WARNING! Long Reply!!! Hopefully worth reading though, and i will try to format it nicely into paragraphs...
muzzy, i'll quote things you say in this thread and then comment on them, here goes:
Indeed. The default windows configuration is quite braindead, and the users who are ignorant of how the system works will typically have a bad system as the result. If Microsoft made it easy to create installers for custom configurations, and made it legit to distribute these to whoever wants them, we could have a totally different windows world out there.
that's right, open standards, possibly open source systems, and education of users, all good ideas, shame microsoft has an active interest in thwarting all of those things.
I'm not a believer of the "computer is a media center" ideology. I think computer is a general purpose tool, particularly practical for all sorts of automation and computation. If people want to use computers yet are unwilling to learn to use them, they should be given Live CDs to boot from along with their internet connectivity subscription, and new CD mailed in every month. It could run on xbox. This would eliminate a lot of the problems, and the real computer users could focus on actually using the computer.
whatever, different strokes for ddifferent folks, personallyy i think people should get the choice eithher way.
Basically, I think windows haters are just ignorant, and want to see if this hypothesis holds true. On the other hand, I want to sharpen my windows skills, and to better oneself one must first know what he's lacking. I think you guys could be very good at pointing out things I need to know, and things I can't do with windows and never knew I should.
this board now has an official policy of not providing windows support, however you will no doubt find a lot of intellectual stimulation of this sort here.
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.
why? do you think the windows 98 stuff is a complete write off?
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.
most windows don't understand how windows works? most windows *users* don't either! i wonder why?
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.
i don't know enough about this to comment, but i will say it's a shame windows is closed source, or some distributor would have probably done this already as a fork project.
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.
ah ah ah! there's a sweeping statement! and one you don't bother to back up too, i already mentioned peer review (people checking each other's work), and i also think that "integrating" internet explorer and so forth in your "system" is asking for trouble. there ae more points to mention, i am no expert though, so i won't go into it.
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.
whatever, i remain unconvinced by your dubious maths.
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.
no, but you imply it is a system related problem, when actually it is 100% to do with applications, in the examples you specify anyway. some systems do not "integrate" huge shoddy kludges of insecure drivel into the "system".
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.
good for you, shame the same can't be said for many other windows users, although you already laid the groundwork to lay the blame for that at the users' feet, rather than microsoft's (which is odd since microsoft extracts a lot of money from the users for "support").
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.
again, fab.
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.
wait, so does "hating" XP not qualify you as one of those people who hate windows? whom you believe don't understand it?
Regarding Office apps, they're available for windows, too. If only Microsoft allowed people to make their own distributions, things would be so different.
they'd have to open their source for this to happen, and as you already said, this is as good as pissing in a barrel. or something, your words, *i* certainly don't agree with them. and yes, i agree that many other people could make a better windows release than microsoft ever could.
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.
in OpenOffice.org by any chance? again, nothing more needs be said.
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.
oh yes, state of the art stuff. i use gimp all the time myself, and i am also sick of people slagging it off. usually these people use all sorts of fancy graphics and dtp things that i have no idea about, but as you say, gimp more than suits me fine for manipulating images to be used on webpages.
In most cases, when you have admin/root access, the system is competely compromised. Further, such access is required for many applications to function.
there are several ways around this as you know, if something really does need real root access, then this is probably down to poor program design than anything inherently wrong with the OS, wouldn't you say?
In ideal OS design, the scope of access would be minimized in all ways. In-process memory curtaining, limited visibility to filesystem, limited ability to execute syscalls, inability to directly jump into library functions, yaddayadda. If the system could enforce such fine grained access, any problems with application logic wouldn't have such a big impact.
or maybe if people wouldn't bring out rotten applications and utilities, the system wouldn't have to do the pthird party programmers' jobs for them.
Once TCPA comes around it will be possible to implement a lot of this in hardware, but even now it could be implemented through virtualization. For example, see the project Xen for limited (yet very practical) application of this.
ooh ah! no, i would rather have a *choice*, this is why i am not getting juiced up about TCPA.
