On Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:26:17 -0800 Jonathan McDowell noodles@earth.li allegedly wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 07:17:00PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
It's interesting that most people who have passed negative comment on my desktop of choice tend to be sitting on a Windows machine with several thousand pounds of pirated software to achieve the same thing I manage with Free software, I often retort by asking them if they would feel the same way if they had actually paid for everything.
This one annoys me too.
And me - bigtime. And a major problem with pirated software (particularly, but not uniquely) for windows is that it is often a vector for malware.
Which brings me to another major reason for using Linux - its relative security and freedom from such crud. This means that I don't have to run a CPU/memory intensive hog of an "internet security suite" because my OS of choice is not susceptible to 99.99+% of all the malicious code out there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not naive enough to think that "linux is inherently more secure than windows", nor am I blind to the problems of application level exploits running in that universal firewall bypass we all love (i.e the browser, which to make things even worse may run flash). But I do like the fact that Linux in all its variants is a very, very, small and specialist target so malware developers leave it alone. Perversely, whilst I would love to see desktop lonux and free software in much greater use, I know that it that were the case we would all face the problems the commercial world currently faces in its use of a fat, juicy, well known, exploitable target. A target that is often unpatched, out of date, and realtively unprotected. (And believe me, the state of IA in major corporates is nothing short of deplorable.)
I've written a handful of blog articles about why I use Linux, mainly as a thinking out loud exercise. It was inspired by the discovered that I might end up having to use Windows at work, and wondering exactly what it was about that which made me unhappy. They're not all up yet (I'm drip feeding them out to avoid flooding Planets/boring people too much), but you can see what I have so far at:
http://the.earth.li/~noodles/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=1&tag=whyl...
Agree with all of that.
Mick
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------