The Great Linux-vs-NT Debate

Philosophy

Linux

Free access to all aspects of the systems.
Free software and free support.
Simply a matter of choice and personal preference.

NT

Limited to what Microsoft thinks you need
Pay for everything.
You are extremely limited in how you can figure your system. If it was not forseen my Microsoft, the only way is to buy a compiler and make programmatic changes. This assumes that you can even find where the changes need to be made.

Linux as well as most of the associate programs were designed by people for themselves. They had a particular need and developed something to solve the need for themselves. There was no "marketing strategy" behind the products, such solving a problem. Things were made simple to use, as compared to looking "pretty" because the developers wanted functionality and were not trying to sell it. In addition, since the programs are designed and programmed by the actual users, there is a very strong motivation to get it right and correct problems quickly (as they have the same problem themselves.)

Being software for and by users, there's no marketing-hype, smoke, or mirrors to mislead user-expectations, MIS or management. When a feature is missing in Linux, it's discussed among the users and programmers and not marketing. The decision is made based on the true usefulness of the feature and not how marketing can sell it.

Linux is free. You are free to copy it all you want. You are free to change it all you want. Microsoft wants completely control over your software even to the point of and thus disabling your software remotely. The same law would prevent your from even ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

Windows 98 has a "bug" that allows Microsoft to read your hardware and software configuration across the Internet. One of Microsoft's managers, Robert Bennet, said "If it's really so, we would have to fix it." Although a which denies any improper behavior has been available for some time on Microsoft's site, there is still no patch. Added to that a unique identifier is stored in MS-Office documents. The claim by Microsoft is that these are unrelated and "it is impossible to use this unique identifier to determine which PC user created any given document. The Office 97 identifier is unrelated to the Windows registration process, and these two numbering systems never converge. "

Since both are based on the MAC address of your Ethernet card both parts of that statement are not true. First, if you are registered with Microsoft using Windows 98 and create a document using MS-Word 97 there is an immediate 1:1 association between your registration information and that Word document. Less than ten minutes before I wrote this, I created a word document. The unique identifier is:

{ 6 1 C D A 9 E 0 - E 1 4 F - 1 1 D 2 - A F C 4 - 0 0 A 0 2 4 A 1 F 2 A A }

The MAC address on my Ethernet card is 0 0 A 0 2 4 A 1 F 2 A A. This has also been verified by several other sources, so it cannot be a coincidence. Since the unique identifier in the MS-Word document is based on the same number as the unique identified for your hardware information, it is flat out untrue that "these two numbering systems never converge." Do you really want to buy software from a company that makes such blatantly untrue statements?

Have you ever seen a Linux "shareware behavior" program? Either it's a very powerful commercial product, or it's free.

One of the most annoying things I find about Microsoft products is the apparent attitude that they "know better." How often have you had a Microsoft product force a certain behavior on you? Examples:

Name a directory OLD and NT forces it to be named Old.
Type the name of a drive letter directly into FrontPage (e.g. D:) and it is forced to be a link to that directory.
Mark a bullet FrontPage with a particular format (e.g. H1) and each individual line is forced to have this format, not the entire block which you marked, but rather each line.1
Try to create a form within a table in FrontPage so you can get the right spacing. FrontPage insists it knows better and forces you to have multiple tables, thereby messing up the layout.
I have recently installed a couple of Microsoft products and Internet Explorer 4.0 was still installed without asking. In addition, IE 4.0 was made the default browser/view for htm, html, and related files, without asking. One product required "Microsoft Messaging" and without asking it screwed up my email.
Microsoft Word and other MS-Ofice applications force the path to the group templates to be the UNC name (i.e. \\server\share\directory) despite inputing the drive letter path (i.e p:\directory). In the logon script, specific shares are connected to specific drives so it is uniform across the company. When we moved the directory containing the templates to a new server, we did not change the drive letter, but the UNC pointed to the wrong server. Total cost of owning NT went up because of having to make the changes on hundreds of machines by hand.

1Someone told me that it did not make sense to want bullet list to be a heading. Whether it makes sense or not is opinion, and I can if I want according to the HTML spec. What if you want the headings to be numbered? MS knows better and forces the formatting to the way it "thinks is best."