3 ms·

Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is

Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is the case. Thought I think we can agree to disagree depending on our respective experiences.

tormeh 12y ago
This. I'm not saying modern Windows is fault free. It may have an inconvenient user interface for some things, it may not always do the thing you want it to etc. but it never fails to boot, everything but Apple hardware runs it flawlessly and it has a massive third-party software selection. For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage with debugging the occasional failure to boot, install etc., but that's because I have unusual priorities and good google-fu.
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  Just to toss something else into the mix...:) Honestly,I really really dislike Apple...esp the fanboy culture, mythology of Steve Jobs (and the culture which means everyone in Starbucks knows him and not Norman Borlaug), the weird shops, the overpriced products and ripoff margins, lack of choice and individually vs Android...for years I've been known as the guy who slags off Apple etc etc BUUUUUTTTTTT - and this might be relevant to Windows survivability in the future. Having spent nearly a week humming and thinking, comparing every type of new business laptop (powerful, reliable etc) at any price to run as my next Windows machine, I can't really find any...Thinkpad has seemed to have gone to pieces, DELL I have only ever had bad experiences with, ASUS/ACER meh etc... I quite literally am close to swallowing my pride (awaits incoming from friends who I slagged off over the years) and buying a MacBook and putting Windows on it. Maybe it's just me, but as Windows (except for the Win 8 bloaty crap) software has gotten better, the hardware at the moment seems to be getting worse.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    ASUS is basically the highest quality you'll get with consumer prices. Acer is among the worst - they're like HP. You can't compare the two.
- zanny 12y ago
  > but it never fails to boot, Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technically literate and lives two states away. Nothing can fix it. He does not have the technical wherewithal to remove the drive and recover files, there is no way to rewrite those specific files without reformatting the disk, and if the Windows install CD does not fix it (and it did not) you have no resources to try to resolve it. With Linux, he would have had a live USB on hand, and if it failed to boot he could have reinstalled over his root partition and have all his personal files preserved while effectively resetting the environment.
  - tonyarkles 12y ago
    This is way OT, and I'm pretty rusty in Windows land, but there used to be a tool you could run if you booted to a command prompt from a windows install disc that would rewrite ntldr and the boot sector. bootmgr.exe maybe? Something like that. Not all hope is lost!
    - zanny 12y ago
      The context is that he is tech illiterate. So much so that I tried to get him to just use a gui tool on his windows notebook to put Ubuntu on a 2GB flash drive to save his files but he couldn't do it. There is no way he would have been able to boot to the Windows recovery CD command prompt and run anything. Also, I'm pretty sure the boot repair on the disk runs bootmgr repair options during its "please wait were doing stuff and not telling you what is going on" phase.
- xorcist 12y ago
  People have so varying experiences it's not even funny. I guess fail to boot means some update was required to initrd that didn't make it, but it's not something that would be common among the mainstream stable distributions. I've certainly never seen it on hundreds of machines. Windows is a different story altogether. Not primarily because of some technical inferiority, but because people run all kinds of not-even-broken things with admin privs just because they got it in a box. Just last week someone pushed a mobile broadband stick in their Windows box. It purred and whirred for a while, and hasn't booted since. I've seen similar things before. (OT: I'd be grateful if anyone had any helpers on how to remove things selectively from the Windows boot process. There is a safe mode boot, which also hangs. Can I step through it, like on DOS? Can restore the boot related registry settings to an older version? Google doesn't help me at all here, and it seems like it should be a pretty common problem.)
krylon 12y ago
My day job is managing a company network of about 100 Windows clients, running anything from Vista to 8.1. I agree that Windows has gotten a lot better over the years, but if you have enough machines in one place, you see some pretty strange things happening, like MS Office breaking for no apparent reason, or an update to Office 2013 breaking Autodesk Inventor, forcing me to reinstall Inventor, thereby breaking Outlook, forcing me to reinstall Office (afterwards, both Outlook and Inventor continued to work - I have no idea why). The chance for an individual user to experience such problems is fairly low, but as an admin / help desk monkey (we have no dedicated help desk, so I am the one users call for help) I get to see all those problems. Let me repeat, Windows has improved a lot over the years, and I honestly do not know what it would be like to manage ~100 Debian or CentOS clients. I am not saying Linux deployed on such a scale on such a variety of machines would run without problems. But you do run into those situations where you have to invoke some arcane command or edit the registry on Windows, too. And at least in my experience, if that happens on Linux, at least you can look at the man page for the command or the config file.

