On 2012-09-18 17:12, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Reformatting and reinstalling, though, is a matter of course on any Windows installation that I've ever seen. I've heard of such things as stable Windows installations, but as far as my experience goes those are mythical beasts. Things just fail the moment you start doing something non-trivial, like anything besides read email, watch youtube, and browse the 'Net. I've been spared this pain for the most part 'cos I swore off Windows and have been running Linux as my main OS for at least 10 years, but I do still get requests for help to fix broken Windows installations. Most of the time, the thing's either unfixable (hood is welded shut) or not worth the effort to fix 'cos reformat + reinstall is faster (shudder).
I had a Windows machine running as an HTPC that I had no problems with. Although the only thing I used it for was to watch movies.
That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its own problems, of course. The libc5 -> libc6 transition is one of the memorable nightmares in its history. There have been others. X11 failures can get really ugly (back in the days before KVM, a crashed or wedged X server meant your graphics card is stuck in graphics mode and the console shows up as random dot patterns -- good luck trying to fix the system when you can't see what you type). Once I accidentally broke the dynamic linker, and EVERYTHING broke, because everything depended on it. The only thing left was a single bash shell over SSH (this was on a remote server with no easy physical access), and the only commands that didn't fail were built-in bash commands like echo. So I had to transfer busybox over by converting it into a series of echo commands that reconstituted the binary and copy-n-paste it. It's one of those moments where you get so much satisfaction from having rescued a dying system singlehandedly with echo commands, but it's also one of those things that puts Linux on some people's no-way, no-how list.
That's also the beauty of Linux, you could do it. Try doing that on a Windows machine.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
