Wagahai’s corner

Discussion of operating systems and platform are as bad as discussions about religion or politics. There are reasons behind someone’s choice to back one over another and 99% of the time you won’t change someone’s mind.

An example.. I’m a PC guy and use RH Linux for my servers and Windows for my workstations. I’m comfortable with Linux as my server choice because that’s what I started on. I know how to make it do what I want. Why RedHat? I tried them after slackware buggered up the glib support back on slak 4.0 and never went back. I really haven’t given the other distros a try recently since I’m comfortable with what I have. Likewise, with Windows.. I have XP pro on all of my workstations. I know how to keep it running in a way I’m comfortable with and I like certain software that only runs on Windows.

Better choices? Sure - my RedHat 9 machine won’t do a simple 2 command upgrade like fbsd and upgrade every program. It’s not as handy as other Linux flavors either. I’d love to have the support from OpenBSD to place firewall rules based on remote OS detection, that’s just plain cool. As for Windows “security”.. I’ve not had a virus, spyware or anything since moving to XP. Windows runs the programs I want to run.. for better or worse. Only time I’ve had the blue screen of death in recent years has been due to a hardware failure (power supply which also corrupted the drive)..

..so why would I want to change?

Sure, I like playing with technology.. so I will probably have a Mac someday. I really want to play with quicktime editing at some point.. so far that’s the 1 application I need a Mac to use (for specialized purpose). Chances are, once I go to virtual machines more, I will have a few virtual machines to try out other OSs.. but for my day to day work, I can’t see changing.

..and for those of you reading, I don’t expect that what works for me would work for you either.