this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Ah man, you toughed it out clear into XP? Win2k was the last version I ever ran here. That whole shit of "oh you inserted a USB drive, please reboot" really got on my nerves. Plus trying to write code and having Windows crash once a week.
Several times per day sometimes if you came from the Win9x line like us normies had to use and not NT.
Don't forget Win3.x. I remember working on that, trying my hand at OS/2 Warp with high hopes. I never used NT, just the home version of Windows 2k, however I was already trying to move away from Microsoft at the time. I was introduced to AT&T Unix in the late 90's with our Audix voicemail system, and learned a lot while attempting to upgrade the hardware to a more current 486 computer. I got hooked but Unix was expensive as hell, then the internet led me to Linux. My first attempts were with a version of Slackware that ran from a folder on the Windows desktop and by '99 I had my first dedicated server up and running. It wasn't until 2006 that I finally dumped my dual-boot desktop and permanently dropped Windows.
I haven't seen a Windows BSOD in a long time on any of my systems....
I haven't either. 😆 Switching to Linux solved all of those problems allowing me to run for months at a time between reboots. Of course back then things didn't work so smoothly, and I did have some struggle getting my sound card working. These days it pretty much all just works.
Except unlike all the Linux desktop users here, I've run every version of Windows... even Vista was actually very stable for me.
When I've had problems, it was 99 percent of the time failing hardware or bad drivers...
...which I will note I have had a lot of grief with in the past on my Linux installs.... nVidia... Atheros... Broadcomm...
I would only point out that most hardware problems are due to vendors refusing support of any OS except Windows. If they didn't support Windows you would see equal problems there. I know there has been a lot of contention with nVidia over the years, not so sure about others.
Also, linux does take direct control of all hardware and runs it hard. If a vendor claims their devices can run under certain conditions then Linux expects it to actually perform that way. Many vendors exaggerate their claims though and it's quickly discovered that their devices cannot actually perform as expected on the general hardware sold to the public. Nobody is surprised, and the linux driver admins eventually make those features optional so you can test the specific device to see if it lives up to the vendor's claims. My nVidia GTX 1050 has been running well for me though.
Otherwise I agree that yeah, a lot of faults come down failing hardware. In my case the same machine that constantly blue-screened under Windows worked fine for many years under Linux, and I'm one of those who really push the hell out of my computers. Coding in Visual Studio while also having a bunch of other windows open for reference on my current project, on a machine that only had a gig of memory? Yeah I expected a lot. And moving forward to today, I have dozens of windows open to browsers, spreadsheets, terminals, image editors, and 3D modeling software. Surprisingly I currently have over a gig of free ram right now (on a machine with 16GB) but I'm usually closer to a half or quarter gig free. My machine is pretty clean right now because it rebooted a month ago from a power outage during a storm, so we'll see how it looks in another couple months.