Ok, you talked me into it (almost :-)


Absolutely!
I served my own nuke site once with Mandrake 9.0, and I was reasonably happy with it, but from the info I read lately, FreeBSD is definitely the way to go.

I can't believe the number of really lush distros that have poped up in the last couple of years.
I'm not a big fan of the command line, so for me Mandrake is the lazy man's way to Linux paradise.
But now, if I go FreeBSD, I'll have to hunker down and dig my heels into the ol' bash prompt.

(this thread has taken an interesting direction for a "Windows" specific issues - hahaha)
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If you want a lush distro, try Mepis, that comes with everything you need preinstalled, that's the windows of linux in some ways.

Kanotix, once the new release comes out, it was supposed to be 2005-4 but looks like it may be 2006-1 instead, that guy kano, he's really good at hacking linux, he's one of the best out there, very good forums etc.

Windows forum is here only because windows exists, and has problems, and solutions to those problems. It's purely practical.

I was very surprised the day I realized that the old cable I'd used and reused was causing a wide variety of almost impossible to resolve issues, which no-one ever figured out until one day I connected the dots, I'd reused it in a new box, could not get bios to see drives consistently, finally swapped cable, then it all connected, the 2 failed drives, various cdrom issues, all came back to that one cable being bad.

Keep in mind those cables have 40 connectors, each one is simply a tube of metal that fits over the hard drive and mobo pins. Each time it's unplugged and replugged, that tube of metal, not even spring steel usually, expands slightly, more if you rock the cable to unplug it. As it expands, it loses its ability to compress around the pin. Which means at unknown points, one or more pins will have an incomplete connection, or partial connection. Not good.

FreeBSD, I don't know, I gave it a thought, but the new linuxes have too much good work going into them, the kernel especially has more and more emphasis on consumer desktop features, along with server features etc. Nice stuff.

Of course, you can install kde on freebsd, but you don't get the kernel itself. That can get to be a pain. Sound drivers, linux has a whole new thing for that, works well, that's in the kernel. Lots more.

but for a box running as a real webserver, I'd pick freebsd, for sure, you don't need all that consumer desktop kernel stuff for that, you don't want it in fact, I don't particularly like linux web servers to be honest, wouldn't be my first pick ever.

However, if you do go with a freebsd install, I'd be curious to read your real world impression of it as a desktop os, it's hard to find actually useful reviews of freebsd on the desktop.
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I think I'll go and buy myself a couple of brand new cables.


That's usually because FreeBSD people are not the GUI-lover types.
In fact, they don't seem to be big fans of Linux either.
They are more of the "UNIX purist" type.

If you look over their forums
www.freebsd.org/usergroups.html
you'll find some rather unflattering coments about Linux.
Same with the OpenBSD and PC-BSD crowd.
Which is unfortunate because we're all on the same side.
Oh well...

But yes, I will do a little write-up about my "FreeBSD as a desktop" impressions in this forum when I get it going :-)
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openbsd seems to have fallen into the trap of too much code purity at the expense of other considerations. I've read funny exchanges between their top guy and Linus, they are pretty funny, I guess openbsd is good if you want absolute locked down security or something, but you can't really use it as a standard os from what I gather, it's good for security applications etc.

Linus has pretty funny comments about the openbsd guy, Linus tends to be pretty level headed, and the openbsd main developer really seems to be approaching the lunatic fringe way of thinking, sort of where KHTML was with KDE, great code, but it didn't really work, didn't support real CSS, barely supported Javascript, but the code was 'pure'. In other words, as a browser, the pre applewebkit/safari fixed Konqueror was almost useless in the real world. But its code was elegant.

I'll look forward to seeing a real freebsd review, that should be interesting. I dabbled with using that too, but decided against it, I like things that work without tearing my hair out, Linux is already hard enough to use as a working desktop.

