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Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register)Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register)Posted Apr 4, 2006 16:03 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332)In reply to: Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register) by dw Parent article: Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register)
"" The "it's unstable", "it's insecure" mantra is circa mid 90's, would you please for the love of God just drop it. There are much more plausable ways of attacking Microsoft than resorting to outdated lies. ""
Well... you have a pretty solid stand if you count only by your experience.
If been running professional smallserver/workstation Linux from 1999, and moved my personal systems mainly to Linux before 2001, and i've been posting in this forum just about since it opened !
IMHO the "it's unstable", "it's insecure" sticks *pretty good*. Win9x was a complete nightmare, thought not network ready, not really. Win2k improved a lot, and yet more feature rich, it couldn't compare to the 2.4 series and specialy the rock solid 2.2 kernel based distros for small services. WinXP losed some of the stability that Win2k gained, recaptured again by Win2003.
The problem is again compare poorly managed or unmanaged systems with basic managed Linux systems.The stability, security and versality of Linux will win hands down.
The key is in that managed/unmanaged systems relation. Deploy a Win system in a desktop out of the box, cut activeX, VBscript, remove, patch, and or disable insecure features, dont allow email attachment execution, remove or replace WMP with something without net acess, restrict IE to the ~100+ filtered websites relevant to your company, and you have a solid and secure windows environment even if you dont apply active countermeasures.
All this *WORK* will be pretty comparable to a good *UNMANAGED & UNRESTRICTED* Linux distro out of the box, on the same exact hardware.
If you go to servers, unmanaged or poorly unmaged Windows is out of the question, and most probably a poorly managed Linux server could outlast longer then a well managed Windows counterpart.
The conclusion is that you manage your systems pretty well (congratulations), but the not so lucky large majority of systems deployed around the world, in SOHO and small part of SME, are living a true nightmare with the ~7000 malware on the loose.
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Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register) Posted Apr 4, 2006 17:14 UTC (Tue) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link] I will accept that the malware is a serious practical problem for users who aren't clued in. For larger setups though, Group Policy and network isolation can effectively prevent the problem of worms like that (for eg., Windows has had Authenticode, or even the simpler "exec only if MD5 is on the allowed list" for many years).
To qualify the statements in my previous post a little more, I was referring mainly to Windows as a desktop. The machine I type this on has not been reinstalled once since it was purchased (Windows XP; 4 years ago), and bar once-yearlyish maintainance (defrag, cleanup temporary files, unused applications), hasn't required much to keep it stable. I believe there have only been one or two occasions where I've had a forced reboot - SP1 and SP2 installation via Windows Update being the obvious culprits.
When I have had the choice I have always used Linux servers, for various reasons. One of the main things, is a Linux system is a hell of a lot more recoverable than a Windows box. Have you ever tried to deal with a corrupt system hive or SAM on a Windows machine? AFAIK you simply can't. :) Compare that to manually reconstructing a lost /etc/passwd with vim.
FWIW, in the past few years, the Windows Media Player installer hasn't permitted you to install until you have chosen your privacy options - it is perfectly possible at this stage of the install to configure it such that it will never connect to the Internet.
Cheers,
David.
Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register) Posted Apr 4, 2006 17:16 UTC (Tue) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link] One last side note on the malware front: Microsoft now has much better infrastructure (in the form of sub UIDs in Vista, and Microsoft Antispyware for XP) in place for dealing with this threat, whereas the likes of OS X and Linux have none. It's another old mantra, but I believe it is still true: Linux is still yet to feel the full force of malware.
Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register) Posted Apr 4, 2006 18:36 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] Windows has a very poor software distribution mechanism to begin with.
A strict white-list of checksums will mean you can't easily deploy tools. Not to mention you can run just about anything without actually executing it (bash, perl, python, ld-linux, you name it).
And then there are "manual" scripts of human engineering.
Microsoft starts supporting, er, Linux (Register) Posted Apr 4, 2006 20:33 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] The machine i type my posts on, dont has a glitch since 2001 of virtue of staying out of early betas on it, and only with a rather basic firewall and no virus scan because i patch, or better said, update frequently.
Of course it has "some" management on it, nothing remotely comparable to other WinXP machines i worked on, and it has stayed on for weeks in a row in a "cable" direct connetion to the net without a problem ( a big "worry" in XP), thought usually i do it trough my NAT routed home network... and quite frankly KDE 3.4/5 series is much more joyfull than the XP environment.
The only occasional problem compared to WinXP is hardware device support!
Its nice to have Windows users on this forum, IMO,... its always nice to ear from the other side and or different opinions.
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