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Hax said:eneville said:Well, you can probably tell from my sig that I'm going to fight the corner for GNU/Linux. X hasn't screwed up on me for years, it's better now than it every has been. Maybe you're mixing up X with the window manager?
As I work with Linux/Solaris boxes for my day job, doing anything with Windows is painful and I'll often pull faces at the computer trying to make something dead simple in unix happen on Windows.
You're pretty much on your own when there's a BSOD during boot on windows, it's the opposite case with unix.
Nope, not confusing X with windowing manager, I *do* know the difference after years of developing chartplotters running Linux as the OS
As for the BSOD comment, Windows still gives you the chance to boot into safe mode. Linux gives you the chance to boot to a console prompt (if you know how to edit the boot line that is). Linux = no GUI, just console and keyboard. Windows = basic GUI with most, internet to look up help, etc...
I know which I would recommend for most users who aren't comfortable with console commands, which is a large proportion of the people who use PCs these days. Hell, I know developers who've struggled with the console be it Windows or Linux, most don't have to get near it these days.
I agree that Linux is a nice OS, I just don't think it suitable for everyone.... Yet...
The thing is that I'd estimate the BSOD frequency is *FAR* greater than the single user boot (S) mode. The majority of installs don't have any xorg.conf files (apart from conf.d files for peculiar hardware) so things "just work", in my opinion far better than things on Windows where very specific drivers are required so internet access is more essential there.
Anyway, Linux crashes much less IMO, I've not seen a single user boot on my desktop since I had an AMD K7 so maybe a decade ago and that was through faulty hardware. The biggest X problem IMO is nvidia drivers. That aside, I've used Linux installs for users that are so clueless about their desktops. Using something like Ubuntu is just fine for this sort of user. The only thing they need to know is where the firefox icon is. Works just fine, not heard any complaints, I wouldn't expect them to start using Mutt as their primary email client or to start writing documents with LaTeX or anything crazy just yet.