Windows Rant

[Rashkae]

Basil Chupin wrote:

> 
> You just swapped in another hard drive and "Ubuntu worked just fine" - 
> and without having to make any alterations to fstab (as a for-instance)?
> 
> XP won't even let you change the colour of your underwear without 
> wanting to be "authenticated" again. But stating what you did about 
> Ubuntu, me thinks is kinda going a tad overboard :-) .
> 
> I must say that this was the case some time ago, but no longer. All to 
> do with UUID I think. But then I am more wrong than right... :-( .
> 
> 

Apples and Oranges.  The OP was talking about moving 1 hard drive to a 
different machine, wich works just fine in Ubuntu as is.  Your talking 
about changing the harddrive in the same machine, which does require 
updating fstab.  (And yes, that used to work without changing config, 
but that's changed by hardware moreso than UUID, the days of IDE 
Primary/Secondary Master/Slave are long behind us)

Try doing the same thing on Windows some day.  You're ok if you using a 
3rd party drive cloning tool and move your windows install to a HD *that 
was never used in the system before*.  But try copying Windows from 1 
hard drive to another using only Windows, and when you try to reboot, 
nothing works because the drive letters are jumbled.  In linux, that's 
as easy to fix as open a file in a text editor and put in the correct 
UUID.  In Windows??? ha... you have to take the hard drive to a working 
windows system to boot, then use the registry editor on that system, and 
import the registry directory of your broken windows as a "hive".. then 
you can navigate a tree so complicated even experienced technicians will 
probably need a reference cheat sheet to find (unless they do this 
specific task regularly) to find the entries you need to fix.

Windows is *very* technician unfriendly OS.  Ubuntu and Linux and 
general would be years ahead in user *and* technician friendliness if it 
wasn't for the lack of hardware support from proprietary devices that 
need closed source 'drivers' that don't exist for Linux.