[aclug-L] Re: LInux sucks

[Greg House <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

re: "Linux sucks"

I can't tell you then number of times that I've said "Windows sucks", or "NT
sucks" or whatever... <grin>

However, Linux, as an OS, generally has pretty tight security features. That
doesn't necessarily mean your distribution doesn't do stuff that breaks 'em, or
your mail application, or something odd about your configuration. It seems like
it'd be more fair to say "Mandrake sucks" or "kmail sucks" or "vericad sucks"
or "crackers suck" then to say Linux sucks. That would be like me saying
Windows sucks because I don't like something Outlook did for me. Yeah, there's
some vague connection between Windows and Outlook, but it's not Windows that
did the offending deed.

I don't understand the text you saw on your screen before the problem, but
here's a possible theory. You said you saw that and immediately powered your
machine down, right? If that was the case, perhaps the message was just that,
nothing but text...it wasn't doing anything, but...when you power cycled it,
that caused some disk corruption. I had a disk corrupted a couple of months ago
by power cycling the system. (it was a Windows system, it trashed the registry 
and it wouldn't boot, required me to reload Windows, the fact that I had a
Linux partition on the system and was able to boot that was the only reason I
didn't lose all my data off the Windows side...) I've also see a "fake trojan"
mail message that would pop up a box that claimed it was deleting all your
files (showed something that looked like a delete confirmation message for each
file on your hard drive), but it didn't really DO anything. That one ran on
windows, and it was an actual application, but it seems within the realm of
possibility that something like that could be done.

The other possibility is that someone actually cracked something and exploited
a bug. A bug is a bug and there is no OS on earth that doesn't have some. Linux
isn't exept. Neither is Solaris, or Windows NT. If there was a security
problem, I bet it'd get fixed a lot faster on Linux then on NT. And just
because something has a bug (even a pretty bad one) doesn't mean that it sucks.

Greg

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