4 Dec
2017
4 Dec
'17
5:51 p.m.
On Mon, 4 Dec 2017, Neil C Smith wrote:
On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 10:52 AM Louigi Verona
<louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote:
And in my experience, proprietary systems are generally much more
stable than floss, and are less likely to fail suddenly and without
warning.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha .... oh, wait .. you're serious?! ;-)
There's a reason I use FLOSS, and it's because my personal experience is
absolutely the opposite of this.
+1, our family has started out with a number of windows machines (mostly
laptops) and my wife has said she wanted to keep the windows in there.
That normally lasts about a week before I get "put what you have in my
computer please". This from someone who uses their computer for browsing,
skype, and word processing.
I can't talk about Macs, they are out of our price range.
It is unfortunate that some of the big players in the Linux world have
decided "covergence" is a good thing. I really, really, do not want my
desktop/laptop to work like a 5inch phone thank you very much. I actually
do work on my machine. Thankfully, Linux does offer more than one DE and
one can find work helpers buried, but still there if they need to.
I have worked in a large company who used windows as the corperate system
because there was someone to sue if things broke too badly. At the time
the microvax was still used for realtime stuff (machine control) with NT for
data massaging. However, the install disks we were supplied with (to
install NT) were all basic linux on a cd with dd to install the image. We
also found that most trouble shooting was best done with a linux rescue
disk. Backups were all done with a linux dd too. Do note, I have been away
from the technical end for over 10 years now (it let me move out of the
Vancouver area and onto Vancouver Island and less than 1 hour to get to
work for 2 hours saved a day) and I know there are new machines that have
been installed. I am sure they do not use MicroVax as there is no one
around to sue if it quits but I do not know what they do use. There was
some experimenting with Red Hat by the IT department (remember someone to
sue, and this company is big enough that they did use lawsuit as a
negotiating tool - often).
My experience with proprietary software as someone whos job is to keep
things running has been if it's broken... live with it somehow. Even the
smallest SW fix was $10k so they weren't done often and then only when the
fixes were a list, never a single bug. In older times, the machine control
SW was written in house, well understood and fixed as needed.
I also remember the days when hardware automatically came with a full
schematic.
--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net