I know some folks have said this here, but I don't believe it. This is one claim someone will have to prove to me. Every hardware manufacturer there is supports Windows first, and many support only Windows. XP installed off the OEM or retail CD will support just about everything I can think of except TV Tuners, and MCE supports most of those. If Linux supports more kinds of hardware, and I don't know that it does, then I am betting it is mostly stuff the average person doesn't need.
IME OEM Windows discs are just normal Windows discs, they just bundle them alongside the driver discs.
There's no doubt Linux supports more hardware, the fact that it supports ~25 architectures alone puts it over the top. And there are hardware manufacturers that support Linux first. AMD64 was tested first on Linux beceause the port was so easy, Intel had PCI Express patches for the kernel before the and there's probably other stuff that I don't remember.
Speaking of stuff the average person doesn't need to do...
You asked how the networking was better, the average person doesn't need anything more than TCP/IP and a DHCP client so the question doesn't really apply anyway. Why does MS include all of that VPN crap if the average person doesn't need it? The average person could get by on Linux just fine too. Web browsing, email, word processing, photo editing, etc all work just fine and are provided by free apps.
Your comment about tracert I simply don't understand. Tracert spends virtually all of its time waiting for ICMP TTL expired packets to come back from servers. As a software developer I would be amazed if the o/s had any effect on its performance at all. You could write it in Javascript and it would run just as fast.
I understand that's how it's supposed to work and I think most of the problem is in the Windows resolver, it's like 10x slower than the Linux one. I have a perl script for work that spends 99% of it's time doing DNS requests and it takes ~5 minutes to run on Linux but would take like a half hour or more on Windows. For instance, running traceroute to a host 3 hops away on this Linux notebook takes 0.018s. On a Windows box on the same network, same DNS servers, etc running a tracert to the same host takes 7.5s. No, 7s isn't long but the magnitude of difference is obvious and when using it on the Internet the delay is much more noticable and annoying.
You can't argue that it wouldn't. It might result in more. Until the same number of attackers are probing for holes you can't claim anything like the coverage of potential exploits that Windows gets. I'll grant you that Unix was more secure for a long time, but that was largely because the OS had a longer history of being run in more sensitive environments. Linux? Who knows? Linux adoption is miniscule. It's a statistical inkblot.
Technically you can't argue either way, it's all speculation. But I think it's fair to say that Linux exposure has gone up many magnitudes in the past 10 years and the number of exploits has not risen in tandem. And there are security holes fixed all the time that were never found by blackhats because there's simply more people reading the source code. The whole "many eyes" thing is a bit extreme, but it does work to an extent. And with companies like IBM, HP, RedHat, etc all supporting Linux I'm sure they have people doing just security related work. But as I said, most security problems are with userland apps that aren't technically part of Linux, things like Apache have been running on unix with huge amounts of exposure for a very long time.
I won't argue this point. Windows started out as a chunk of swiss cheese, but you can't lump "unix-like" systems together and call it reflective of Linux security. For one thing, over 90% of the last thirty years just about all "unix-like" systems were run by professional system administrators. Even then the security of the system depended largely on how good the admin was, and that is still true. Today the admin is very often some Joe running a home system.
Sure I can, you can't claim that Linux developers haven't learned anything from the past problems. No, they won't catch them all automatically but it still helps a lot. And as I said, distributions like Ubuntu don't install anything actively listening on the network, not even ssh, so the chance of exploitation is a lot lower.
Some folks have trouble with it, I'm sure, but I bet the solution is pretty simple and easy to identify.
And I say the same thing about a lot of Linux problems that new users have, if you know what to look for anything can be considered easy to fix.
Sure, it's a little annoying, and somewhat time-consuming. But, like I said before, never in the process am I left wondering, "will this work?" or "what do I do next?" Linux for me is always a nightmare and a half. Whenever I have an issue, there's less than 50% chance I can figure out how to resolve it in a timely manner (IE, within a day). That's why I never keep it installed.
I'm always wondering whether the next Windows patch will break something of mine, MS' history is too jaded for me not to. And Linux is a nightmare because you don't understand the system, you have an advantage with Windows in that you already understand it. Imagine being a lawnmower repair man and being asked to fix a diesel engine, they both perform similar functions but the inner workings are different enough that you won't be able to just jump in and fix it without some work.
Even if true, that means absolutely nothing. While it would be nice to have Windows XP and all my drivers on one disc, it's not by any means necessary. I honestly don't mind a few reboots in the installation process. With Linux, if by some chance the driver isn't included with the distro, I'm screwed. I have to look for obscure third-party drivers on the net (using a Windows partition of course, because without drivers I can't access the net through Linux). Then I have to figure out how to install them. To this day I can't figure out how to install my external DSL modem or SoundBlaster Audigy LS (hopefully that will change later today). You call that easier?
Of all of my machines only 1 of them requires a 3rd party driver (I do install the closed nVidia driver, but it's not required for X to run) that 1 driver will be included in the kernel eventually since it's GPL'd. And as for your Audigy, I know most of the Audigy models are supported out of the box but I have no idea what chipset the LS uses so I can't say for sure. And my cable modem 'just works' because it's not attached to any device, I just plug it into the network.
I agree with you, here. Even if Linux were full of more potential holes, it still wouldn't matter, because, for better or worse, it is not being attacked as relentlessly as Windows. On the flipside, though, does that one strength outweigh all its apparent weaknesses? I don't think so.
No, you don't agree with me. I'm saying Linux doesn't have as many problems and increased exposure won't be a big deal. The token example is Apache vs IIS, Apache has nearly 70% of the webserver marked and yet IIS has a much worse security history. Apache has had problems, but nothing anywhere near as bad as things like CodeRed.