The "let's bash Windows" thread

[Necronopticous]

I play video games so I'll deal with Windows, thanks.

[Azure Chrysanthemum]

I don't know enough about Linux to use it, and I used to play (and sometimes still do play) computer games. Which pretty much requires a PC for.

[Shoeberto]

I went nearly three years on one install of windows xp.

I have had firefox as my browser for nearly two years.

One of these days I'll pick up another harddrive and make it use linux. I ran a live cd of ubuntu 4something, but it was hard to do more than oggle xD

~~~~~

Um, I've done a good bit of playing around (and breaking) of Linux systems. The breaking, of course, was of my own inexperience in trying to do relatively high-end things, but eh. I had a very stable Ubuntu install running for a while (that is, until I inevitably broke it) and I loved it.

Linux does run better, aside from the windowing environment responses - it didn't seem to like reponding immediately after clicking, be it in Gnome or KDE, which was a minor annoyance. Performance, overall, is better and more stable, more extensible, and fun to tinker with.

Three things keep me from wanting to reinstall and run Linux fulltime:
1) NTFS RW support is still poor, and I'd like to utilize my storage drive like I do on Windows without having to partition or reformat.
2) I like games, and my computer doesn't have the performance to run recent games under Cedega. Older games run aight, but I'd like to play Half-life 2. . . which would just not run worth a hoot for me, where it runs pretty well under Windows.
3) I'm kind of a whore and have certain programs I like to use. Like mIRC. Xchat may be open-source, have a better scripting engine, run cross-platform, be more extensible with plugins, etc. etc., but I hate its interface. The mIRC page says that it can be run reliably under Wine, but I've never been able to get anything to run under Wine. I'd be willing to give it a try, though, of course.

[theundeadhero]

   
windows

[Dr Unne]

Not enough Windows bashing going on here. At work I've seen at least 4 Windows XP Pro boxes (maintained by "XP Pro guys" whose job is to do nothing but maintain XP Pro computers) go down in flames in 6 months through regular usage. Two become so unresponsive they were unusable, for no reason I can determine other than probably some kind of Registry corruption or God only knows what. Running company-wide antivirus, company-approved software, sitting behind a firewall, 3 GHz, 512MB RAM, and I could click the start menu and watch it draw onto the screen one line of pixels at a time. One had adware and spyware to the point where you could do nothing but watch it run. One was a brand new computer, fresh from the factory as of a few months ago, and it takes about two minutes to open Outlook or Word. I sometimes talk to the guy who comes down regularly, unplugs someone's computer, hauls it up the hill, and brings it back a couple days later wiped clean and ready to be slowly driven into the dirt again. I see the pain in his eyes, a pain I know all too well any time I get a phone call from a family member looking for me to "fix their computer".

Here's a trick for everyone who has XP to try. Make a new folder in c:\, name it anything. Click on it once in Explorer to highlight it. Now, click the filename again like you want to rename it. As quickly as you can after you click, type an R (as though the first letter of the new filename begins with R). See what happens. It's neat.

To everyone who used the "I have no problems with Windows" argument (even KNOWING that you'd lose the thread, which I might add you most certainly HAVE) I offer a quote from the article:

"Detection is difficult, and remediation is often impossible," Danseglio declared. "If it doesn't crash your system or cause your system to freeze, how do you know it's there? The answer is you just don't know. Lots of times, you never see the infection occur in real time, and you don't see the malware lingering or running in the background."

This is why we have thousands or millions of zombie computers acting as spam relays and God knows what else. People happily ignorant of the silently running viruses. So your computer is either fine or quietly evil. Good chance of either.

So far as only "retarded" people getting viruses, or it being the end-user's fault, what about the viruses that auto-download and install themselves without having to do anything at all? Blaster for example. That was fun.

1) NTFS RW support is still poor, and I'd like to utilize my storage drive like I do on Windows without having to partition or reformat.

There's always FAT32. Hard drives are cheap. Or better, run a dedicated file server and use Samba. OS X and Linux can both run samba (client or server) just fine. If Windows supported anything other than its own partition types (like every other OS does) or opened the specs to NTFS so other people could write free drivers (which they haven't) you wouldn't have this problem, of course.

Yes, X responsiveness is not good. I can deal with the sub-second lag though, it's worth it for the benefits. It also depends on which window manager you use. Openbox for example is going to be much more responsive than KDE or Gnome.

I keep a 4GB partition where I run Windows for games. I keep it far away from anything important. And it still sucks, but it plays games. It takes one minute to reboot, it's not that big a hassle. Less time than it takes me to find a CD to stick in the drive.

There's always OS X too.

[Xaven]

