[lug] my latest guilty pleasure -- Linuxhaters Blog

[Zan Lynx]

Collins Richey wrote:
[cut]
> Nate, you never give up. Of course, Linux could never be an acceptable
> alternative in your opinion. I would rephrase that statement. Windows
> will run longer without crashing that it did in the past with or
> without professional admins. It will not run as long as Linux without
> crashing. We have professional admins at work, and it still crashes.
> In particular, the hotfixes that M$ proscribes to fight the
> continually morphing viral infections are more likely to crash the
> system than not. Based on recent experience at work, I would say that
> maybe 1 out of 100 Linux updates are flawed (RHEL), whereas Windows
> fixes get about 1 out of 10 badly wrong, and these are usually hard
> failures, not just a single broken package.
[cut]

I was going to mention this "crashing" problem caused by updates too.
My experience running Windows XP, XP-64 and Vista 64, versus Gentoo,
Fedora Core and Ubuntu Linux shows this: The Linux update process
creates "crashed" systems far more often than the Microsoft updates.

For a sysadmin these problems are easy fixes: merge changes from a
.rpmnew or .rpmold config file (or the Gentoo / Debian equivalents) or
do a bit of Googling and add a new xorg.conf Option line to disable some
new X feature.

For a basic user, these problems are as bad or worse than a crashed
Windows machine, which can generally come back to life after a reboot,
or at least the undeath of safe mode.

RHEL is better about the updates.  What *makes* it better is the extra
work RedHat puts into it.  So you should really be paying for it, not
using a Centos knockoff.

Speaking of hotfixes, these are the equivalent of installing packages
from Fedora Rawhide or Debian Unstable.  If you're installing 0-day
fixes, expect 0-day testing.  Microsoft is *still* better here: their
shadow-copy rollback on newer OS's is very, very good.  You can get the
same effect on Linux installed on LVM, *if* you remember to run a
snapshot before installing packages.

I still like Linux better, but I cannot stand the endless MS bashing
some people do.