I am aware of that. It has been a "feature" for a long time. I was talking of a fresh install though. In any case, all operating systems have problems. There is no such thing as a perfect OS.

Hmmm... other hardware will also affect the box, but maybe it's just the D'hell I had that was the problem. Glad your's works well for you.

I'm not exactly sure where you got your information on XP, or what your experience is with it, but I would not classify a 1GHz pc with 128MB of RAM a GREAT setup for XP. It is a minimal setup for usability. It will work, but not with any kind of speed. On the other hand, XFCE or fluxbox window managers on Linux will be quite happy with that hardware. To be REALLY fair, no modern system will be blazing with those specs.

Also, I don't know when the last time you did a Linux configuration was, but it is far more simple than it was a year or two ago. I have not had any of the "massive, time-costly research" that you indicated in any of my many installs this year.

As soon as people agree that every OS sucks, we can get on with our lives and forget this petty bickering.

Why should he be any different than the average slashdotter?

I am a full-time network administrator, without any IT degrees. I am just finishing my associates degree, and have taken some training from SANS.org, but had little IT experience when I was hired. The jobs are out there, but hard to find.

Actually, I use that quite a lot from a liveCD distro. Great way to securely wipe a disk. dd if=/dev/urandom of/dev/sda1 is better though.