[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-09-18 17:12, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> Reformatting and reinstalling, though, is a matter of course on any
> Windows installation that I've ever seen. I've heard of such things as
> stable Windows installations, but as far as my experience goes those are
> mythical beasts. Things just fail the moment you start doing something
> non-trivial, like anything besides read email, watch youtube, and browse
> the 'Net. I've been spared this pain for the most part 'cos I swore off
> Windows and have been running Linux as my main OS for at least 10 years,
> but I do still get requests for help to fix broken Windows
> installations. Most of the time, the thing's either unfixable (hood is
> welded shut) or not worth the effort to fix 'cos reformat + reinstall is
> faster (shudder).

I had a Windows machine running as an HTPC that I had no problems with. 
Although the only thing I used it for was to watch movies.

> That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its own problems, of course.
> The libc5 -> libc6 transition is one of the memorable nightmares in its
> history. There have been others. X11 failures can get really ugly (back
> in the days before KVM, a crashed or wedged X server meant your graphics
> card is stuck in graphics mode and the console shows up as random dot
> patterns -- good luck trying to fix the system when you can't see what
> you type). Once I accidentally broke the dynamic linker, and EVERYTHING
> broke, because everything depended on it. The only thing left was a
> single bash shell over SSH (this was on a remote server with no easy
> physical access), and the only commands that didn't fail were built-in
> bash commands like echo. So I had to transfer busybox over by converting
> it into a series of echo commands that reconstituted the binary and
> copy-n-paste it. It's one of those moments where you get so much
> satisfaction from having rescued a dying system singlehandedly with echo
> commands, but it's also one of those things that puts Linux on some
> people's no-way, no-how list.

That's also the beauty of Linux, you could do it. Try doing that on a 
Windows machine.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg