Mr. Dodge, thank you for taking the time to bring up the subject of Linux; and what's more important, to admit that you don't know everything about it, instead of just condemning it on the "if I don't know it, I must not need it" principle. What's so great about Linux? Well, quite a number of things, actually. I'm sure that as a journalist who works with computers all day every day, you want your computer to perform well. As a number of benchmarks available freely on the web will show, Linux is among the best operating systems in terms of wringing the most performance out of your hardware. In fact, it surpasses the commercial Unixes in many areas, when compared on an apples-to-apples basis with similar hardware. It leaves Microsoft's offerings far behind in this area. There are many anecdotal stories of old DOS applications that perform better under Linux's DOS emulator on the same machine. Furthermore, I assume that you want your computer to be as free of bugs as is humanly possible, and to have any bugs that are found corrected quickly. Linux excels in these areas, as well, mostly due to it's "open-source" nature. Simply put, Linux bugs are looked for by thousands of programmers all over the world, who not only have real-world applications that have to perform, but also have full access to the source code. This is something that Microsoft operating systems can't possibly match. Microsoft couldn't hire enough programmers to make a team this large, even if they gave up on all other projects permanently. Linux can perform extremely heavy jobs on less machine than just about any other operating system. In many cases, it does this with freely-available, open-source software, which means that not only does the hardware cost less, but the software is free. You have the source code to that software as well, so it's subject to the same scrutiny. At this point, you may be thinking "what good does source code do anyone except propeller-heads who think 100,000 lines of C++ code is light reading?" The answer is simple; you may not be the one who looks for and finds the bug in the code, but your bug still gets fixed if the propeller-head down the block finds it. Or if some Ph.D. candidate at MIT finds it. Or if a team of programmers at Digital Domain finds it, as happened with an extremely obscure floating point math bug in the DEC Alpha port some months back. If Microsoft, with her considerable but not comparable resources, finds a bug, it generally gets fixed within weeks, and makes it's way into a hotfix or a Service Pack months later. Sometimes it doesn't get properly fixed in the next Service Pack, and it's many months until the next one comes out that it gets fixed. A good recent example is the "shortcuts point to UNC names, not local paths" bug, which was supposed to be fixed in Service Pack 3 but wasn't. This bug is still in place, and the kludges proposed by Microsoft technical support can break other software, including Internet Explorer 4. If Joe Propellerhead in Outer Slobovia finds a bug in Linux, a patch is usually out within days. Sometimes within hours. It finds it's way into the commercial distributions (such as Red Hat and Caldera) within days or weeks, not months. If the patch turns out to have a problem, a new patch makes it out in days. By the time Microsoft gets around to having a couple of dozen testers pour over a fix, a Linux patch has had thousands or millions of people test it. If it so happens that you have a problem, and the IS staff at Ziff Davis can't fix it right away, you want to be able to get support. It's tempting to conclude that Linux would fail in this, due to the decentralized nature of it's distribution, but this simply isn't true. Numerous commercial vendors provide Linux support via any mechanism you can think of, including telephone. In fact, at least one of these support companies is used by companies as large and technically-inclined as IBM and Lotus. More importantly, however, is the tremendous level of support provided by a huge active worldwide community of users, administrators, and enthusiasts. As the administrator of a large network of machines running Microsoft, IBM, and Sun operating systems, I have to deal with every avenue of support imaginable, and I've found that no operating system has better support on the Internet than Linux. That's why one of your competitor magazines (InfoWorld, and you're welcome to edit that out if you publish any part of this) awarded the Linux user community with the "Best Technical Support Award". Linux has received this kind of recognition many times in it's history. It's tempting to dismiss Linux as a newcomer, but before you do keep in mind that Linux is one year older than Windows NT, and that it's estimated installed user base is doubling every year, and has been doing so steadily. It's hard to come up with good numbers to compare. After all, you can just ask Dataquest how many copies of NT have sold, compared to how many copies of commercial Linux distributions. However, one thing you need to keep in mind is this; if a company decides to roll Windows NT out on 100 desktops, they buy 100 copies of NT and Dataquest shows this. But if they decide to roll out Linux on 100 desktops, they buy 1 copy of Linux, or possibly just download it off the web. Or some propeller-head in their IS department brings his copy from home, which is perfectly legal. That's how Linux is being installed for pilot projects in my company; from one of my CDs. That will show up as one sale through Walnut Creek CDROM, but will run on multiple servers. Those servers show up as sales of Windows NT Server 4.0, which will be replaced by Linux. I am not by any means suggesting that Linux is the end-all and be-all of operating systems. The best tool for the job at hand should always be used, and there is thus room on the MIS pegboard for hammers, screwdrivers, and stapleguns. Linux can scale up from one tiny system (cast-off 486s that are providing multiple network services to thousands of users, and have been up for many months without a reboot) to huge supercomputer-like arrays (the 160 or so DEC Alpha systems that, acting in concert, rendered the incredible graphics for the movie "Titanic".) Windows NT doesn't fit either of these roles well, and doesn't scale well under even perfect circumstances. Windows 95 is a nice platform for playing games, but there isn't a thing that it will do that Linux can't do better. Not even the interface; Linux (which allows you to chose from many different graphical user interfaces and fully customize their operation) has had a similar interface available for some time. It's called "fvwm95" and it works great. One has choices with Linux, unlike the competition. Microsoft is quite fond of their slogan "where do you want to go today", but comparison with Linux shows that the answer is usually "tough, you're going here instead." With Linux, the answer is "cool, go there, and here's where you can find thousands of other folks who already went there and can help you find your way." Don't make the mistake of assuming that Linux is just Linus Torvalds; it's thousands of brilliant programmers all over the world, ranging from Scandinavian hackers barely out of diapers to the best and brightest of the finest universities and largest companies. Folks with brilliant ideas float to the top with Linux. At Microsoft, they probably get promoted to management, never to be heard from as contributing members of society again. If you want to experiment with Linux, or just learn more about it, please feel free to ask me any questions you may have. More importantly, come join us in any of the Linux mailing lists or newsgroups, where others more knowledgeable than myself can join in and answer anything you'd care to ask. -- PLEASE read the Red Hat FAQ, Tips, Errata and the MAILING LIST ARCHIVES! http://www.redhat.com/RedHat-FAQ /RedHat-Errata /RedHat-Tips /mailing-lists To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject.
