> Poor File and Folder Sharing Situation on the Local Network -> really not an issue, we have smb ftp ntfs... I have been mucking around with Windows lately, a

> Poor File and Folder Sharing Situation on the Local Network -> really not an issue, we have smb ftp ntfs... I have been mucking around with Windows lately, and two things that caught me off-guard was the difference in file sharing and remote desktop between the two platforms. Unix and, by extension, Linux grew up in networked environments. I was really expecting it to be better than Windows. Consider NFS. It's plenty fast, in the blows the socks off of SMB sense. It mounts as a regular file system, so it gets along with every Unix application. Is it appropriate outside of a local network? Nope. About the only way access control will work properly is to centralize account management, either on a server or by manually matching up the UID/GID on each system. Not only is that more work, but I really have to wonder about the security implications of that. Samba is also a pain to setup on Linux, at least if you're not running one of the big desktop environments. Protocols like FTP aren't really meant for file or folder sharing. I suppose you can wrap them up as a FUSE file system. Otherwise you aren't going to be accessing files from applications remotely, unless they built in support for those protocols. The thing that really blew my mind though was Remote Desktop. Click a checkbox to enable it on Windows (Professional), select any users who you want to have access, head over to another computer, and log in with your account. Video works. Audio works. It isn't doing anything funky, like VNC, where the gate-keeping is managed by a single password. Don't get me wrong. I'm firmly in the camp that most of the weaknesses (and lack of strengths) that people see in either Linux or Windows is mostly about familiarity. Having used Linux almost exclusively for a quarter century, I can certainly attest to that. I can count the strengths of Windows on the fingers of one hand (IMHO) and using it is a battle to maintain my sanity. I also don't see a lot of the issues people cite, such as local file sharing (or remote desktop), as being something that affects most users. For personal use, most people have shifted to online services. For large institutions, there are professionals to manage the quirks of either operating system. That pretty much leaves small businesses and enthusiasts. Other issues are truly issues, but they are impossible to resolve without throwing away the advantages of Linux (like the claims of there being too many distributions).