Before I bought my current computer I had been running various flavours of GNU/Linux for the past 1 – 2 years. Summary: No half-decent word processor (the non-english dictionaries in OpenOffice is a joke), I can install my printer without having to search forums, type into the terminal or PAY for some sucky Linux drivers – I just plugged it in and it worked right away, just like it did with a Macintosh, and which it didn’t do at all with Linux.

Other problems I’ve had: Sound goes crazy when i turn the volume up in VLC, Firefox just shuts down with no error message, X won’t start after system update (PCLinuxOS), Flash is slow, always some problem or another dealing with NTFS drives, No bittorrent client that’s even close to as good as several Windows-based. When I wanted to rip an audio CD in Windows I could very easily do that in Windows Media Player, even be able to choose MP3 format and which bit rate i wanted and having no problems copying the ripped files to an mp3 player – In linux I would’ve to fiddle with MP3 support.

My experience with Vista vs Linux is the opposite of yours – For me Vista just works, and Linux doesn’t.

Helloooo handsome! I’v been doing some stuff on my blog, some woman gave me alot of questions to answer, and after that’s finish I have to send it forward to five other persons! It’s very, very, terrible, my legs are shaking and I did’nt knew what to do!
..then I think about you, and I thought that you can be my only victim. You are not five people, but we can say that you’re more handsome than all the rest! And that’s fair enough. So, look at my blog –> http://aprilsaga.blogspot.com/2008/04/bloggfrgor.html and then decide if you wanna do it or not!

Oh, fuck, I’m good on english!

Puss!

The problem with graphic drivers in Vista is for the most part due to the DRM functions implemented to prevent the user from dumping secured content anywhere between the file on the harddrive and the screen. As part of thatM Microsoft moved things out in userspace to reduce the amount of code with kernel priviliges. They also implemented triggers that makes the kernel kill anything remotely suspicious happening in the graphics drivers. All this to prevent anyone being able to dump media playing in an application. When your Vista graphics driver dies its most probably not the driver who died, Vista killed it avtively.

The stability problems are to a 100% Microsofts own work. As usual others gets the blame but i would suggest you read Microsofts documentiation on writing drivers for Vista. If you are a developer its pretty horrid reading.

Actually - you seem more like a “hateboy” (as opposed to fanboy) than someone to take seriously IMO.

Note: I’m not saying that you are wrong - you’ve probably forgotten more about computers than I’ve ever learned:-) That is one of the reasons I use Windows - I know that I can get help when I need it. When - not if…

I also find it rather amusing as to how fanboys say that one should use Windows because “things just work”. In my experience it’s the opposite. Plug something into Ubuntu, it works like expected. Windows, hunt for drivers, try to troubleshoot “magic” bugs, hope something bad doesn’t happen, etc etc.

Of course there’s always going to be issues when relying on other companies drivers, but I cannot avoid laughing at the whole thing. Windows is the easy system to use, everything works automatically? Gimme a goddamn break, that’s just an outrageous lie in my opinion.

Bluescreens are not a good thing. They hardly ever give you anything to work with. They give you some cryptic error-message that you have to decode using Microsofts decoder-ring, and then hope that you can find a solution to it or that it goes away by itself.

The only thing that freezes a Linux-system is a kernel panic, and then it will say flat out why it panicked. It panicked because… the root filesystem couldn’t be mounted, etc etc. In fact, I haven’t seen a kernel panic in almost a decade. Every other time it has appeared to freeze there’s always been a way out of it, either it’s X who’s taken a nosedive (happens with proprietary drivers, since you can’t control them) but that’s solved by a quick ctrl-alt-backspace. If something worse has happened, there’s almost always the Magic SysRQ-button to safely unmount your filesystems to avoid damage and rebooting the system. I say “almost always” since I can’t guarantee that there won’t be some odd situation where it doesn’t work, but since I discovered the Magic SysRQ a few years ago, I have never done a hard-restart on a “locked” Linux-machine, since it’s never been completely locked - just that userspace stopped listening. These things can happen in any machine, but on Linux, 99.9999% of the time the kernel is ticking away in the background anyway.

On a side note, bluescreens are good things. There is no graphical equivalent in Linux, instead the system only freezes when you in windows get some debug information.