Linux isn't more secure by design, linux is totally braindead when it comes to design. No ACLs by default, everything's a one big hack, it's a wonder the OS works at all. With processes having to be suid for things to work, everything's pretty damn messy. Also, I laugh at your view that openbsd would be a champion of security. That's just ridiculous.
interestingly it is commonly held to be the most secure system available. re: linux is a hack, hmm, depends on your definition of hack. i know you use words without thinking of what they mean, but i would agree that if linux is a hack, windows is a kludge.
And what if it cannot escalate privileges? Keyloggers on X only need access to the X display, which can be implemented by "merely" taking over the user account. Good luck never typing passwords in X. And that's not the only attack that can be performed by just taking over the user account. You don't need to be root to do significant damage.
to log in, i use gdm (or kdm on the laptop), this runs as user "nobody", which is the user receiving the password. if the keylogger runs under my user then it is not running when i log in. just mentioning it. I am aware this does not address the wider issue.
I read about this and found it unclear what was really going on. The only proof for fraud was that the titlebar of a window didn't change. Why do you yell fraud, when it could've been just incompetence?
why do you claim incompetence when you just said how brilliantly windows is designed?
Obviously I cannot be 100% sure my windows is clean, but neither can you.
i literally can't since i don't use windows (well, ocassionally, but it has no access to any network, so i think i am pretty safe)
I run VICE, RootkitRevealer, and some of my own stuff every now and then. I've never found anything.
so it's not there? sorry, just stirring, but you really should think about these things you say.
I know linux, and it's a horrible mess. Just because the source is available doesn't make it any better technically, it's just a matter of freedom. Yeah, I value freedom and that's good stuff about linux, and I hope all of the computing industry will head to move free direction. Some of the things I dislike about proprietary software is that I'm not supposed to fix them, and I'm not supposed to ask the authors about their design and implementation decisions. If I do, they'll likely threaten to sue. This however isn't just a Microsoft issue, it's got to do with the whole industry.
this is very silly. in one breath you say free software is not any better (and you previously said it was worse) than proprietary software, and then you immediately say that with closed source stuff you can't fix anything, clean it up et cetera. what do you think "better" means? or is this another definition you don't want to go into?
The backwards compatibility solutions in windows are indeed a hack, however the whole linux kernel is one big hack. I've had a plenty of lovely experiences regarding it. Few years ago at work, I had to investigate how to let processes keep more files open. Turned out, the constant that defined it in the kernel was redefined in userland as a different value, but only if you included the headers in a specific order. No explanation whatsoever for this was provided anywhere. They've fixed that since then, but all sorts of various kludges exist all over the place.
i am no coder, but i might just say this:
scalability
i have heard that the design of the linux kernel is designed to be scalable. i have no idea how this compares with how the NT kernel is designed though.
What comes to security design, there's very little of that anywhere. The overall design is the old *nix design, of filesystem defining the access right, with suid bits set for applications that need greater access. Capabilities came at some point but I'm not aware of them still being used. Regarding the suid, it'd be more secure to have one central database of what's suid and what's not, so nobody's going to create a suidroot shell under some obscure directory and hide it there. And don't you tell me that there are security solutions to detect these, when you were pointing out the existance of security industry being implication of insecure design in Windows
i am not convenced that *one* file containing information that many different processes need to access is a good idea. This is the problem with the windows registry for example and it's habit of generating its own errors in fact, lots of reading and writing to it, and it's only, what, five files?
