Basically, I think windows haters are just ignorant, and want to see if this hypothesis holds true.
I would tend to doubt that highly. Except for the long-term Mac users, everyone here is either an ex-Windows user or are seeking to leave the Windows world. Even a dedicated Mac user has probably been exposed to Win-whatever at some point or other. The fact that a web site like this could have been started, and last as long as it has, demonstrates that Microsoft has created plenty of highly dissatisfied customers. Simple "ignorance" or "Bill Gates jealousy" isn't going to sustain the haters for very long. The regulars here are a tech-savvy collection of "geeks" who simply don't appreciate unstable, insecure, poorly designed systems.
Tech-savvy or not, I've found that most windows haters simply do not understand how windows works. I won't defend Microsoft as a company, although I think the US government is partially to blame for the inability to cut MS into pieces. A lot of problems with Microsoft come from the fact that they're so damn big and so damn rich, that they can do pretty much anything they want to.
I've found windows to be fairly stable, quite secure, and many parts are well designed. Unfortunately, microsoft values backwards compatibility more than security, so there are some total braindead things around left from single user win16 times. I wish they'd go away, however the problem only relates to win32 apis and the concerned executive subsystem. If some day we can throw that away and move completely to .NET, a lot of the problems will just simply disappear.
So, would you be so kind to entertain me, and tell me why you think windows is such a bad OS? To narrow the focus, I'm only talking about the NT series (Windows 2000 and 2003 particularly), and just the operating system.
What else can one say about an op-sys that depends so heavily on third-party apps to overcome its inherent design flaws? An entire industry exists for no other purpose: companies such as Symentec, MacAffee, Lavasoft, do little else
These companies would not exist had Win-d'ohs been designed properly from the get-go. What better testament to the piss-poor engineering of the beast is there? Then there's IIS (Internet Information Services) which has become notorious for its security flaws, and behaves more like a worm propagator than a server.
I'm afraid these companies existence isn't completely dependant on issues with Windows. There have been several viruses out there which have depended on tricking the user to run the attached executable. Users don't understand the consequences of running untrusted binaries, and shit happens. Vulnerabilities exist in a lot of software, and pretty much all modern operating systems are equally vulnerable by design. Windows just happens to get all the attention because worm propagation efficiency is linearry proportional to vulnerable userbase squared. If you're ten times as popular as the other guy, you get hundred times more problems.
There have been several vulnerabilities in apache, mysql and other alternative applications that would've allowed for worm propagation, had the application been more popular. Obviously this is a weakness of a monoculture, but it's also a weakness to the compilers and languages used today. C and C++ are both specified in a way that encourages unsafe code generation. What's up with a language that specifies operations that result in undefined behaviour, which in practice can mean execution flow being diverted? I'm aware that there is a place for such languages, but most applications should be written in highlevel languages such as C#, Java, Python, Ocaml, etc... The problem isn't a Microsoft specific one.
When the gov't itself simply gives up and recommends that everyone quit using Inter-nut Expl-Horror, you know that there are some serious problems here. This is inexcusable. If I'm asked to spend far more for something like Win-XP (then put up with WPA, the phone-home "daemons", the nag-ware) than I'd spend on even the priciest Linux non-enterprise OS, I damn well expect better than that. Nor do I like the idea of forking over even more $$$$$ to get those third-party anti-virus apps, the adware and spyware killers, and the rest of the Norton System Works suite just to keep the damn thing running. I get a helluvalot more from Linux for a helluvalot less.
Internet Explorer used to progress really well, until Microsoft basically stopped the development. That sucked. Thank god we have firefox around now to motivate them again. I'm using IE myself, but with activescripting and activex turned off. As of such, nearly no past vulnerabilities have affected me.
I don't run any anti-virus software on my windows systems and I've been totally fine. However I have made preparations and know what to do if something bad happens. I regularly use all sorts of scanners (VICE, for example) to see that there's nothing naughty on my system. So far, I've never been infected.
Btw, I hate XP, too. That's why I'm still running w2k on this box, and w2k3 on the other. W2k3 happens to be the best windows ever, IMO, even for desktop use after proper configuration.
Then there's the question of doing programming. When I wanted to get into this, I had to fork over some $100 for the Borland C++Builder suite of programming apps. The only reason I got it so "cheap" is that this was in early 2000, on the eve of the initial release of Win-XP, and Borland was unloading them for whatever they could get as it wouldn't run on XP anyway. Linux (except for Linare :mad: ) OTOH, includes everything you need to code Linux apps. And let's not forget that you will need to pay extra for other apps, such as the MS Office suite. You get word processors, office apps, art programs with just about any Linux distro, right there on the install CDs. Linux is just a better value.
You have a point there. The availability of development tools for linux is a big bonus, but the system is targeted for a whole different people than windows is. Nowadays you can always get MinGW for windows, or the commandline compiler Visual C++, for free. Scripting was always possible either way, although nearly no home users use Windows Scripting Host for anything. One of the big problems of WSH is lack of generic purpose GUI dialog object. So, you simply can't create a GUI apps with jscript/vbscript, without third party GUI object installed on the system.
Regarding Office apps, they're available for windows, too. If only Microsoft allowed people to make their own distributions, things would be so different. And if the OS development was separated from the rest of the club, I think they definitely would do so. Why the heck didn't they split Microsoft? Anyway, I don't have MS Office and I haven't missed it at all. I can write documents in HTML or RTF, or PDF if the layout matters.
Also, Windows ships with MS Paint. Don't diss ms paint, it's an art program too, and perfectly suitable for drawing stuff. I use it all the time myself.
And we haven't gotten into the business "ethics" of MS itself. The Halloween Documents would be a good place to start as for looking into this.
Yeah, I have lots of reasons for disliking Win-Doesn't and its parent company. :p
I can understand disliking the parent company, but IMO Windows itself is great, as are many of Microsoft's products.
PS. This post is growing long. For next reply, I'll have to drop some parts x_x
