You will NEVER escape idiots like Chud and Emory. They don’t get it, because part of their personality disorder is to want to stand out from the crowd. Linux helps them do that, but the double edge of that sword is the desire for more people to be like them. Linux, especially for those of us who can actually USE a computer, is god awful terrible as a desktop “do everything” OS. For them, an OS is a religion, for the rest of us, and OS just needs to run 90% of the software on the market. Don’t listen to the trolls, they will ultimately fail later in life.

Drop and extra hard drive or another partition on there and install linux mint linuxmint.com enable some of the beryl settings and watch the eye candy meld seemlessly with stability and performance …. Then never look back ;)

The registry is an abomination on over 20 years of effective operating system design concepts. Its spits in the face of even the most basic concepts that a comp sci 101 level student has to learn. Stuff like abstraction, data protection, data privacy. The idea that maybe, you know, putting a ton of system settings into one flat file, may not be the best decision. Its slow, its dangerous, its just a stupid way to do things, straight up. In linux, each developer is responsible for their own preferences, and the OS goes by the same exact logic. Each file can be different. You can restrict which programs can look at what through an intelligent privileging system. Oh, and when one of those files becomes corrupt, its not going to take down the whole system. Yeah, windows keeps a backup of the registry, so woohoo, a two copy data redundancy scheme. I’m so impressed. Or you could even push the data into a database like OSX does with their netinfo database. Then you’ve got redundant storage, faster data retrieval algorithms, and all the other assorted advantages of a true database design.

Yeah, theres reasons to use windows, and these reasons usually come down to preference or just the fact that its what people are used to. But trying to say the design of windows is somehow superior to any other operating system out there, is pure shit. Theres a reason why linux and OSX have the reputation of being stable: because they simply are. Windows, from a pure design perspective, is terribly laid out, and then was horribly executed on top of that. Its open to so many vulnerabilities and is so buggy because it was designed poorly.

If you want to use it, fine, but you’re doing a disservice to the reader when you dont preface the link with a disclaimer. “WARNING: The segment you’re about to see was written by a fanboy and contains no factual information whatsoever.” :P :P

Open a terminal and you can compile alot of the software that runs on Linux under OSX. The Linux X11 windowing system even comes on the OSX install disk…

AND my MAC book pro with 4 Gigs of ram and Intel Duo Core 2 processor will run Vista Ultimate NATIVELY under the OSX bootcamp software, it even creates a driver cd so that Vista can access ALL the cool Apple Hardware. Where are your heads, in the sand???

PS my first OS was a bootstrap that had to be keyed in by hand in binary on an Altair 8080b with a whopping 256 BYTES of RAM.

The thing is, when I have a kid, he/she will learn how to use a linux box, from the ground up, utilizing the terminal and a basic GUI, there will be no windows for him to play with, most of our population now days is “used” to windows and have a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude, but what they don’t know is… it is broke … I personally run OS X because of my dependencies on Photoshop and the great catalog of free and useful software with a polished look and feel.

Now with all that said, Vista is complete shit, and the only copy of windows I run is on my media center/gaming PC and in Parallels for IE 6 & 7 testing… after installing vista I gave it 2 weeks, and went back to XP. The new version of Ubuntu was “officially” released today and OS X Leopard is coming in less than a couple weeks :)

Evan… next computer, make it a Mac… trust me,

(flamebait on…)

When fanboi baiting isn’t focused on the most trivial, e.g. the appearance of the gui, the shell in use, the names of files, it screams ‘”look at me, I’m an idiot.” The real difference between the registry and /etc? Linux doesn’t trash the etc directory every few months, prompting a re-install. The real difference between exe extensions and not? Windows filesystems have almost no metadata in the directories, so the extension is the only way to identify file characteristics.
The real difference between the Windows flag and a stuffed penguin? Stuffed penguins don’t phone home for license renewal (or removal) every day.

And the real difference between a stuffed penguin and a little devil? The little devil is from the smartest people on the planet, those that invented secure multiuser, remote computing, interoperability, and handed us the world on an internet platter. Squabbling about the differences between Window and Linux is beside the point, since they’re both toys written by amateurs.