Die Windows Die!!!!

[midnight armadillo]

:grr: My Windows 2000 installation decided to nuke :nuke: itself. FOR NO REASON. ALL I DID WAS BOOT IT UP. After hours and hours of struggling, I am left with an installation in which most applications are broken...the OS thinks there are 4 hard drives installed when there are but 2...the C & D drives got swapped, majorly screwing installed software...it boots sooooo sloooooowly now...if it wasn't for my Norton Systemworks CD I'd have to do a complete reinstall. As it is a reinstall is going to be needed to set things right. My hardware is fine and pretty recent. :grr:

That's it. I'm going back to using Unix. 99% of what I do with my PC at home these days involves LaTeX, XEmacs, ghostview, CVS, and ssh, and I've been relying on my Cygwin installation to handle all this for me anyway. NetBSD or FreeBSD here I come! (don't like Linux, most distros are awful to maintain & upgrade, esp. once you've been spoiled by *BSD). If I had the money to spare I'd buy a Mac since OSX rocks my world when I get to use it, but I don't.

Actually, there are some SGI Indy's being tossed at work, I could swipe one of those to use for the time being...

F*CK WINDOWS and it's crappy quality!!!!!!

[lcordero]

1. I'm curious

How do the BSDs maintain & upgrade?
I'm aware of apt(rpm & deb packages) and urpmi(rpm packages) in linux but I don't know of anything that is equivalent in the BSDs.

[midnight armadillo]

4. The BSD package system...

The BSD package system is pure poetry.

Here's how it works: unlike Linux distros, the BSD teams (free, open, and net) maintain the source for more of the userland programs as well as the kernel. If you want to upgrade to the latest version, all you need to do is sync your source tree or download the source, and type 'make build' or something similar. Everything is then automagically upgraded. No dependencies, no fuss, no muss.

For the add-on software, the package system (called ports in FreeBSD) works like this: you have a /usr/pkgsrc directory. You go to the approprate directory for a piece of software and type 'make install'. The source is downloaded, compiled, and installed. Any dependencies are automatically downloaded, compiled, and installed as well. A 'make clean' cleans it all up. Alternatively, you can get pre-compiled binaries by CDROM or FTP and dependencies are installed from those when needed. A simple 'make update' will upgrade a software package...and all those that depend on it for good measure.

Debian has a system that comes close, but is not as elegantly done. No RPM hell, no using rpmfind.net to gather 10 files to install one package, nothin'. The ease of maintenance and upgrading is what made me leave Linux a few years ago. The elegance and excellent engineering of NetBSD made me stay...until I started using Windows again, for reasons that are less than clear at the moment. Probably a game or something.

[La_Serpiente]

2. I love the visuals

it really expresses what you feel.

Perhaps you should switch to a more stabler system like Linux.

[Deja Q]

3. Well, when MS won't fix the bugs in FAT, they make NTFS. When they figure

that NTFS has bugs too, they make WinFS...

NTFS was claimed to be reliable, fault-tolerant, less likely to corrupt files, meant for larger hard drives, and never needs defragmenting. And it's all a lot of bull. NTFS NEEDS to be defragmented, often. I've lost files due to corruption and I've NEVER enabled their buggy indexing service...

Linux with ReiserFS is quite nice indeed. SuSE Linux 9 and Mandrake 9.2 PowerPack come with TONS of apps and support dual-booting with ANY Windows OS, even if it resides on an NTFS partition. Mandrake also comes with win4lin and vmware (Windows/PC emulators), but I haven't found out if they're trial versions or full-blown. (For inclusions in a $70 package, I doubt they're anything but trial versions as win4lin costs $90 and vmware costs $400...)

I can see why you hate Linux, I've been eyeballing FreeBSD when v5.2 comes out...

And to think MS makes server/network operating systems... :scared: No wonder they're afraid of a "hack" OS like Linux! :D