Here's a trick for everyone who has XP to try. Make a new folder in c:\, name it anything. Click on it once in Explorer to highlight it. Now, click the filename again like you want to rename it. As quickly as you can after you click, type an R (as though the first letter of the new filename begins with R). See what happens. It's neat.

Nothing happened.

[o_O]

I use Ubuntu. I like it much more than Windows.
The only problem I have with it (and it's not really even Linux's fault), is that for most ACPI functions of hardware, the developers use sloppy standards to comply with Microsoft's sloppy APIs. As a result of sloppy development and Linux's tight standards, I need to hack my kernel to pieces to get Ubuntu to recognise my laptop battery/temperature/voltage/etc.

I keep a Windows partition for games like Oblivion, but that doesn't mean I want to.

[Peegee]

Linux has firefox, open office, games, and runs well.

Why do I use windows?

I play video games and I don't like to reboot to do that. It is my belief that if you know what you are doing you can't 'break' windows. Meaning I don't think windows is designed to slowly deteriorate just because.

But watch:

Windows uptime > 100 hours? Problems will happen.

*sigh*

I support windows 2000 and windows XP environments. For some reason I come across many calls where users tell me the core memory is dumping, stop: inaccessible boot device errors, and all sorts of nonsense which I have NEVER seen on my machines that I have at home ever since windows 98.

And it's not as if these people are using the machine to hell as well. What are they doing to break Windows? It really has to be user error. I cannot explain it any other way.

[Raistlin]

Here's a trick for everyone who has XP to try. Make a new folder in c:\, name it anything. Click on it once in Explorer to highlight it. Now, click the filename again like you want to rename it. As quickly as you can after you click, type an R (as though the first letter of the new filename begins with R). See what happens. It's neat.

Nothing happened.

Don't use R unless you have an file/folder in C:\ which starts with R. Use another letter instead. I just did it, and yeah, that could be annoying.

[Dr Unne]

I've seen at least two different computers running XP Pro get blue-screen STOP 0x0d0000000 IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL kinds of hard-lock errors. You'll never be able to tell what they are, because the error message is meaningless, and not a soul on this planet knows how Windows works under the hood. Even if Linux crashes like that at the kernel level, there are logs spit out all over the place. And there are so many things in Linux that can crash without taking down the kernel, where those same things crashing in Windows cause massive destruction. But this is completely obvious to everyone who's ever used both, I'm stating it only to bash.

Don't use R unless you have an file/folder in C:\ which starts with R. Use another letter instead. I just did it, and yeah, that could be annoying.

Annoying, yeah. Given all the moronic and pointless error messages ("Are you SUUUUUUURRRRREEEEEE you want to delete this file?") you'd think it would warn you about renaming your Recycled folder. But not only does it not warn you, it silently and buggily causes you to do it unexpectedly because apparently a human being can type faster than Windows can think.

[Peegee]

What exactly is supposed to happen? What happened for me is that another file got rename attempted (is that a sentence?) which started with the letter 'r'.

I assume that if you don't have 'r' folders it will rename your recycled folder? wow.

[Xaven]

When you press a letter key on your keyboard, explorer goes to the first object in your location starting with that letter (or character?).

because apparently a human being can type faster than Windows can think.

Yeah, while Windows processes the uber complex command of "MUST_CHANGE_THE_NAME_OF_THE_HIGHLIGHTED_FOLDER" command, Explorer fasterly thinks "HIGHLIGHT_FIRST_OBJECT_ALPHABETICALLY_STARTING_WITH_THE_LETTER_THAT_GUY_JUST_TYPED" and does so. Windows doesn't know what's going on so goes to change the name of the folder Explorer just highlighted, not the one you clicked on. Silly Windows.

Fasterly is now a word.

[Erdrick Holmes]

Unne, post the convo you had with Bleys about the guy who needed help with a virus and looked for one in a P2P client.

[Samuraid]

A friend of mine runs World of Warcraft on his Linux partition with Wine. I've tried it out a bit and it works surprisingly well for emulating Windows executables.

As for Unne's post. I don't doubt Windows is to blame for much of the computer troubles in the cases described, but of the hundreds of Windows XP computers I've seen or used, not one of them has run so badly as you described. (even computers so laden with spyware as to be noticably degraded in performance, in which a single run of adaware detects over 1000 spyware articles) I've seen some catastrophic failures under windows, but after careful observation, we found the problems due exclusively to faulty hardware.

I also can't seem to get the "R" thing to produce anything besides shifting the renaming box to other items, which is simply harmless.

There's always FAT32.

There is, but that filesystem does have significant limitations compared to NTFS. I do keep a FAT32 parition around for shifting files between Linux and Windows, but I could not run my system now nor use all the software with FAT32 (due to filesize limitations). It's also slower (on volumes of any decent size), less secure, and less reliable than NTFS.

[Zell's Fists of Fury]

I downloaded Firefox yesterday. I already like it better than IE. So there.