On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 07:42:42PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Now after witnessing some of the nasty buggy and bloated drivers I have to deal with in Windows, I don't want the same put into my kernel (even as a module).
Recent versions of Windows can be very stable, it's the nasty third party drivers that cause most of the stability problems. Given the choice between Windows instability and lack of support for some cheap and crufty £30 printer, I'll take the latter thank you.
Both of these points are very very true, you just reminded me of the problems I have had with hardware in Windows. My main motivation for giving my parents a Linux computer is partially to do with when I tried to upgrade the graphics card in their machine (I had upgraded my gfx card and was giving them my cast off). Basically I removed the ATI drivers rebooted the machine and it was ok, shutdown Windows put in the Nvidia gfx card and the machine blue screened at boot, no matter what I did, no safe mode nothing. I also then tried putting the old gfx card back into the machine, the result was exactly the same problem.
In the end I pulled the data off the harddisk and as yet have to build them their new computer (still not decided on distro, fedora is a possible/likely candidate as it has a very nice UI out of the box and they only have dialup so Debian unstable may be a bit much :)). Although I /may/ give Mandrake 9.2 another go.
At least with a Linux box it is hard to get it into a similar state unless you have physically broken hardware or have actually broken a config file badly but at least to fix these kind of problems usually means a boot with a rescue disk and fixing your boot loader or changing your fstab back to what it said 5 minutes ago before breaking your machine, not that I would ever do anything like that ever... oh no. not me :o)
I am also reminded of how much of my bargain hardware doesn't actually work in Windows very well, mainly because you get locked in to poor vendor shipped applications as many of the drivers do not supply an interface for third party software, sometimes I have despaired when I have a new bit of hardware that I am having trouble getting working under Linux so I boot to windows (I only have it for games! honest guv) to try the hardware there and find out how bad the official driver support and applications are!
Adam