Happily, we can let these guys fight it out among themselves and just sit back and enjoy the results, freebsd gives us great web servers, linux gives us a potential windows replacement, plus good servers, openbsd keeps security at the forefront, it's all good from what I can see.
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Yes, it is supposed to be the most secure OS for net stuff, but really, I don't see that much of a gap between all these BSD OS's.
In fact, I feel very confident with any Linux distro protected by a good iptables script like the MonMotha script.
I think that comparing the BSD OS's and the Linux distros is like comparing oranges with oranges.


Once you start getting used to it, Linux is a real sweetheart.
Being able to get anywhere, as deep as you like into the OS is great and just that alone give a very nice feeling of security.
You know that nothing is up to anything behind your back.
It's a chilling experience to compare the sniffer log files of my Linux network trafic and the sniffer log of a Windows web session :-(


I wish they didn't, 'coz it makes BadBilly happy.
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Some good reads, from newsforge, an interview with Linux Torvalds.



And another one with Theo de Raadt and Christos Zoulas[openbsd and netbsd]


You have to love it, I think this is the real strength of free software, the ability and the right to do your own thing, to disagree, to fork, to work on your own thing, because it's done the way you like it.

You can also read a review of the brand new OpenBSD 3.8 here.

Windows is windows, can't change it, can't fork it, it is what it is, no debate is possible.


I've been trying to switch to Linux for a year or two, but there's a few things holding me back, number one is system stability. I know what they say, Gnu/linux is more stable, but that's only true if you don't mess with it too much.

For example, I put Kanotix on a new box I made, it failed on an apt install of some package. The problem? KDE 3.4 is not compatible with some components of KDE 3.3, and Kanotix 2005-3 is only half way switched over to 3.4. And if you use the debian repositories for that distro, they will try to upgrade the whole KDE. My install failed, to make a long story short.

I hadn't really committed to it, I was just testing the new box, but this is not the first time I've had an install destabilize and fail, and it won't be the last.

This is a problem from my perspective, I understand why it happens, and when I read the Kanotix forums Kano warned against this type of issue. Once the switch is done to the new libraries this particular issue will get resolved. And I could probably figure out what's wrong with my install, but it's faster to reinstall.

I like Gnu/Linux, and I really like debian based distros like Kanotix, but at some point this OS will have to achieve significantly greater system stability with upgrades than it currently has.

But everything gets better and better, I remember testing an old redhat, maybe 6, I added a hard drive, boom, redhat wouldn't boot.

Every year things get better and better, it's hard to believe how much progress these guys make.

But on windows I'm working almost completely open source, abiword, firefox, apache, php, mysql, OOo, Filezilla, all my main apps are open source except for 3, a key 3, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. No current substitutes for any of these, except Dreamweaver, which I could replace by just learning grep etc better.
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The stability of Linux is directly proportional to one's understanding of it.
Linux was very strange to me when I first got into it, and yes, I had problems with it as well. But the more I understood it, the better it got.

Software dependency is one of the most frustrating negative point of Linux. Installing software can sometimes be infuriating.
There is a "partial" solution to this; keep a mirrorring app (like wget) running to have ALL the packages (especially the libs) either on your hd or burned on cd's.
Also, there are some things that can't be tampered with; glibc is one of them. Change that to a version that your distro can't handle, and it's bye bye birdie.

But mostly, I think that any stability issue is more to do with some software than with Linux.

Debian-based distros may not be the best ones to get to know Linux with.
I would recommend a RedHat-based distro like Mandrake.
Even now that I'm fairly comfy with Linux, I still prefer Mandrake.

There are also other annoying issues with Linux, but you will find that in the end, most people who go to Linux tend to stay with it in spite of the problems.
There is also the philosophical issue of OpenSource vs corporate fascism.

Personally, I like using the two, Linux and Windows for separate purposes.
I usually run the Windows hd when I need to do serious graphics, or play certain games, like StarWars Rogue Squadron.
But I normally NEVER connect my box to the web when I run Windows. I mean I physically disconnect the wire.
What with all the spyware, trojans and what not, coded for Windows, you never know if your box isn't up to something without you knowing it.

I'm using Windows on the web now because it's the only OS I have at this point, and I'm not bad at configuring the firewall; but I still dislike it very much and I'll breathe a sigh of relief when I get Linux going again.
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Yes, that's why I'm just using it as a secondary system, I want to do a full switch, 100%, no moving back and forth between Windows and Linux to do task a or task b.

