On 22-Dec-10 10:18:29, Richard Lewis wrote:
At Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:55:46 +0000, Simon Royal wrote:
So what make you lot a Linux?
Flexibility and features. GNU is good because it comes with tools! Windows has been acceptable as a desktop operating system since the XP release, but it's immensely frustrating to use because it has almost no tools. Linux-based systems are slightly more liable to misbehaviour in hardware related things such as suspending, but the trade-off is that anything you can imagine that you want to do will be possible somehow (except computing when a computation will halt, but that's also impossible in Windows).
Indeed (as Richard undoubtedly knows) impossible in general on any possible operating system running on a Turing machine. See (for example):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem
There are additional (and non-logical) reasons why computing how long a program will run on a Windows machine is impossible. These are based on the fact that in an environment where the operating system will cease to function at some random moment, this moment cannot be computed in advance. You just have to wait for it to happen, and then you find out (though you may be able to pre-compute features of the distribution of this random time). However, you can be sure that it will happen sooner or later (and indeed usually sooner, so just waiting for it to happen is in fact a quite efficient method of determining it).
Ted.
Price. When I first started using GNU systems I was a poor student and very much appreciated having access to useful software without having to spend money. Access to free but industrial grade software is also invaluable for learning. For example, anyone can learn to set up and configure Apache just as it would be in a production context on their own computer at no personal expense. But in order even to learn how to use IIS, you need to buy it. What if you do so and it turns out to be rubbish?
I like Debian specifically because of the package manager and package management. My first experience with a GNU/Linux distribution was Red Hat and I gave up after a few months because it was such a chore trying to install software. But, as others on this thread have said, the Debian tools, policies, and archive are what really makes free software stand out.
Best, Richard
--
Richard Lewis ISMS, Computing Goldsmiths, University of London Tel: +44 (0)20 7078 5134 Skype: richardjlewis JID: ironchicken@jabber.earth.li http://www.richardlewis.me.uk/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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