Hardware or driver issue. I cannot see how this is different from using linux and running a proprietary driver. Due to how modern operating systems are designed, drivers have a little bit too much freedom to operate. I have a kind of "dream OS", which would involve a Xen-like approach of separating the guest OS and host OS, with drivers being in the simple host OS layer. And here, the drivers would run under some sort of JIT VM, bytecode, so they couldn't crash the damn system. Well, one can dream. Perhaps in future, once the .NET implementations get stronger, this kind of approach will become viable as well.
hmm, this isn't too efficient though, yes? a lot of people like the idea of java virtual machine for instance, because it's platform independent, so long as you can get a java runtime environment for your platform of choice, however actually java stuff is crap. the widgets are horrible, the apps are slow and clunky, it's rotten. you could make this idea work, it's been 25 years since they thought of the java virtual machine, but it's mean a huge waste of resources in my opinion, although fair enough i am no expert. i agree about drivers too, they shouldn't be able to control the actual system, however perhaps a proper set of specs should be hammered out and then adhered to, so that very few third party drivers would be needed anyway. you know how tons of things use the usb-mass storage driver? great! this enables me to use tons of peripherals really easily across windows at work and linux at home, for example. with devices that could (but don't) use this driver, this becomes a big problem.
I cannot see any problem with using legacy code here. Once the stuff works, portions can be rewritten to be "more pure" if desired. However since the .NET will create a completely new machine abstraction level, anything that goes underneath it is not an issue. It's just the machine implementation, and it can be changed anytime without affecting stuff above it.
depends on the design, surely, are you oversimplifying?
.........
I agree that this is bad design, however there's no going back in win32-land, since ShellExecute() and similar things are depended on by everyone. Getting to .NET is the ultimate solution to fix the mess, since that lets us drop the win32 crap behind.
you see? this is what i was saying above, windows is a big clunky crufty mess, and its backwards compatibility is the reason, however if you get rid of that to make a better system, you can guarantee the majority of users will start to finally take an unbiased reassessment of whether windows is their best option. you and i both know what'll happen if that is allowed, and therefore, we both know why microsoft will not take this option.
Obviously you're only comparing the things that you want to.
you too, as kintaro points out elsewhere.
The windows native kernel is superior to that of linux, except in some specific things.
define some. also, let's have some elaboration instead of just some statement with no justification.
Unfortunately, these specific things are quite significant, but the windows kernel still compares pretty damn well to linux. Yeah, I'd like better networking mechanisms, too, that's one thing where linux wins. If you want a router that performs complex traffic shaping (weighted round robin, for example), there aren't really any alternatives than using linux/iptables/tc and friends. This might be the only reason I'll ever get a linux system running at home, but for now I haven't had such a strong need for a traffic shaper.
whatever. i find that different distributions make a better comparison with windows, and that the comparisons come up with different answers depending on circumstances. here are some examples. say i am considering some systems: FreeBSD, SuSE, Fedora, MSWindows 2000 and Vector Linux. Now think of the following scenarios: i have a lot of windows games/apps that i paid for and want to use regularly. i will choose windows, since i know wine is no substitute. if i am rich, i may choose a linux (suse if i want support, fedora, if i don't) and run vmware. if i am not, i might dual boot with windows and something else. now in a different scenario, say i have an old laptop with 64MB of RAM, 1 gigabyte hard drive, and a 133mhz pentium processor. Clearly i cannot run fedora or mswindows on this, probably not suse either. i have doubts i could install freebsd with all the apps i want, so i would probably choose vector linux for this. i might choose freebsd actually if i want an adventure (i am less familiar with its use than a slackware based linux), you see what i mean? simple "windows/linux is better arguments are useless without considering the application of these technologies in the real world and the expectations placed on the system, and so on.
Apt is nice, but what if you want to install some third party cool monkey that will run around your desktop doing cool stuff? And don't tell me it's ridiculous that anyone would want such a thing, practice proves otherwise.
that is ridiculous actually, but you can (for some reason) get a myriad of that sort of thing (xsnow, xsanta and all that crap) via apt, particularly if you use debian, be my guest, it's your cluttered GUI environment you're messing up. at least with xsnow you know you're not installing some garbage that'll waste your bandwidth with phone home crap, pester you for money after 40 days or mess up your registry.
