From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <8cb4718761b0024730026c919e1d5a3a@davidashen.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] UN to fund linux for the 3rd world
Date: Thu,  2 Sep 2004 23:54:57 +0500
From: dvd@davidashen.net
In-Reply-To: <9630f037594241e95e7f99a025d54d9d@proxima.alt.za>
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For me, as for somebody who uses computers actively enough, a good
OS is one that helps solve my everyday tasks efficiently without falling
into the trap of following the fashion of useless stupid features forced
upon us by commercial hardware vendors so that we always by faster
computers.

Linux is indistinguishable from Windows.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/comments/dbaigent/Weblog/the_linux_ui_that_has

It is just another bloated OS with unstable kernel and bad performance.

Plan 9 is nice, but has numerous bugs here and there which need constant
fixing to get it work for my needs (I was fixing a couple per week during
my last intercourse with this OS -- the first one was in mid-nineties; it
was unusable at that time). It is here to prove its own superiority, not to
serve as a tool. 

4.4BSD family is the least inconvenient among usable ones. They still don't
want to be just another VMS Personal Edition (while Linux is there already,
with a lonely but fading exception of Debian); and they provide environment
convenient enough to do everyday's work.

For the everyday work of mine, a BSD is the tool (including my Fujitsu T1120
subnotebook with FreeBSD on it), and the rest of the zoo 
(Debian, Win 2000, Plan 9,  Solaris) are test platforms.  

It is better than Plan 9 because I don't have to debug its kernel to
do my day-to-day application programming; better than a recent Linux
because I don't have to adjust my code to performance traps of the
process scheduler and filesystem idiocy; and it provides a good
alternative to many bloated GNU unixish tools. Win2000 would be nice
if it didn't inherit all the faults of VMS along with some of its advantages.

David