Why Linux Is Better (was Re: OT: Solaris question)

[Leo J Mauler]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 23:10:40 -0600 (CST) Duane Attaway
<dattaway at dattaway.org> writes:
> Do you have a disk, partition, or directory free that is large 
> enough?  You can make a symbolic link of /opt somehwere 
> in the directory structure of a larger partition.  Or you can 
> mount opt into its own partition with the mount command, 
> even using a whole disk.  When you need space, call up 
> your friends ln -s and mount.  They will help you move 
> your furniture around without you breaking a sweat.

Someone from M$ wanted to know what made Linux great.

Something which M$ will never do because it would require rewriting most
of their filesystem, but which makes Linux great (especially relative to
M$ Windows) is the lack of drive letters, coupled with ln -s.

My wife wants a hard drive upgrade.  I have a spare 20GB drive to put in
there, but she has so many things which are installed on D: that
installing it will be a royal pain.  This is because the first Windows
partition on the second hard drive is *always* given drive letter D:.  No
exceptions!  

So in order to add the second hard drive, I would have to create a 10GB
partition on the 20GB hard drive (half its size) to match the current
10GB hard drive partition on the current hard drive which is drive D:. 
Then I would need to copy over the 9GB of files on the current drive D:
partition.  I would need to reboot her computer into KNOPPIX because M$
has decreed that some of the files on D: are system files which cannot be
moved in Windows.

I'm avoiding this for a little while because I have another Windows
computer with a 5GB share on the network, and I have some of her files
stored there to cover some of her needs.

What is worse is that once I install this second drive, all of the drive
letters move around.  Suddenly, her DVDROM/CDROM drive is no longer drive
I:.  Suddenly, all her applications can't find the CDROM drive for the
program CD.  Suddenly, many things don't work anymore.  Two solutions: if
the application has a user-accessible config file, change the position of
the CDROM drive in the config file; if the application does not have a
user-accessible config file, *reinstall the application*.

If she had been running Linux, I would have installed the new hard drive,
partitioned and formatted it, and added an entry into /etc/fstab.  THE
END.  No applications would have suddenly found their important files
missing.  No system files mysteriously located on drive H: when they used
to be on drive D:, because there are no drive letters.  Her CDROM drive
would *still* located at /mnt/cdrom, not suddenly moving from I: to M:.

Hours of work in Windows, versus less than an hour including the physical
hard drive install in Linux.

Secondly, ln -s.  In M$ Windows, you can create "shortcuts".  These allow
you to open a file in an application, such as double-clicking on a
shortcut to a M$ Word document.  But they are very limited.  Another
application I have in Windows refuses to use the C:WINDOWSFONTS
directory, so I have to have two copies of every font on my system to use
that desktop publishing program.  Windows shortcuts don't let you use the
actual file the shortcut links to, so I can't create shortcuts in the DTP
app directory linking to Fonts in the C:WINDOWSFONTS, because those are
the shortcuts to the files and not treated the same as the files
themselves.

In Linux, symbolic links are essentially the same as M$ Windows
shortcuts, but they are also treated the same as the files themselves.  I
can select a symbolic link to a file to open it in OpenOffice.  I can't
do the same thing with a shortcut in Windows, I have to know the actual
location of the file rather than the location of the shortcut.  And Linux
can create symbolic links to directories as well, meaning that I can move
/opt anywhere on the system.  Or take an existing install which has /usr
as its own partition, and use a symbolic link to move /usr/local onto its
own partition.  With Windows, the drive is the drive.  You can't tell
Drive D: to also be Drive H:.

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