Good idea this post... be interesting to see where folk are coming from! as they say.
2007 i only had an old machine that could still just about run win98. I was given a couple of P3 1ghz. I was going to put win2k on one of them but after a browse in PC world in Ipswich i thought i'd give Ubuntu (ver 6.10 CD enclosed) a go. I had read about Red hat back in about 2000 but didn't get round to trying it.
My father had just died and i found myself coping with my mother who was then diagnosed with Alzheimer's. While i was coping with her (a rather stressful disease to cope with to say the least) i tinkered with linux and read as much as i could. I could run all the applications i wanted to in linux apart from a mind mapping app, autocad, turbocad and a scanner. Most of the applications better than a doze equivalent although i'd used OO, Thunderbird and other common ones. But i also wanted to know more about linux. It seemed to me that unix in late 80s and early 90s didn't see the potential of the mini or home PC - microsoft jumped in there.
What i liked was the cli - made almost redundant by microsoft and yet very much at the heart of the earlier windows. I have a liking for the simple but effective things in life - like my seven classic cars... there's nothing i can't do on them - can't do a lot on modern vehicles. On linux i enjoy the mix of graphical and cli. To me it's not either or - each have their place e.g. i like llgal (cli) for photo albums [http://jessejazza.110mb.com/photos/dogs/best-09/index.html] but i'll stay with graphical text editors.
I got a better machine later and ran ubuntu 8.04 (tried the 9's and 10's and weren't to my liking), and have just bought my first new machine. I'm tinkering at present with what distro to use for a while as i've decided to move on from ubuntu. I'm also GOING TO do a Gentoo, slackware or LFS installation in the New Year - i've been promising to do this ever since i started using linux and still haven't got round to it. The linux 'MUST DO' they say 'then you'll know linux' - yet i've failed to get round to it so far.
Perhaps it's worth a mention: what's the future of linux? Linux has certainly come into it's own for websites due to the security. Windows holds it's place in the market for office use and at home. Too many distros i feel give linux a bad name and a fair number produce more than the main three desktops. Yes; linux is about choice but i also wonder about the long term of too much choice. Ubuntu is produced in so many forms now and yet the project is still in the red... and that can't continue for much longer. Do i donate; yes to releases that don't have problems. The three distros i've tried where i feel they have gone the extra mile are Pclos, Mint and Mepis yet these are one-man-bands. But each distro i've tried i find there are things i like and then things i don't. Mepis (kde) ran nicely and faster than ubuntu on the P3 - Mepis gets first place for kde imo. Pclos have taken a step that i feel is significant for the future - 'mini' releases. [This Texstar fellow intrigues me... seems full of new ideas - e.g. in pclos before you can use synaptic (i think there the only rpm distro using APT) one runs a speed test and thus select the fastest download server (don't think anyone else does that)]. The basics are on the CD and you add your selection. With ubuntu i'd remove evolution and a lot of stuff i didn't like and put on Thunderbird and so on. So why don't distros save themselves development time and use mini versions for releases? Another development taking place it seems is the replacement for gnome. Gnome is hard to package (apparently) - slackware have dropped it and as other distros seem to be developing xfce maybe we'll be left with xfce and kde. xfce i gather sits on gnome partly and there's also standalone xfce on some distros. But then again certain distros seem to be keen to develop enlightenment, openbox, lxde - lighter versions for older machines! The majority of users probably have a dual core machine - perhaps the next generation of machines are going to be much more expensive! Currently computers are very cheap compared with what they were a decade ago. Quality certainly down - the motherboard on my old compaq P3 is vastly superior in my view. Bit like a landrover compared with a car - all rugged and reliable.
Anyway rant over - got to ice the Christmas cake.
james
On 22 December 2010 14:59, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
On 22/12/10 14:24, mick wrote:
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.
I disagree with this. I agree that Linux isn't absolutely bullet proof, but there are a number of reasons why Linux is better prepared for the threat than Windows. The fact that anyone can audit the code really is a strength, but also the fact (that you alluded to) that with Linux, most of the software you want is an apt-get away, rather than downloaded from PirateBay or similar. The package management also makes it a lot easier to keep things up to date; Windows does a reasonable job these days of installing system updates but you're very much on your own when it comes to application updates, and the myriad of "update available, click here to install" messages you get on Windows is a gift to trojan writers.
Windows has improved from a position of real weakness (eg the Windows equivalent of sudo), but it still suffers from things like driver validation, which (because most aren't) requires that users get used to clicking past the warnings.
And the worst browser is still IE (at least with all the legacy versions out there - and a lot of systems that cannot update past IE6), which although it is way better now than it used to be has again started weak then got better, rather than starting strong where most Linux applications have taken security seriously for longer. Of-course it "helps" that the cost of a Windows licence is substantially offset on most PCs by kickbacks from security software trials, so the incentive isn't fully there to fix the problem. Whilst the business model includes selling updates, it's "useful" that old versions have problems that you have to pay to upgrade, and upgrading between distro releases is way easier than between Windows versions in any case.
Linux distros would be wise not to be complacent (but I don't think they generally are). Being a smaller target is part of why Linux is currently safer but it really is not the whole story. A bigger concern would be a major shift to closed-source drivers and applications on Linux (it's no coincidence that Flash is one of the biggest problems right now).
-- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) @ 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
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