Can Linux survice normal PC USE?

[gregzeng]

Can Linux survive normal PC USE? We know it works with SERVERS (eg GOOGLE.com) - with lots of professional staff, and UPS protections everywhere.

If the power goes off, anytime, will Linux easily reboot, repair itself, and then continue - like Windows XP (HOME)?

[Bangers]

Think of something Windows can do, multiply it by 5, and thats how much better Linux does it. The only thing Linux has trouble emulating/copying is pure windows stuff. (eg NTFS, Games designed for Windows platform).

To answer your question, yes it does that, far better than windows in my own opinion.

[hast]

Bangers that is a very biased comment
There are a lot of things that windows can do a lot better than linux and if you can't see them then you must be a zealot.

[Geo]

Originally posted by gregzeng

If the power goes off, anytime, will Linux easily reboot, repair itself, and then continue - like Windows XP (HOME)?

Yes.

[Bangers]

Originally posted by hast
Bangers that is a very biased comment
There are a lot of things that windows can do a lot better than linux and if you can't see them then you must be a zealot.

arrr, you must be referring to things such as speed and stability?

Your right, Windows does do the above much better than linux. I take back my comment.

[/sarcasm]

[bioxeed]

Originally posted by gregzeng
Can Linux survice normal PC USE? We know it works with SERVERS (eg GOOGLE.com) - with lots of professional staff, and UPS protections everywhere.

If the power goes off, anytime, will Linux easily reboot, repair itself, and then continue - like Windows XP (HOME)?

Yes it can. Though how well it copes with power failure depends on the filesystem you use. Not so long ago an unexpected interruption would mean disaster (or at least a very long and tedious fsck) Luckily most recent distro's have moved to a journaling fs these days and don't have that problem. reiserfs and ext3 seem to be the most popular of the journaling filesystems.

Frankly there's very little reason NOT to use linux for home and office use unless theres some specific application that just won't run under linux. even then dual booting isn't very hard to setup.

[tin]

Ext3 does wonders.... Get any new distro and you wont have any problems with power failures screwing up drives. Fixing up on reboot takes all of about 1 second even on a 20Gb drive.


And for the guy who reckons Windows does some things much better... What would that be? Have support for stuff where the company that made it is too blind to support linux? EG - Aussie Tax Office, Game companies, M$....


I live in a town of 7000-8000 (counting the entire shire... the town itself is around 4000-5000), and I personally know 2 normal everyday computer USERS that purely run Linux (except to do BAS and other Win only crap). Linux is not any problem for normal use. Give it a go.

[bioxeed]

Originally posted by tin
And for the guy who reckons Windows does some things much better... What would that be? Have support for stuff where the company that made it is too blind to support linux? EG - Aussie Tax Office, Game companies, M$....

High end CAD (though with PRO/E getting a linux port this will soon change)
Pro-Audio Applications (some would say use a mac instead for this )

what kind of latency do you get with linux sound drivers? unless you have drivers with very low latency you won't get support from the pro-audio companies for linux.

There are also some larger CAD software developers that aren't switching but PRO/E doing it is a HUGE plus for linux.

[gregzeng]

Originally posted by bioxeed


Yes it can. Though how well it copes with power failure depends on the filesystem you use. Not so long ago an unexpected interruption would mean disaster (or at least a very long and tedious fsck) Luckily most recent distro's have moved to a journaling fs these days and don't have that problem. reiserfs and ext3 seem to be the most popular of the journaling filesystems.
...

How do I know which distro uses the journaling filesystem?

With Win XP, I find it needs regular use of "SYSTEM RESTORE", "CHKDSK /F" & DEFRAG. Do the user-friendly Linux distros (SuSE, Mandrake or Lycoris) have this filesystem easily available?

Reading about Lycoris - it seems to not recognize USB, & FIREWIRE. Are there other shortcomings that we non-Linux users should know about?

[Kermalius]

Originally posted by hast
Bangers that is a very biased comment
There are a lot of things that windows can do a lot better than linux and if you can't see them then you must be a zealot.

"can do a lot better".. as opposed to "does better"? :P

semantics asside, these come down to two areas:
a) Industry support. More Win32 users = better driver and application support. Here also lies distributor support...
b) "Idiot-proof" setups. See also "wizard". Note that actually taking control of these processes (or getting a list of what they're attempting) can be difficult.

Note that on the first point, this is nothing to do with windows itself, just the fact that it covers 3/4s of the earth montior surface. On the second point, its up the user as to if this is a good or bad thing...


This is, of course, not entering into any areas linux (or other operating systems) may perform better at than win32 OS's...

[Quadbox]

Originally posted by gregzeng

How do I know which distro uses the journaling filesystem?

With Win XP, I find it needs regular use of "SYSTEM RESTORE", "CHKDSK /F" & DEFRAG. Do the user-friendly Linux distros (SuSE, Mandrake or Lycoris) have this filesystem easily available?

Reading about Lycoris - it seems to not recognize USB, & FIREWIRE. Are there other shortcomings that we non-Linux users should know about?

To the best of my knowledge, all of the current releases, of all distro's offer at least ext3, and the number offering xfs, jfs, efs, reiserfs and others is increasing by the month (xfs comes to the vanilla kernel as of 2.6 Woot!). To find out what filesystem you are using, take a look at your /etc/fstab file, in the 'type' column.

As to usb and firewire, both work fine WITH SUPPORTED DEVICES, but it's nowhere near as idiot-proof as windows and macintosh in this area. It can take a bit of fiddling.

[ConundruM]

im surprised to say this...but i aggree with hast.

both (windows+linux) have advantages and disadvantages.

windows does somethings better than linux...and linux does somethings better than windows.

your specific example I would say that linux handles improper shutdowns much better than windows when using ext3 (default Filesystem on Redhat and others).

but windows handles many devices (due to vendor support) much easier.

I use linux as my primary OS at home and my only OS at work...so i like it....but your being blind if you say that it does everything better

[elvis]

Originally posted by hast
Bangers that is a very biased comment
There are a lot of things that windows can do a lot better than linux and if you can't see them then you must be a zealot.

age old argument folks.

linux and windows both have their place in the world. i don't play games on my linux box, and i don't do word processing nor run file sharing on my windows box.

use what works best on the best platform.

[Forge]

A small note. Do any of you who say that linux recovers better from a power failure than XP/2000 use NTFS on XP/2000?

I know ext3 and reiser and jfs all do journalling but NTFS has been doing it for a lot longer. I admit fat is crap but don't knock XP/2000 just because you decided to use a poor fs. Comparing Ext3 to Fat32 is like comparing NTFS to Ext2, its apples and oranges.

Personally, I prefer windows on my desktop and something else as my servers. It comes down to using the right tools for the job.

[Jacaranda]

High end CAD (though with PRO/E getting a linux port this will soon change)
Pro-Audio Applications (some would say use a mac instead for this )

You can't exactly say this is a linux problem. If the software existed, linux would run them quite well. It woud be nice, and hopefully software developers will start porting more apps, but this is likely for a while.

I wish linux had CAD and Audio, if that were the case, the only time I'd boot to windows would be for the occasional game.