I have never owned a system where Linux "just works". Most users purchase computers with licensed and customized operating system images.

And if you purchase your computer with Linux pre-installed by a vendor, it will work even better.

Replacing these with a hacked together 1970's operating system designed to work over dumb terminals is simply beyond retarded

Not as retarded as keeping an overpriced, hacked together 1970's operating system from a bunch of people who think that "multi-role" support is the future and that Amiga was the state of the art in operating systems in the 1980's.

Linux on the desktop is a non-starter. Its marketshare reflects this.

It is, although that has mostly to do with Microsoft's monopolistic practices. Fortunately, "the desktop" itself is going away. Hopefully, along with it, the incompetence up in Redmond will go out of business as well and the industry can finally move beyond both Linux and NT.

In terms of total number of installed Linux kernels in the world, Linux probably already has NT beat hands down.

What more modern approaches?

Managed programming languages, virtual machines, etc. All of that was around in the 1980's already.

Can you name a better language for writing kernels? C is basically the optimal language for writing system code. You haven't presented a revolutionary alternative yet.

Modula-3 and CEDAR/MESA come to mind, but kernels have been written in managed languages.

And C is about as far from being "optimal" for writing a many million line kernel as any language can be.

Virualization is big because UNIX is too awkward to work as a multi-role server

UNIX and Linux actually offer all the "multi-role" support you could possibly imagine and want: access control, isolation, namespace manipulations, and various forms of virtualization. Among all of those, people choose virtualization because it's the least hassle and the easiest to manage.

And you are absolutely right that NT has focused on "multi-role" support, including elaborate security and user mechanisms from the start. But that's not the sign of a modern kernel, it's a sign of an obsolete 1960's design. By doing so, Microsoft missed the boat on all the other approaches and is now trying to catch up.

Let's just be clear about this: Linux gives users a choice about what level of "multi-role" support they want, and their choice is "very little".

so you use virtualized myopic UNIX servers to replace what could otherwise be done by Java EE or .NET.

That claim makes absolutely no sense at all, since the Java EE approach was developed on UNIX and Linux. And once you run your servers in managed virtual machines, you don't need all the elaborate kernel-based "multi-role" support anyway. That's another reason the "multi-role" support in NT is superfluous and obsolete.

The only other "modern" systems I can think of from the beginning of the NT era are Amiga and eventually BeOS.

Yeah, that's because you obviously don't know anything, and neither did the people at Microsoft. Microsoft's OS developers in the 1980's and 1990's were a bunch of PC hackers plus industry wash-ups who had no idea what the state of the art in computer science actually was, and they developed a third rate OS that was obsolete from the start.

Let me tell you; its because neither you nor anybody you care about are affected.

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

Let me give you an example; between 1998 and 2004 about 4 million were killed in the second congo war; and that was a fairly localised conflict.

And in what way are we responsible for that, or responsible for fixing their problems? The most likely outcome of interfering in their wars is to make things worse, not better.

A basic problem with both of those packages is that they're database applications without a database.

It's a lot of work, but if you want high performance and/or have limited compute resources, that is often the way to go.

The big commercial DNS systems are all database-based.

They probably also throw 10x the amount of hardware and personnel at the problem than is strictly speaking needed.

Does the word "cloud" have any particular meaning?

I always thought it referred to a visible, translucent collection of tiny water droplets suspended in air high above ground level.

I don't have to supply facts, you do: you claim that Windows is objectively better than UNIX on a number of dimensions (e.g., driver development time, bloat, energy efficiency, etc.), but you don't supply a shred of evidence. Therefore, your claims of Windows' superiority is just a bunch of hot air (and quite implausible, too, given how Linux eats Windows' lunch in the embedded market).

Technologies like Java and .NET are the rational solution to having countless single-purpose archaic unix servers virtualized in order to provide inefficient mock-ups of multi-role systems.

Yes... and why are people using those "countless single-purpose archaic unix servers"? Because Microsoft perpetuated this archaic model in the 1980's and 1990's when it decided to follow that model with NT, rather than any of the more modern approaches. Microsoft's lack of vision and innovation in the 1980's and 1990's is responsible for why we still program in C/C++ and use UNIX-like kernels.

It took Sun and the Java community to drive managed languages, garbage collection, and virtual machines into industry and server applications. It took Microsoft a decade to catch on to that one.

It's a good thing the enterprise IT market doesn't share your critical lack of vision.

You should be more concerned about your and Microsoft's critical lack of vision. Throughout its decades long history, every major Microsoft product has merely been a reaction to industry trends and either been cloned or acquired.

Given your passionate defense of Linux as somehow comparable to the Microsoft platform,

"Comparable" only in the sense that both of them are obsolete junk. But since I have to choose one or the other, I prefer the cheaper, simpler, open source junk.

I'm going to assume your time is pretty worthless to you

Anybody whose time is valuable would be a fool to run Windows: any serious computing on Windows is a bottomless time sink. On standard hardware, Linux just works.

