Comment of the Day- November 5, 2005 at work I support NetWare, Windows, Solaris, and linux servers...

Why I switched to linux


I went to a business school from 1984-1988, having had only the first computer course my high school ever offered and a typing class on a manual typewriter. The required computer classes for all majors were Intro to Computers (history, terminology, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect) and Basic programming. There were no features that didn't work in any of these softwares. You had to learn enough DOS to get to the directory the software's executable resided in to start it. My first job out of college, I used DOS workstations and a NetWare 2 server with 1 MB RAM. The "computer specialist" went on maternity leave and never came back. I was on my own, so I started learning. The next thing I knew, I was the admin of the server/network, at a time when memory management was manual and tricky; but if a new version of Lotus or WordStar came out and a feature they'd been advertising didn't work yet, they'd offer a discount with apologies, and take it out of the menu. Support was free for all software, as the companies actually used to fix bugs, rather than design new features around them. My expectations had been set high, and I had been taught ethics at business school.

Then M$ started breaking every rule I'd learned in business ethics. They made sure DR DOS had "problems" and stole Norton Utilities defragmenter, without even trying to hide the fact. They didn't even try to change the appearance, and I had already been burned by disks that weren't full, but could no longer be written to, until you deleted stuff to make more room, installed Norton Utilities (or at least the defrag files, it was modular) and ran a defrag. From there M$ went downhill, dragging the whole industry with it. Overpriced software sold with promises of features that never worked, turned into the bloatiest crashware we'd ever seen. M$ started ticking off the rest of the ethics violations we had been taught not to do at business school, and became the poster child for why monopolys were bad, eventually buying entire sections of our government and dozens of judges, to avoid having their customers protected from their abuse. These days, FDIC auditors recommend M$ Active Directory for the security of it (what a joke) and tell you how great it is that M$ gives them all their software (except the OS) for free.

I am a M$ hater, and although I'm not proud of it, I am not ashamed of it either. As an administrator, their software is some of the worst I've ever had to make excuses for, 'er I mean support.



My aging games machine is Windows 98SE Lite. Litepc.com has software originally inspired to prove M$ wrong about not being able to have Win98 without IE. The label on the CD case says "...because they said it couldn't be done...". Anything to kill the competition, including perjury. The more I studied security, the less comfortable I was connecting even this stripped Windows machine to the wild, wild, web. Hiding behind an OpenBSD firewall with a host firewall, anti-virus, and a web proxy wasn't enough anymore.

I had used Red Hat as mail servers and as DNS servers at work and they had been extremely reliable. Our internal mail server running sendmail would run at 98% - 100% CPU utilization all day every work day, until we feared the hardware would die on us from the strain. I had not found a linux distribution I liked as a desktop workstation until the fall of 2002, when I found Lindows (now Linspire). I can strip unnecessary services and lock down the firewall, and I need not fear checking my e-mail or surfing the web (as a regular user, of course :-). It has no hidden costs and no menu options that lead to broken features. It only has Clam-AV on it, so I needn't fear ssh'ing a virus to my Windows games machine, which will be replaced with Gentoo, most likely (I already need a new video card and more CPU for today's games). Trimming the bloat off XP just isn't worth the effort. Linspire is easier to setup and maintain than any version of M$ Windows, as an internet PC especially. For a games machine, Gentoo appears the best distro for me, as I like my games to get the most out of the higher end hardware I'll supply it with (Yes, I'll be building my own again).

You have heard from a Micro$oft hater, created more by their abusive business practices than by their crappy bloated crashware. They abuse their competitors, their partners, and their customers, and they hold back the progress of their customers, their industry, their country, and mankind.

This is why I switched to linux.

BTW, at work I support NetWare, Windows, Solaris, and linux servers, in order by count. In order by time to support per server, Windows, Windows, Windows, Windows, Windows, NetWare, linux, Solaris.