>In short, sir, what substitute is there for reliability?
Coffee...humungous liver-destroying quantities of the stuff. When
reliability fails, this substance is a great stop-gap :)
To be serious though, David_F has a valid point. There's two spheres of
the OS world...the commercial & the rest. For every little inconsistancy,
strangeness, or unreliable behaviour linux might exhibit in the domestic,
non-business sense, the users within this sphere will only loose some
time.
In a corporate sense, the addage is true...'time is money'..and so
these things would not just be deemed unfortunate or a little problem
likely to be resolved (in time) from the linux community...it would be
described as 'unacceptable incurred cost'. People cite that they can get
answers regarding (for instance) NT, but then infer that the fact that you
have to pay MONEY for said answers (by the hour) is in someway 'bad' or
perhaps coupled to greed. This is of course absolute bollocks, and no
doubt drawn from a mistaken angle of including the business sector in the
domestic one.
In real terms, for a company to pay someone say $175/hr to fix a trouble
with the example OS here (NT), is not so surprizing, nor unacceptable.
However, you'd need the services of a highly qualified HEAD SHRINK if you
were thinking about spending this money on your home peecee's troubles
with linux.
At least draw a line somewhere...I myself find this highly amusing,
considering I've come from over a decade of Amiga ONLY one-eyed,
tunnel-visioned support. You really can't equitably debate these two
spheres of computer use...whatever the OS. Whilst I recognize there are a
great many commercial enterprizes out there running linux as their base,
in house networking OS, there is no way a lot of big companies will head
that way, for all the reasons cited in this thread. Companies can go out
and buy an OS that *will* run on just about any peecee, that *will* behave
or misbehave consistantly, that *will* be somewhat familiar to all it's
employees (without, as David points out, the neccessity of having fulltime
people employed to fix & re-educate people for linux's idiosyncracies),
and if a problem arises, same company can BUY a solution.
Would I set up a company tomorrow, based on linux OS for it's networking?
Yes....but only if all involved had a knowledge, dedication, and interest
with working with this (dare I say it) 'as yet incomplete' OS. Without
that caveat though, a most definate NO. I doubt I could even speculate
what it would be like to change from a mainstream OS (in a business
implementation) to something like linux...if for little other reason than
I'd wonder what all the employees would think, when they're home peecees
suddenly became things running a different OS than the one at work.
The equations are much more complex than just 'which is the better OS',
because this in itself is just a part of the blindness. Such is the nature
of the computing industry, that it is always 'mobile'..progressing at a
rate determined by the aquisition of knowledge, and the advancements in
the technology it is bound by.
Cheers!
Db
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