unless you have the chance to see with your own eyes the commercial
OS's source code, I doubt you can tell whether your Win95 crash is
due to a hardware problem, a software flaw (maybe coming from an odd
mix of config options ? :) or a typo.
Anyway by now you'll probably have noticed that the Linux kernel
developers (I'm not among them, I work as a tech consultant at
Oracle Italy, with 4yrs hunting SunOS and Solaris bugs - remember
Solaris 2.1 ? no ? lucky man ! - while working as sysadmin and DBA
at my previous workplace) mostly share a view that goes:
1) Linus is THE maintainer, and he is wise enough to do the right
thing all the time, whether it comes from his mind or from a
bright suggestion. (Other Linux geniuses, please do not assume
I am telling there's only Linus. You know who you are.)
2) Linus definitely lives 24 hours a day, though his work on the
kernel may make us think he goes from 48 to 72 hours a day.
3) The 2.0 series is not yet stable, but who used 1.3.60 to 1.3.90
feels it's already great. Not enough to be put on CD and made
a RedHat 4.0 or the like, granted... but the testing process is
more like distributed computing than a centralized thing. Linus
actually is one person, again. (BTW I had zero crashes/hangs
since 2.0.0 - now at 2.0.10)
4) Linux is free. You may tell the developers you found a bug, they
will even fix it; there is no reason you should get nervous for
a typo. I guess who made the typo already slapped himself - we
have a bunch of proud guys, IMHO.
My own 2 cents:
- You can't install Oracle on {HP-UX, AIX, Olivetti SVR4 Unix} from
CD straight because the first two OS's do not fully support the
file name extensions on CD (so you have to run a dumb program
that takes a file containing the non-extended filenames and makes
symlinks to them for a few THOUSAND files, not very fast indeed),
the third (my surprise today) does not even support iso9660 fs,
you need to install software that comes separately from the OS.
Ask about Linux.
- I benchmarked gawk 2.15.6 against HP-UX 10.01 awk a few weeks ago
on a testcase that produced 60MB output: HP-UX awk ran at ~40000
records/minute, gawk at ~62500. What now.
I could go on, but I already said a lot. Oh, I share the developers'
view, in case you doubted.
--alessandro