Comment by GrandMasterBirt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GrandMasterBirt | Hacker News Reader

GrandMasterBirt

I always been a windows developer. 3 mo ago my co-worker suggested I give linux a shot. Fuck it why not.

I realized the following:

1) Linux is more stable. (NEVER have to reboot it, unless I chose to conserve energy at night).

2) Linux boots faster. By the time linux boots, auto launches firefox and eclipse, windows is only reaching the desktop at which point its still 1-2 minutes before it becomes usable.

3) I still use the same tools in linux and windows (I still need a VM to run Toad). (Eclipse, grep, firefox, a linux command prompt (god cygwin is not as good as the real thing). Which is great since toad makes windows 95 appear stable. Putting toad in a vm is the best way to make it work well :). Also I get to test IE6,7,8 without any problems because I already have vms set up.

4) Multiple desktops = easier at times.

5) Windows made me need tools for mounting like sftp -> drive. Linux comes with sftpfs (ok fine u need to apt-get it). Its all free too so cost savings.

Switching to linux only raised one question: Why didn't I do it earlier.

The only problem is KDE fonts suck! Gnome ones are good out-of-the-box. Also KDE apps (like plasma) crashes like a wasted, doped-up, narcoleptic. Sooooo ubuntu, not kubuntu wins for me.

If you have to reboot Windows for anything other than updates you should be looking into problems with your hardware and drivers. The "Windows is unstable" meme should really be dead and buried by now.

I can believe Ubuntu is faster than Windows at booting, especially considering they focused on it in their last release, but for me the much bigger issue was flaky Sleep/Suspend-to-RAM and Hibernate/Suspend-to-Disk support. I suspend my laptop several times a day but only reboot on updates.

> If you have to reboot Windows for anything other than updates you should be looking into problems with your hardware and drivers. The "Windows is unstable" meme should really be dead and buried by now.

It it should be 'dead and buried' by now then why does it persist ?

It seems that there are enough people that share these experiences (not necessarily your own) to stop that from happening.

My own take is that it is getting better, but it isn't there yet.

One thing that I personally don't understand at all is why the industry did not long ago standardize on ECC RAM, the cost would have been marginal (due to the increase in volume) and the potential benefits in perceived stability would be huge.

Servers have it pretty much as a standard, any bit flipped in critical RAM can cause an OS crash (both for Linux and for Windows, RAM failures are OS agnostic).

Maybe Microsoft's code doesn't cause crashes any more, but 3rd party drivers and shoddy OEM hardware are definitely still to blame. Users don't care why their stuff crashes, only that it does. And first hand, I see XP-era machines crash less after converting them to Ubuntu. I haven't tested a Vista machine, I've never seen anyone run one.

Re: ECC ram, my non-server, "consumer" linux boxes typically have uptimes of 100,200,300 days. They only go down for hard drive failures and OS upgrades.

> I haven't tested a Vista machine, I've never seen anyone run one.

I'm a designer and programmer and was stuck on Vista for a little over 3 months after starting my current job. Photoshop required at minimum two reboots a day. Absolute hell.

My copies of XP and Vista were fairly peppy booters when first installed, but adding in assorted services (databases, Web server, VNC) slowed things down, plus I had to install antivirus software, which makes things even slower.

Of more concern to me is shutdown time, as in "eternity", and when I have to just hold the button button to force a machine off. Each time there is a real risk of corrupted drives (I'm recovering data right now from a drive corrupted because something hung Vista and I had to power off the box).

Each time it refuses to cleanly shutdown there is nothing displayed to tell me why.

Is there even an option to have windows show what it's doing when it shuts down instead of the often untruthful 'Windows is shutting down' message?

At work, I have to restart my computer at least once a week. I'm not sure if it is Windows XP's fault or if it is another program I run. All I know is that after about a week the computer grinds to a halt, taking way too long to do anything reasonable.

I whole-heartedly appologize.

Windows swapping algorithms suck big time. After coming back to work I need to wait for windows to swap eclipse/ff to ram... Wtf was it doing overnight that warrented a need for disk swap? Heavy thinking?

After leaving ubuntu on all night the performance tomorrow is as if I never left the keyboard.

Last job windows shutdown took 3 min, startup took 10. The system did suffer from memory leaks or appeared to since after like 2 weeks it had to be rebooted or it worked like crap. Coulda been antivirus pos software though. Reboots were also needed at times, just the nature of not having kill -9.

Another complaint: can't delete open files. Our av program broke our build caz we could not run cleanup scripts where applicable.

In any case after 3 month of bliss I have nightmares that next job ill be coding in windows. Maybe 7 aint so bad...

I have a 2 year old Vista machine, the biggest problem I have is that it sometimes (2-3x per day) locks up while running a major HD write or read, usually with no warning, sometimes when I haven't even been doing anything on the machine. Also, I wiped my Norton Antivirus, it would start running virus checks every week, which it was supposed to, but for some f-ed up reason it ALWAYS did it when I was in the middle of a game, and I don't spend much time playing games.

In my experience, Windows doesn't need to be rebooted very often - although it does seem to leak some RAM. Also, a few games and other applications (like GTA:SA) cause lockups or BSODs in edge cases. GTA:SA freezes the computer if I pause it, close the laptop lid, reopen the lid, and try resuming.

Also, as you mention, drivers cause problems occasionally. I think twice Windows suddenly stopped recognizing a wireless mouse, not sure why. It worked on a different USB port.

Disclaimer: I'm talking about XP. Also, I have little experience in Ubuntu, but quite a bit in FreeBSD on the desktop. Once it's set up, it works quite nicely actually - apart from some quirky behavior while suspending to RAM.

Use the Droid or Undotum fonts with antialiasing. Very, very good.

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/10/15/tweak-your-font-ren...

I have found the kubuntu KDE4 a bit flaky and font-poor (especially the earlier versions). I run KDE4 at home from the gentoo repository and it is rock solid and the fonts are fine, so I am not sure what is going on there.

A bit beside the point as I would not recommend switching to gentoo as your first linux distro (or even for most people)

I used Windows Server 2008 for development this summer and generally had uptimes of 2-3 weeks...only had to restart for updates. Never had any problems.

What version of Windows?

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