Desktop platforms Toolkit

Story: Desktop Linux wins plaudits for stability

Posted by: The Mitch (Monday 14 March 2005, 4:01 PM)

I'm using a stripped-down, fully patched win2k and a customized Mandrake 10.1 Linux on the same machine (yay dual boots); windows GUI freezes as soon as I run too many apps and click all over the screen - which is usually solved by forcing windows shutdown to send a 'killall' signal to all processes if an application fucks up the GUI some. If that happens in Linux, I can either just kill the app, if others happen to be compromised (rare!) I can just kill X... and if even the session has crashed I can log in as another user and shut down the system correctly.

Personally, I still use w2k for some games and a few applications I still haven't completely replaced in Linux; but even then, most utilities I run are under the GPL, LGPL, AGL or Mozilla licence...

If I want to work under Linux, there are no problems to do so. Ifi I want to watch movies, no problems either. Many games are available, so it's not a big deal. And finally, if something doesn't work I can try my hand at correcting it - something one can hardly do in Windows, even with source code provided (one example: installing XviD in Linux basically requires a precompiled package that isn't always out or specifically optimized; in Linux, get source, run ./configure && make && make install, and you're all set, with an optimized build fitting your computer to a tee).