Many people object to genetically engineered foods not because they fear that the end product is unsafe, but because of the impact that growing them has on farmers, the economy, and the environment.

I'm not concerned about eating genetically engineered beets.

The real problem with "eliminating the choice to eat non-engineered beets" is that it would make all sugar beets effectively proprietary: farmers have been successfully sued for growing genetically engineered crops even when that was due to contamination from adjacent fields.

Of course, a better way of dealing with all this would be to eliminate patents on genetically engineered crops altogether but ease the approval process.

I would like nothing more than to dump Windows, but I need wireless networking

Every laptop and desktop I have installed Ubuntu on over the last year has had wireless working. Most common wireless cards either have an open source driver or a proprietary driver that Ubuntu loads for you. (In a real pinch, you can use a $10 USB WiFi stick.)

phone sync,

No desktop phone sync I have used on Windows or OS X ever has worked quite right. The problem isn't the syncing itself, it's the different data models between the desktop apps and the phone, with the desktop apps usually being too complicated and out of step. FWIW, Linux supports SyncML, plus special purpose WinMo and Palm sync libraries.

But I have a better idea for you: join the 21st century and sync your phone to the cloud. It's easier and better. Nokia syncs to Ovi and Google, and most other phones sync at least to Google.

and 3D graphics first

Both nVidia, ATI, and Intel cards are fully supported on Ubuntu, 3D and all. Dual display works easily for some cards, but requires some playing around for others.

The rest I can play with.

The rest you don't need to play with at all, since "printer, webcam, bluetooth dongle, external hard drive" really just work.

I have a radical idea: maybe you should actually *use* Vista or Windows 7 before slamming it. Just a thought.

Vista, like previous versions of Windows, requires driver installs for any piece of hardware that I plug in. They seem to have short-circuited the dialog box so that for some hardware that I plug in, it looks for the driver itself somewhere and installs it. However, the process still causes things to pause for a significant period and is far from "just works".

For a lot of other hardware, it really requires driver CDs, and a lot of devices come with little stickers over their USB ports that say "STOP! Install driver CD first." Apparently, if you don't, bad things happen.

So, I'm sorry to say, it's you who is "completely wrong".

Yes, it's an easy claim to make. It's frustrating to watch computer science die under the thumb of unix zealots. The industry has become regressive.

Yes, it has, and Microsoft is chiefly responsible for that regression. In the 1980's and 1990's, Microsoft had an opportunity to deliver truly modern operating systems and development environments. What did they give us instead? Another bloated C/C++ kernel, GUI libraries written in C/C++, bad imitations of visual programming environments, and (lately) a Java clone.

Now the Microsoft pot (NT kernel, MFC, etc.) is calling the kettle (Linux kernel, Qt, Gtk+) black. Give me a break. Linux at least has an excuse for being cheap and old tech. But with its hundreds of billions sunk into Windows, Microsoft should have been doing a lot better.

If I have to use 1970's operating system technologies, at least I'm going to stick to the open source technology with the simpler architecture, instead of the overdesigned, overpriced, marketing driven corporate bloatware.

If Microsoft actually ever starts delivering 21st century software and software that isn't just a badly executed clone of someone else's ideas, then I'll give them another try.

[long diatribe]

You haven't given a single fact in your diatribe, all you do is state your religiously held beliefs as truth.

We have an entire generation of shoddy insecure servers and energy wasting devices now because of a mix of laziness, illogical penny-pinching, and a religious following behind Linux.

Actually, it's not penny pinching. People like me have given Windows a good chance, again and again, and it simply doesn't work well for our purposes. Your mistake is that you assume that a "superior" design or architecture would matter, even if Windows possessed it. There are far more important things than that.

Of course, I would disagree with your assertion anyway. Having used two of Cutler's systems extensively, my conclusion is that the guy is (to use your words) a complete "moron". He couldn't design a decent kernel if his life depended on it. The NT kernel exhibits the classical second system effect, building on the experience of an already completely overdesigned VMS kernel.

"This picture has been manipulated. The French president appears considerably taller than he is in real life."

(Heaven help us when there are French leaders who have issues with their height.)

The Windows kernel is tiny and modern. It's practically a microkernel and about a decade or two ahead of linux in architecture. When people complain about Windows, they're not talking about the NT kernel. There is no comparable open source equivalent.

And this "modern architecture" buys me... what? Is it easier to develop drivers for Windows? Is Windows more stable? Does it perform better? Does it require less time or money to develop? Is it cheaper to buy? The answer to all of those is, for practical purposes, "no".

Kernels are supposed to do only a few things: move bits back and forth between devices and users, manage memory, and keep users and processes out of each other's hair. That's not rocket science, and it doesn't require a complicated architecture or complex OOD.

Sure, Linux has some software engineering problems, but so does Windows. Both of them use inherently unsafe languages. On balance, there is very little real-world difference between the two.

One could design and implement a better, less bloated kernel than either Linux or Windows, one that has genuinely useful functionality that doesn't exist in either of them. But so far, nobody has bothered because it's not really worth the effort and there are more important things to spend one's software development time on.