Story: 'Windows' toughest competitor is pirates' - Gates

Posted by: David Wright (Tuesday 29 June 2004, 9:04 AM)

His comments on being a systems integrator for ones self and realising that components are missing is dangerous ground.

I have had to install 4 Windows 2000 boxes, 1 XP box and 3 SuSE boxes in the last 2 weeks. The Windows 2000 were a real pain, XP wasn't much better, while the SuSE boxes were a breeze.

Windows 2000/XP didn't recognise most of the video cards or network cards installed in the machines, I needed the motherboard/card driver CD's to even get on the net to find the latest versions. Then I needed additional CD's for Office, anti-virus, printer drivers, multi-media devices etc. When the machines first booted, they displayed the desktop in 640x480 or 800x600.

With SuSE, it recognised the video cards and display panels and the console and YaST installer booted in 1280x1024 mode. It loaded the correct video drivers, network drivers, sound drivers, printer drivers, scanner and installed Office without me having to change discs.

Once the first install was complete, a quick trip to the net showed I needed around 60Mb of data for the SuSE installs. These installed together, and unless I installed the Kernel update, it didn't require a re-boot after patching. And that included all of the applications that were loaded (including Samba, Office, Apache, PHP and a plethora of other programs and server applications).

The Windows installs required several hundred megabytes of patches and 6 reboots before installation was complete. And many of the patches had to be loaded separately. Then the patching of Office and the anti-virus etc. could take place, another hundred megs of downloads or so.

Mr Gates should be very careful about what he says, some of his comments just aren't true anymore. Linux has caught up fast in many areas and in a couple has stolen a march on Windows.

Given a pre-configured machine, many users wouldn't find much difference between the platforms. It is only when a user has to configure Linux themselves that problems arise, and Windows isn't as easy to install and configure as Microsoft makes out.

I am still a user of Windows, but more and more of my work is switching to Linux, because it is faster, simpler and less prone to virus and worm attacks.

Having used Windows since version 2, I didn't find the switch to Linux very difficult.