A virus or two

Mark mhullrich at gmail.com
Thu Nov 25 22:10:24 UTC 2010


On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Thierry de Coulon <tcoulon at decoulon.ch> wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 November 2010 07:12:50 pm Liviu Andronic wrote:
>> A nice overview of Linux vs Mac vs Windows, including some comments on
>> viruses. http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/11/operating_systems
>
> I'm not sure how to take this "overview".

It is largely a load of bunk.

The hard facts cited in the article are interesting (who runs what in
what percentage of the market), but the rest of it is mostly nonsense.
 Linux is way behind Windows because of many reasons, most of them
just age - Windows became a marketable product with v 3.1 back around
1985.  Linux has been maturing slowly since its birth in 1991 and only
in the last few years has it made any serious inroads into the general
computing world.

There is a whole paragraph or two on the apparently astonishing lack
of drivers for Linux for many peripherals on the market, especially in
the area of printers.  To some extent this is true - it's pretty
difficult to find drivers for Canon printers, for example, but the
paucity of drivers is changing. Ubuntu and its rough equivalents tend
to have support for even some reasonably cutting-edge hardware, and it
supports the majority of commonly available peripherals for notebooks
and even netbooks.  If there's any serious lack in this area, it has
to do with high-end, new peripherals more than anything else.

The fundamental ubiquity of Windows comes from mass marketing
campaigns, the brilliance of a particular very rich salesman (who sold
a non-existent OS to IBM for "their" PC back in 1981 and then made
good on it by stealing an existing one and making it worse) and
certain anti-competitive distribution restrictions that are only now
beginning to ease as more and more hardware vendors are pushing back
and insisting they have the freedom to sell Linux-based computers.  (I
have an Everex laptop that I was unable to put Windows on temporarily,
but that's a whole 'nother story.)

People who aren't scared to death of computers, and to some extent
even those who are, will find Ubuntu at least as friendly as Windows.
There are a number of quirks one can expect to find, but that's true
with any computer system, and Linux is WAY friendlier than Windows
when it comes to reliability, stability and software availability for
the average user.  If you need Photoshop (or any other professional
Adobe product) you're potentially in trouble without Windows, but for
office products, browsers, emailers and the usual slew of products
that come on the base Ubuntu distribution, you, and Windows, can't
beat a Linux distribution.

As for malware, I repeat (although I don't remember the source -
sorry), a couple of months ago a friend of mine chastised me for
saying that there are no Linux viruses, so I looked into it.  When I
looked, the list of Linux malware numbered 42 entries.  Windows is
over a million (two million if you believe the above article).

So take things like this article with a (huge) grain of salt.  A lot
of "expert" users are really just users with an expert ego....




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