleaned up and everything made good as soon as I uninstall. I'm not buying it. I've used Linux as a server for over a decade now, and I've seen the mess left behind by well meaning package managers. Not to mention the horrid list of conflicts and days of researching resolutions at times when things go wrong -- and they always go wrong eventually.
Wat I prefer is my recent experience going from OSX 10.5.8 to 10.6. I had moved a few applications to a tools folder (QuickTime and Text Edit). When I installed Snow Leopard, it saw these were missing from their designated place, and simply replaced them. Suddenly I have two versions of these apps -- both still able to run without a problem. When having the choice bothered me, I delete the directory under tools, and life is again simple.
And yes, I know that this sucks up hard drive space, and probably uses some extra ram to boot. But really, my mac mini has 120g of hd and my pc has 320g of had -- both with 4gb of ram. I can spare the space if it means never spending a minute playing which software do I want to disable from package conflicts again.
-- Don't get me started on the Apple key!