There will always be countless amounts of software out there that won't be in known repositories. Then you have to get it yourself, from untrusted source, assuming you want to run it in the first place. A lot of the time you can apt-get everything you need, and if you can't get your favourite text editor "pico", you only need to whine about it to your geek friends and they'll tell you to get "nano" instead.
pico is part of the "pine" package. it's about 7MB and is a mail suite including a text editor, this requires about 10 seconds of research (but yes, nano is a better choice if you just want the editor, or in fact jpico which is part of the joe package is probably best since you can invoke it as jmacs as well). that aside, so what? most of your windows rubbish is from untrusted sources, do you trust download.com? or tucows? like it or not, that's where your average windows user gets their stuff from. i haven't heard of anything like apt for windows. and windows update does not really come close, for configurability, choice of packages or ease of use. in fact, this point of yours, claiming apt is not up to the standard that windows users require is complete and utter drivel.
Anyway, I've understood that "normal" users just tend to go around and try whatever software they can find. They'll download and run anything, to find cool stuff. If such people were to use linux, and knew how to do what they want to do, you'd have a security disaster right there and then.
true, but that's not the point. a critical part of any system is between the ears of the system administrator. you use the term "users" though, which is misleading in this example.
Security isn't just something a system provides, it's more about the users than about the systems most of the time. Good systems enable users to make informed security decisions, but uninformed users can't make good security decisions no matter the system.
wrong, for the reasons i mention above. only a bad administrator blames the users. the administrator of a system is responsible for security, stability et cetera, not the users. if the users can mess the system up, without administrator priveleges, there is something wrong with the system, or with the administrator who configured the system. it is easier in windows, mainly because it assumes all users should be administrators by default (generally speaking) for users to mess everything up. of course the "integration" of such security chasms as outlook, internet explorer and windows mediocre player into the system doesn't help.
So, how exactly did it happen? What went wrong? There's always an immediate reason for why everything happens. It could've been user error.
i might just repeat something i said above there:
only a bad administrator blames the users.
Also, depending on what exactly happened, that data could've still been recoverable. I greatly suspect this wasn't fault of Win-XP itself, unless the filesystem just mysteriously went wookoo.
what are the chances of this, in your opinion? why is this something a filesystem can be considered to do? also, why can't it recover from a journal? why do you say windows xp is not at fault? interesting diagnoses, from perhaps scant input.
Not knowing what really happened, I don't have further comments about the incident.
that's better.
My linux experience starts from around 1.2.x times, and I mainly administrated boxes during 2.0.x kernel tree. Back then, people were already bashing microsoft all around and moving to linux, although bsd system would've been a lot lot better choice for everyone. Well, Linus has been doing unbelievable job at having the damn thing working and keeping it together, but from my perspective I have to say it looks like one huge mess. I'd pay more attention to the more recent kernel trees if they actually worked.
by "worked" you mean... what? this whole paragraph makes some huge sounding statements but adds up to roughly nothing, well done, by saying nothing you seem credible, but actually, you get your money's worth both ways by not having to commit to anything either.
So, wouldn't the best approach to solving the problem be user education? Software lock-in can be expensive, and businesses understand money. However, GNU is an evil empire when it comes to lock-in as well. Everyone's writing their "sh" scripts with bash syntax nowadays, m4 is backwards incompatible, gcc has language extensions that are widely used, etc. How are these not lock-in issues?
they are, just like any "de facto" standards, but i think there's the matter of perspective here. you can easily say that anything proprietary is a "lock in issue", but in my opinion creating your lock in issue and then using it to literally force all the competition out of the market by brainwashing the user base into believing they have to use the .doc format to save their documents in, or they have to use internet explorer rather than netscape (or any other browser, although most windows users still don't know there's anything other than IE and netscape available), is a different thing altogether.
Also, how many GNU apps really run NATIVELY on windows?
for somebody who's so smart, you sure are dumb. didn't we have the "natively" discussion just last week with somebody else? how many *windows* apps really run natively under a GNU system? define natively, and then take a flying leap, because when it comes down to it different systems require different implementations. I am sick of people criticising linux for not running applications that were written and compiled for other systems, and now we're hearing the same criticism in the other direction, with GNU apps now having to be able to run natively on probably the most completely non-GNU-like system available.
