water cooler :: Which Distro?

ke4nt1 et al - I have always thought MS's high maintenance & installation costs are, paradoxically, partly behind its market dominance.

It goes like this. Back in the mid/late 90s a study was done on the number of IT support staff a large organization required to support Windows desktops as opposed to supporting Apple Mac. This was back when Billy G was so confident of his dominance as to publicly admit that MacOS was of course superior to Win.

The results were not surprising: a Wintel-based organization required MANY times the number of support staff than did a Mac-based organization. Everyone knew why without ever reading the thing: Macs crashed very much less often, were less susceptible to viruses etc, were of much better build quality and were easier to learn and use because the interface was much better designed. Apple R&D, such as their subsequent development of quicktime, firewire and getting usb to work, was way ahead. Apple obviously also did more prerelease testing and bug fixing than MS, for whom everything was (and is) effectively a beta release.

So Macs needed far fewer support staff. But they were more expensive. Outside the US, they were (and are) MUCH more expensive, and training staff in both Apple engineer certification + MS Win was double the time and expense.

Now, if you are an ambitious senior corporate IT manager, which platform do you want:

(1) the one that gives you many more staff (hence a big empire & salary package to match) but seemingly lower hardware costs in the short term; or

(2) then one that gives you many fewer subordinates (hence a small salary package) and embarrassingly high hardware costs to fight with Finance over each year?

It's a basic rule of corporate politics that (1) will win outright despite the false economies. The accountants are going to say "why aren't you buying CrappyTel PCs when these are half the cost of Macs?" Since they'll scream blue murder when an IT support person doesn't instantly materialize when their Excel crashes, they won't query your demand for two gadzillion junior IT support people to keep their nasty CrappyTel boxes running and to worship at your feet.

I'm not saying it's all of the explanation but it's a big part of the reason Macs lost the battle for the desktop. It could've been an Apple world .... (sigh).

However now Steve J & Co have effectively built their OS from unix, we can see a convergence of sorts between the second & third string OSs (Mac & Linux).

And all of China is switching to 'Red Flag' Linux, with the rest of Asia using AsiaNux? Watch out Bill.

yeah.

DSL is my all time fav. It was on my first completely working linux box, it's so simple, works on almost everything, and is a perfect intro to linux. can't leave it alone. it dual boots with WIN98 on an old 200Mhz P2. From there i went to Mepis Linux because I am dumb and need a graphical interface, it runs on my main box with WIN98. Now, after using those for a while, i have just installed Fedora Core 3 (the only OS) on our newest machine and am teaching my 11 year old step-son about linux.

he gets the DSL box.

Nice post, woofy..

I get to use/repair/upgrade a few G4's at work..
Mac has always had a really tight OS, and excellent hardware support.
They should, since they were the ONLY ones making and selling it !
( except for the "power computing" brand.. )

If you KNOW whats in the box, its easy to write good code for it.
Must be nice to MAKE the hardware AND write the software for it.
No Cyrix, IBM, Intel, AMD, issues.. It's all MAC

I think the OS9 and earlier versions were very solid, as long as you
maintenanced the hard drives and kept your fonts and drivers clean.

I hope the OSX proves to be as roadworthy over the long haul.
Now that mac has a "shell" , I imagine vulnerabilities will arise..

73
ke4nt

Fedora Core 3 sucked. had to revert back to DSL. it's so tight.

...carry on

you missed out knoppix

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