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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (60368)	8/6/2001 12:31:57 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

WindowsXP Vs. Linux Mandrake: Some Aesthetic Observations systemlogic.net My main rig is a dual PIII 600. It typically runs Linux-Mandrake because 9x doesn't support dual processors and 2000 only pissed me off with it's vague, "You have a hardware error, contact your hardware vendor." errors. Sometimes dealing with 2000 was like dealing with a cross between Marvin the Paranoid Android, HAL and a VCR that always blinks 12:00. Seeing how XP Professional is based on a new kernel and supports dual processors natively, I figured I'd give it a shot and set the PC up to also run XP. The installation went amazingly smooth, but some things struck me so familiar, it was actually funny. There were some parallels with what makes Mandrake "cute and fuzzy" and "easy to work with", that I was running that AC/DC song "Who Made Who" over and over again in my head. The first thing that popped up that made me think about this parallel during the set up was the Network Connection Wizard built into the tail end of the set up process. Of course, XP being as new as it is, has a very large database of native drivers for NICs, so odds are that XP is going to find your NIC while it's installing itself on the PC...much like Mandrake 8.0 currently does. Once it finds this NIC, a wizard pops up wanting to set up your network! Just as in Mandrake, I tell the OS what the name of my Workgroup is, the name of this particular PC on that network, and I enable DHCP. BAM! I'm on the network. I'm not knocking this. How could I know this? It's a NICE ADDITION that can seriously reduce the number of calls I get from people that have two PCs, bought two NICs and a crossover cable from me, but have no clue as to how to make the PCs see each other. I just find it funny that the first time I saw this type of "easy network setup" was in Mandrake. So now you're asking, "why is this funny to Jon?" Microsoft is obviously implementing something that is known to work. Well, one of the biggest reasons why people are turned away from Linux is the greater learning curve that it used to have. Used to have, I say. The folks at Mandrake have made the act of installing and using Linux so idiot-proof, that the end product nearly defeats one of Linux's qualities by making the operating system so bloated that by comparison, the Goodyear blimp looks like a balsa wood airplane! Certainly, Windows XP is no Calista Flockhart. XP has so much pomp and circumstance that it's front-end weighs more than that of the cast of Baywatch. Thanks to slashdot.org