Don't a lot of them use the cygwin api wrapper to implement signals and *nix apis for them?
just like you have to use wine to run windows apps in linux. i suppose both of those adds up to a point against linux for you, yes?
I know there are a lot of native apps, but a lot of them aren't. For a long time, GIMP didn't use native widgets on windows either. It'd go on implementing its own damn scrollbars and buttons. Talk about bloat and inconsistencies.
talk about whatever you want. doesn't it use gtk+ rather than whatever windows comes with? you'll see that gaim (which uses gtk+ under windows too) is consistent with gimp if you run the two at the same time. you'll notice the same thing with gimp or any gtk+ app under kde for instance, or any kde/qt app under gnome. There's been a lot of good results allowing the apps from different forks to work together, and personally the visual inconsistency is less than negligible. one or two windoids do harp on about it though, so it must be important to them i suppose. whatever...
If we disregard win9x series,
why should we disregard windows 9x? because it sucks and would knock the whole bottom out of your already flimsy position?
I've had way more problems with linux than windows. And I mean real problems, such as netscape crashing whole X,
X is an application, netscape is an application (and not a very integrated one at that) both are runnable on many non-linux systems. This is not a linux issue.
strange kernel panics on same system in which windows worked fine, etc.
same system? how can windows and linux be the same system? you make no sense. if it comes to that i have had many unstable windows systems on machines that linux runs perfectly well (stable) on, even with my not being an expert or anything.
On Windows 2000 there were initially some problems with memory management (the "out of buffer space" problem), but those have been patched long ago. On windows 2003, I can't remember having a single problem related to windows itself, only third party apps.
however windows comes with very little in the way of applications software, and what it does come with are always garbagey microsoft apps, that you can't uninstall properly. linux distributions often do not even need anything installed on them besides what you get out of the box. fair enough these are technically third party products, but the fact that hundreds of things get bundled with the OS, each of which is fully removable and reinstallable, and all of which still makes a perfectly stable system beats the pants off of windows, if you ask me. by contrast you install windows, then spend three days remembering where you left thevarious CDs with winrar, winzip, photoshop, staroffice, realplayer, the one version of quicktime without the nag screen and so on on them, and if you are very lucky you might get through the endless reboots after each install without too many blue screen errors.
Linux can be more suitable to you,
can it? thanks for that.
and as I said it's probably better for a lot more people because it's simpler than Windows.
this is an interesting comment. since i work with windows as my day job, and i work with linux as a hobby (configuration in both cases, no programming or anything), i know that there are a lot of ways of doing a lot of things in both systems. i find windows simpler, and more restrictive for a lot of things. this is why windows is a better choice of OS for computer simpletons (if you understand what i mean) in a way, it has less to misunderstand for them. i don't stand by this ruling in all specific areas, some things linux s much simpler than windows at, configuration wise, once you find out what to do. /etc/fstab for example, as far as i know there's no easy way to make the equivalent of an fstab in windows, it's all mapping by hand and ticking the box to remap on next reboot, or use some third party tool to do your mapping for you. i still don't know how to hand configure the drive letters of your local partitions (and neither do i ever need to know, if i ever do, i know where google is, thanks).
Windows is more complex, and way tougher to learn. Despite Windows being marketed for clueless folk, the Windows itself hasn't been designed for newbies. It's a serious OS for serious people, and currently (imo) the biggest problems are the amount of work it takes to properly configure one.
i think you are blowing this way out of proportion here, also, why is it such a bonus if a system is complicated to configure? especially in an age where even somebody as clued up as you confuses the terms "user" and "administrator", as you appeared to do earlier on.
If the default installation wasn't so braindead, a lot of you guys would appreciate the whole system more.
uh, quite. the people responsible for the braindead defaults in windows, are the same people responsible for writing and compiling windows too. if they can't get the configuration anything like decent, why should i pay them my money and trust that they will somehow be better at writing, debugging and compiling the system than they are at configuring it?
