Re: [Fsfe-uk] An ignorant question?

[Simon Waters]

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Alex Hudson wrote:
>
> I agree with your disagreement ;) If people held Windows to the same
standard
> that they hold Linux to, Windows would not be suitable for the desktop
> either. There are only two factors in it's favor:
>
> i. hardware manufacturers are willing to write drivers for MS (however,
> these drivers are invariably crap)
> ii. software producers are willing to write software for it
>
> Personally, I think GNU/Linux is *easier* to install and use than Windows.
> I don't think it is as featureful yet - single sign-on is but a dream at
> the moment, and there are no network file systems as nice as the Windows
> stuff yet - but I'm not sure these are issues that might prevent an SME
> using it.

Single sign-on in Unix/Linux is pretty easy, more so in these days of
PAM, what are you blathering about. Took Windows ages to catch up
because we had to rely on Microsoft releasing details of it's
authentication schemes before people like Novell could dive in and
supply such interoperability features to MS OSes.

Have to say I'm not up on file systems, NFS was always adequate for
properly secured networks, since NFS is virtually transparent, I'm not
sure what features of Windows networking you are referring to. Certainly
for properly designed networks I've found NFS more reliable and flexible
than anything MS ever produced, but then I never touched automounter in
the days when it got a bad reputation - automounter never let me down.

The real crunch is not is Linux easier to install, but that hardware
vendors, like DELL, OEM Windows to deal with the hardware differences.

Typically the user never installs Windows - why else do you think Acer
supply a "recovery disk" that images Windows back onto your hard disk,
rather than an OEMed Windows 98 disk? Because it is so easy to do a
Windows install - obviously ;-)

On slightly unusual hardware, the average Windows MCSE/MCSA, is going to
struggle to install his OS of choice from the MS OS CD, the point is if
they know their stuff they won't get into this situation, they'll either
use the vendor OEM disk, or recover using other methods (Ghost).

By all means point out where Free Software is worse, but I think you
don't have much experience of deploying big Unix networks, at which
point you realise GNU/Linux is just another one of the lads, but
cheaper, and with better file utilities, and more software.

Admittedly Linux NFS to other platforms has a few idiosyncracies (well
documented in the HOWTO), but Linux to Linux is no different from HP-UX
to HP-UX (actually HP were good at putting bugs in NFS so probably worse
than Linux), or SUN to SUN (who wrote the software for HP NFS, that HP
kept cocking up on porting, in case anyone tells you proprietary vendors
have more source code know how than Linux vendors).

That isn't to say the the ADS management tools that come with W2K aren't
quite good, the end user doesn't see that sort of thing anyway, so it is
down to the Linux admin to find a toolset that fits his needs.
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