The reason I want to move to a debian based distro is exactly the point you raised: I don't want to move from one commercial distro to another, even if the other one is open source. That's a philosophical point, I want to use free software, as much as possible.

Otherwise I'd rather just stay with Windows 2000, which does everything I need, and is stable.

I really respect the debian project, and apt is really good, apt should have been the defacto standard years ago, rpm was totally unuseable only 2 years ago on redhat [example: rpm mozilla latest - dependency failure, end of road for standard user], whereas apt was working fine.

And that redhat barefly functioned on a slower older machine, wouldn't really work with KDE, sort of barely worked with Gnome. Desktops are getting better now finally though. Same machine ran Windows 2000 fine, slow, but fine. Situation improved with lightweight linuxes running new Gnome, but still not that great, lots of glitches. Running mainstream distro on that box is unthinkable, suse runs like molassis, didn't even bother checking redhat.

The main thing that Linux has to achieve though is breaking through the 18/24/36 month life span for a distro version.

This is where OS development gets really boring, and not very rewarding. Maintaining a release, or making sure that a total new release supports upgrading from the previous release without reinstall for 5 years is in my opinion the absolute number one priority for Gnu/Linux.

Of course the problem is that the stuff develops so fast it's hard to do that. But this is what is needed for Linux to ever really make movements in the consumer desktop market.

My main problem with linux is that over the last 5 years I have never installed a distro and not had to learn some very strange things to get it working the way I want. And no distro has come even remotely close to the stability my Windows 2000 installs.

That's why I haven't been able to justify switching, if for example I'd decided to make Kanotix my working development install instead of Windows, I'd be in very bad shape right now. That's just a practical real world thing, philosophically every application I find that works well, as well as commercial equivalents, or better, ideally, makes me a happy camper.

Once I've tested them for about 1 year, and find that they have stabilize beyond use at your own risk beta phase, I start moving my friends to them.

Some friends ask me about Linux, and I have to tell them the truth, not yet. Soon, but not yet.

To me, using two OSes for work doesn't make much sense, I do a lot of image processing at random intervals, and switching back and forth doesn't make sense.

One thing I do though is run Linux as my media center while I work on windows, kvm switch, that's nice, but it's not really necessary, especially now that I got an nvidia multi desktop supporting video card for windows. Not nearly as good or user friendly as Linux desktops, but it's ok.

Windows is fine with firewalls, hardware and software, decent AV products, light stuff like antivir or avg, and, this is critical, text only viewing of email, using Thunderbird, with all scripting etc turned off.

And with that I managed to bring the thread back ontopic, to Windows....
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Very VERY interesting thread in the long run, guys. I'm still struggling with getting familiar enough with kanotix to be comfortable.... part of which of course is that I can't make it behave with dual monitors OR my Hayes external modem....

I'm probably (based on looking at various fora around the net) going to install SUSE to see if the monitor and modem problems are solved....
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vkaryl, yes, interesting thread. SUSE will probably work for you, that's my guess, commercially it's the best bet, I was going to download the stuff and burn it, but I ran out of cd blanks and have been too lazy to get more. Maybe I even downloaded some of the isos for SUSE 10, can't remember offhand.

Did you try posting on the kanotix forums, english part? If there is a solution you'll usually get it, but those guys can be pretty terse, they assume some skill level, kano has answered most of my questions, but usually won't give a further answer, and when I go back, I realize that he actually really did tell me what I needed to know, I just had to figure that part out.

That's the hard part of linux. Learning curve. But it's interesting. I'm waiting for the new Kanotix to get released, and Filezilla linux, then I think I'm just going to switch, and learn the GIMP for image processing, maybe photoshop with WINE, if I can get it working. But I'm not going to pretend that Fireworks 4.0 isn't going to be sorely missed, that's the best little web graphics application. I tried Fireworks MX 2004, what a piece of trash, talk about letting a project slip out of control, I rolled back to 4, which was done in 2000, and am happy.
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