blogs.techrepublic.com.com — I have been around the Linux community for more than 10 years now. From the very beginning, I have known that there are basic differences between Linux and Windows that will always set them apart. This is not, in the least, to say one is better than the other. It?s just to say that they are fundamentally different.
Aug 26, 2008 View in Crawl 4
nerdherderAug 26, 2008
Whats with all the unrelated thumbnails the last couple months?
Closed AccountAug 27, 2008
I?ve had times where I've run Vista for several months with no anti-virus or firewall beyond the builtin capacities of said operating system with no issues at all.
pirategonzoAug 27, 2008
This is really hard to read.
enternalAug 27, 2008
I don't know but when he wrote "or whichever it is these days," it sounds like he has not use Windows for a long time now so I don't know whether I should listen to him or not to do a comparison.
smotpokerAug 27, 2008
@gcauthonWe were both wrong... but you are wronger since you called apt a frontend ;).dpkg is a console package manager, Synaptic is a frontend to it. My mistake was that I did not properly distinguish between 'package manager' and 'package management system'.apt is not a frontend to anything, though. It is a system (collection of tools, libs, dependency trees, repositories), of which dpkg is a part.@mynameistuxWhat makes it any better than adept, kpackage or any other frontend? I never use any too extensively but from what I could tell they all had about the same functionality/usability...
init100Aug 27, 2008
Another one of my (hate-filled) "favorites" is "This device cannot start" in the device properties dialog box in Windows XP. Happened to me a long time ago (around 2003) with my nVidia card. Even a reinstall of Windows XP didn't fix the issue. One could have thought that the card was broken, but if it had been, it wouldn't have worked in Linux, which it did just fine. The issue was never resolved, except by buying a new system.
init100Aug 27, 2008
"For the off-the-wall specialized software, it has the same inherent scalability problem of anything centralized."Sometimes the developers of such software have their own Yum/Apt repository. You can add it to your list of repositories and install/update just like packages from the distribution repositories.
midnightbrewerAug 28, 2008
But it's the front end that makes Linux palatable to first-time users. A first-time user needs to understand the interface, not the engine. If the developers are doing their job correctly, then the software behind the scenes should stay there.
skinjesterAug 28, 2008
"Now with 10^6 people examining the source for exploits. Especially if they've been doing so for 13 years"excellent point. Well said. Still, I refuse to believe that any networked system is 100% secure.
brbungleNov 29, 2008
This is all great and all, but what are the real differences. Such as the overlying structure. That is what I would say would be the great "WOW" insight to what is different. File system structure api and all that jazz, sure it has been done before you say and here is some technical jargon. But the real wow will be when someone can put it in simple easily understandable terms. Let me preempt a few flames, yes I know that is ridiculous and or hard/impossible to do. Perhaps due to the general publics limited understanding of computers or Microsoft's ,or apple's for that matter, approach to to software making it closed source. I know some people must know how it operates or no code would ever be written and third party apps wouldn't exist. The real question is whether there is one person that understands enough of the basics to explain it on digg. I know this is an old digg and probably won't get any response but I figured I would through it out there while I search for answers.