tormeh 12y ago

This. I'm not saying modern Windows is fault free. It may have an inconvenient user interface for some things, it may not always do the thing you want it to etc. but it never fails to boot, everything but Apple hardware runs it flawlessly and it has a massive third-party software selection. For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage with debugging the occasional failure to boot, install etc., but that's because I have unusual priorities and good google-fu.

secfirstmd 12y ago
Just to toss something else into the mix...:) Honestly,I really really dislike Apple...esp the fanboy culture, mythology of Steve Jobs (and the culture which means everyone in Starbucks knows him and not Norman Borlaug), the weird shops, the overpriced products and ripoff margins, lack of choice and individually vs Android...for years I've been known as the guy who slags off Apple etc etc BUUUUUTTTTTT - and this might be relevant to Windows survivability in the future. Having spent nearly a week humming and thinking, comparing every type of new business laptop (powerful, reliable etc) at any price to run as my next Windows machine, I can't really find any...Thinkpad has seemed to have gone to pieces, DELL I have only ever had bad experiences with, ASUS/ACER meh etc... I quite literally am close to swallowing my pride (awaits incoming from friends who I slagged off over the years) and buying a MacBook and putting Windows on it. Maybe it's just me, but as Windows (except for the Win 8 bloaty crap) software has gotten better, the hardware at the moment seems to be getting worse.
- tormeh 12y ago
  ASUS is basically the highest quality you'll get with consumer prices. Acer is among the worst - they're like HP. You can't compare the two.
zanny 12y ago
> but it never fails to boot, Except when it does. I have a friend who got a virus that deleted the Windows bootloader / ntldr from C:, but hes not as technically literate and lives two states away. Nothing can fix it. He does not have the technical wherewithal to remove the drive and recover files, there is no way to rewrite those specific files without reformatting the disk, and if the Windows install CD does not fix it (and it did not) you have no resources to try to resolve it. With Linux, he would have had a live USB on hand, and if it failed to boot he could have reinstalled over his root partition and have all his personal files preserved while effectively resetting the environment.
- tonyarkles 12y ago
  This is way OT, and I'm pretty rusty in Windows land, but there used to be a tool you could run if you booted to a command prompt from a windows install disc that would rewrite ntldr and the boot sector. bootmgr.exe maybe? Something like that. Not all hope is lost!
  - zanny 12y ago
    The context is that he is tech illiterate. So much so that I tried to get him to just use a gui tool on his windows notebook to put Ubuntu on a 2GB flash drive to save his files but he couldn't do it. There is no way he would have been able to boot to the Windows recovery CD command prompt and run anything. Also, I'm pretty sure the boot repair on the disk runs bootmgr repair options during its "please wait were doing stuff and not telling you what is going on" phase.
xorcist 12y ago
People have so varying experiences it's not even funny. I guess fail to boot means some update was required to initrd that didn't make it, but it's not something that would be common among the mainstream stable distributions. I've certainly never seen it on hundreds of machines. Windows is a different story altogether. Not primarily because of some technical inferiority, but because people run all kinds of not-even-broken things with admin privs just because they got it in a box. Just last week someone pushed a mobile broadband stick in their Windows box. It purred and whirred for a while, and hasn't booted since. I've seen similar things before. (OT: I'd be grateful if anyone had any helpers on how to remove things selectively from the Windows boot process. There is a safe mode boot, which also hangs. Can I step through it, like on DOS? Can restore the boot related registry settings to an older version? Google doesn't help me at all here, and it seems like it should be a pretty common problem.)

krylon 12y ago

My day job is managing a company network of about 100 Windows clients, running anything from Vista to 8.1. I agree that Windows has gotten a lot better over the years, but if you have enough machines in one place, you see some pretty strange things happening, like MS Office breaking for no apparent reason, or an update to Office 2013 breaking Autodesk Inventor, forcing me to reinstall Inventor, thereby breaking Outlook, forcing me to reinstall Office (afterwards, both Outlook and Inventor continued to work - I have no idea why). The chance for an individual user to experience such problems is fairly low, but as an admin / help desk monkey (we have no dedicated help desk, so I am the one users call for help) I get to see all those problems. Let me repeat, Windows has improved a lot over the years, and I honestly do not know what it would be like to manage ~100 Debian or CentOS clients. I am not saying Linux deployed on such a scale on such a variety of machines would run without problems. But you do run into those situations where you have to invoke some arcane command or edit the registry on Windows, too. And at least in my experience, if that happens on Linux, at least you can look at the man page for the command or the config file.