Indeed, whatever is better depends on your values and your preferences. If you value freedom over functionality, I can see why you won't bother even trying with Windows.
ha! you don't think you can have both? perhaps you sincerely think that the more functionality software has, the less freedom it has to have. i wonder if, to you, this means that freedom stifles creativity. perhaps you should join microsoft's marketing department, if you aren't already an employee of theirs that is.
And about gimp, maybe someday it will be usable for the things I use it for. For now, windows just wins.
gimp is not as good as windows? that'd be right, if you wanted to... move files, run applications et cetera. windows is a system, gimp is a graphics manipulation application, how can you compare them? well i suppose since you use pbrush.exe all the time, you are trying to say that's better than gimp, then this truly is a good example of how your values and preferences influence what software you think is better.
Also, photoshop doesn't run properly under linux afaik.
hmm, could this be because it's only been released by its vendors for macintosh and windows platforms? let's see you run a linux binary on windows "properly". shame you windoids never make equal comparisons about these things, isn;t it?
Crossover office lists several known issues for it, some of which I'd find to be seriously annoying if I had to deal with them. I'd rather use the application in an environment I know to be stable.
in this i agree with you. you want to run windows programs, run them in windows. you want to use linux, find an alternative or write tons of letters to the vendor till they bring out linux binaries.
Obviously my opinions are subjective to my experiences, as are yours. However, let's see... you installed a shitload of third party apps, ran out of memory, and had crashes and issues as a result? What third party stuff are you talking about that's absolutely necessary to have a "half-decent" system, that actually has to be running all the time?
anything that isn't outlook, IE, windows mediocre player, and oh yes, ms paint. basically every possible program you ever want to use that doesn't come with the system. see my example above, once you have installed your winzips, acrobat readers and so on, you've just got a big box of BSOD waiting to happen, again and again.
Funny thing you mention about this piracy thing. I was under impression that a lot of people really do run pirated windows systems instead of linux or other alternatives. This, again, is most likely because of the functionality windows provides.
"most likely"? do you think about what you type? or do you just type it? the reason they all use pirated windows copies is because they know how to use windows already (windows at school, work and all their friends' houses), they probably have some windows software that they think is worth a lot of money (games, or some pirated ms office shit, or photoshop or something) or else they have some crappy hardware that comes with windows only drivers (their modem/lan card perhaps, or some scanner maybe). We briefly mentioned lock in technology before didn't we? did we mention the financial incentives for vendors that provide only windows support for something that could have been open standards compliant? well, add those three reasons up, and combine them with the natural human want to have something for free that they think they should have had to pay for and that's a lot more likely than any alleged functionality that windows might have. ask any windoid and i think functionality might not even come in on the top ten list of reasons to use ms windows, that's if they could spell "functionality" in the first place.
Most likely they don't value windows as an OS, but as a gaming platform. For these people, windows is the only choice because applications of their preference aren't available for other operating systems.
and now what? you contradict yourself and agree with what i just said (albeit after you said this yourself, if you get my meaning).
So, as a conclusion, if stability and functionality are the reasons you are using linux and you can't find them in windows, the only explanation I can find is that you don't know how to use windows and you're unwilling to learn.
if that's the only explanation then you oversimplify things to the point where they are meaningless and i am glad i don't have to work with you. i could say the same thing to you with the words "linux" and "windows" reversed and it would mean just as much, ie: very little.
and i still think comparing "linux" with "windows" is like comparing shoes to cheesecake. both are useful, but they are so different that it is pointless comparing them. if you want to compare windows to linux, compare it to a full linux based system such as red hat or mandrake. you can't even claim you refer to them all together using the qword "linux", i have seen some awful linux based distributions, (mklinux for one, it is worse than any other system i have ever seen, including the one written purely in assembly language, including every version of ms-dos) but this can usually be the fault of the vendor, rather than the kernel contributors.
the issue is a lot more complex than you admit, and contains a lot of things you ignore because you don't see that they are relevant to you as a windows user.
it's a lot like trying to talk to a christian about polytheism actually, their paradigm just doesn't have the leel of understanding required to get the idea across without a lot of frustrating and compromising ideological translations.
