Re: Driver Model 2 Proposal - Linux Kernel Performance v Usability

Richard B. Johnson
2003-09-05T19:57:29Z

On Fri, 5 Sep 2003, James Clark wrote:

> Valdis Kletnieks wrote:
>
> > So if 500 million people are productive 60% of the time and hosed 40% of
> > the time, and 5 million people are productive 95% of the time, the 60/40
> > model is better because 60% of 500M is more than 95% of 5M?
>
> This is a good example of the kind of rubbish that is sometimes talked around
> here. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard the 'Windows is SO
> unstable argument' it almost seems like a religion. I would agree with what
> you have said if Windows was actually unusable 40% of the time. Do you really
> believe this figure? In reality it is much better than that as plainly the
> majority of the WORLD are using it. I love Linux but I also use Windows.
> Sorry to break your delusion, it ain't that bad.
>

I sure wish it was rubbish. In my other life I write
music. So, I bought Cakewalk Software so I could record
and edit music I play on my MIDI Grand Piano. Unfortunately
this only worked with Windows.

I wanted to have the most reliable machine possible so I
installed windows in a machine that I had been running Linux
on for about two years. It was (is) a dual Pentium 400 MHz machine
with a 100 MHz front-side bus. This is a Tyan "Thunder" board.
This is not the latest-and-greatest. Just a good "old" reliable
machine. The machine had two SCSI disks with an Adaptec controller.

Windows installed fine. It even seemed to work. I recorded and
edited many compositions. I also backed up my files to a SCSI
tape using the Windows backup utility.

After several months of use, the machine would not boot anymore.
I had to reinstall windows from scratch since the partition was
corrupt and the distribution CD would not fix or install anything
over it. Since I didn't want to lose everything on the disk, I
bought another one, thinking I could always copy my stuff from
the original. Guess again. The original disk was so destroyed
that Linux wouldn't even recognize it. Even as a raw device I was
unable to recover any of my composition data.

Not to worry. I still have the backups. Guess again, Windows
would not read the backup data. I had just lost several months
of my life and, incidentally, some piano playing by another
pianist who will become famous someday. All lost. All gone.

I eventually replaced all my compositions, except those played
by the other pianist. This means that I had to practice over
40 compositions over and over again, then record them again.
This is a lot of "hurt" over many months.

Then the same thing happened again! The machine would no longer
boot and the file-systems were totally trashed. Also, I had bought
an external Fire-wire drive to which I wrote the backup files.
Again, after completely installing everything again, I was unable
to recover any of my data from the backup files.

To make an long-story short, the "solution", proposed by Microsoft
was to remove one of the CPUs. They said; "Windows is too powerful.
With that extra CPU, you are over-powering the machine."

This is not an isolated incident. Every Engineer I have ever worked
with (or even talked to) has similar horror stories. Every Writer
that I know of who has attempted to use Windows to keep their
life-long dreams alive, has similar horror stories. Every Artist
that I know, who used Windows has similar stories. They have all
migrated to Apple. They were not of the "Apple Generation" either.
They all started out using Windows because that's what "everybody"
used. They went to Apple because it doesn't destroy their work.

Most persons who use Linux have similar horror stories about
Windows. The difference, here, being that they thought that
no widely-used Operating System could be as bad as they found
it to be. Instead, they for the most part, though that their
problems were isolated incidents. Once they started communicating,
it became obvious that practically everybody has problems with
Windows. In the days where VAXen were the "Engineering" computers,
we had 200 Engineers, two computers, and one System Manager.
Now, those 200 Engineers require 30 "Windows Administrators"
for support, just to be able to share project directories.

They spend their time reinstalling Windows Software.

Cakewalk recently released an Apple version of "Home Studio". I'm
going to buy and Apple and convert the Windows machine back to
Linux. I wish they had ported their stuff to Linux. I would still
have some hair left.

So, if you think Windows "works", you just haven't any experience.
In a year or two, maximum, if you are trying to use a Windows
machine for any serious work, you will probably be planning a trip
to Redmond, carrying an axe.

When you talk about 40% or even 10% failure rate, you are talking
nonsense. A computing machine must never have any failures that
an end-user could detect. It's not quite six-sigma, but to the
end-user it should seem like that. Any real operating system
will not fail as long as the hardware doesn't fail. No version
of Windows qualifies.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.22 on an i686 machine (794.73 BogoMips).
Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.