From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Jul 2 18: 7:21 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 435D7151BA; Fri, 2 Jul 1999 18:07:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.8.8) id VAA24907; Fri, 2 Jul 1999 21:08:33 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199907030108.VAA24907@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Re: NT vs Linux vs FreeBSD In-Reply-To: from Paul Anderson at "Jul 1, 99 02:47:58 am" To: paul@geeky1.ebtech.net (Paul Anderson) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 21:08:33 -0400 (EDT) Cc: ulairi@jps.net, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL40 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org [This has completely diverged to -chat. Redirected there.] Paul Anderson wrote, > On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Ulairi wrote: > > > NT is about 7 years old. Give it time, > > perhaps it'll grow up a tad. > > > And it's already a huge kludge. NT suffers from two _major[0]_ faults: 1) It is meant to be the end-all, be-all for every customer. i.e. a single distribution of the OS is meant to serve every possible contigency for the user. This is the conceptual design which leads to rampant featurism[1]. 2) Marriage to a GUI. Once anyone has used a CLI for a while realizes how frightfully inefficient the GUI is for the experienced user. By the time any administrator has learned the ins-and-outs of NT, they have had more than enough time to graduate from the awkwardness of GUI to the CLI. That said, I still have trouble with this remark, > The problem is that Microsoft won't admit to itself that UNIX is, in > fact, the pinnacle of operating system interface design. [snip some mostly valid statements about UNIX vs. NT.] To me, saying UNIX is "The Operating System" is almost hypocritical. As my reason (1) claims, the primary flaw of NT is that it wants to be the OS for everyone all of the time[2]. The power of UNIX is flexibility, but surely, it is not the OS for every situation. Also, saying UNIX is the 'pinnacle' seems to say there is nothing better in the future. This I find hard to believe. Whether the next step(s) are evolutionary or revolutionary diversions from UNIX, I think there _is_ a next step (who knows, maybe a Microsoft broken up by the Feds finds the Next Best Thing). I feel about UNIX how I feel about democratic government, "UNIX is the absolute worst operating system there is. Except for all of the others." There must be something better down the road. Even if there is no factual basis for that belief, I must believe it to keep going in the computing field. [0] NT suffers from a broad range of problems, but most can be tracked down to these two major ideological flaws. [1] Which in turn is what leads to the contradiction that the supposedly easy to admin system becomes impossibly complex. A personal example is doing something simple like getting a "shared" directory's permissions right. There are at _least_ 3 overlapping permission systems that all must agree for things to work. The GUI does _not_ make it easier. [2] If anything in here is going to catch flames... Well, I'll just say it: The current primary UNIX offerings, FreeBSD, the other *BSDs, and the Linuxes are still not the best option for the luser who just wants to use Outlook, M$ Word, PowerPoint, etc. The Win9x OS's, or say an iMac, are still a good choice (today) for someone who wants to use a computer without really caring to understand how it works. The ol' analogy being someone who wants a nice cute car that will get them around town without having to build it or maintain it themselves. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message