It's not just for servers any more. A German study concludes that Linux is approaching Windows XP in new user usability.

Today is my day for defending Microsoft.

Three weeks ago, I was, ah, "awarded" the Systems Administration responsibility for a moderately large local-area network, based on Windows 2000 servers and Windows XP clients. I'd never done any Windows SysAdmin work before that. I was Hobson's Choice: the only guy available who didn't drool when he spoke.

Well, sports fans, Windows administration turns out to be about the most pleasant experience this side of free pizza. As with Microsoft's Office suite, the programmatic interface is intuitive, based 100% on Visual Basic, and does exactly what it says with a minimum of fuss.

It got off to a sputtering start, but the Windows family of operating systems, and the major applications that Microsoft offers for it, are a towering achievement, unmatched by anything in the world of computer software. Do these programs have bugs? Yes. Of course they do; a program more than 1000 lines long is guaranteed to have bugs in it. Microsoft's responsiveness to fault reports equals or exceeds anything else in the industry.

With Linux, you're on your own -- and there's no beans about it.

I'm a 35-year veteran of the software trade, and I thank God for Microsoft: the first company to realize that the computer must be made accessible to ordinary people as well as computer programmers, and to act consistently on that vision. In the process, they've made things incomparably easier for us technoids, as well.

Yes, easier to introduce massive security holes to your network...

;-)

Let's take a leap hear and posit that Linux takes an ever increasing share of the PC market over time. At what point will Linux become so ubiquitous that the HaXX0r Duudz start aiming there instead of MS? I suspect the main reason that Linux is so 'secure' now is mostly because it has such a small footprint in the marketplace. Give it time.

I must admit that I have this suspicion also that the reason there aren't that many Linux holes found or virii developed is there aren't enough platforms to make it worth while.

This may not be the case of course.

We'll see as there are more and more on the desktop, but it really does have features that make it much more difficult to attack than Windows systems under their current code base (as long as one doesn't run it as root...) Perhaps Longhorn will learn from lessons from the past generation, but people developing Linux came from a much stronger security tradition, and they've been steadily sealing it up for well over a decade now.

Rand: What you say about a security tradition is true of the kernel people, and the (multiplatform) server/daemon people (though, oddly, many of them seem to have unending trails of security bugs)... but I'm not at all sure it's true of many of the userland people.

But none of that is really relevant to the main topic, which is ease of new user use... and as someone who's used linux for ages, and sees new users moving to linux every day, and how they handle it, I can't help but wonder what sort of giant crackrocks the Krauts are smoking.

Then we look closer and see that "usability" evidently means "doing simple tasks with a preconfigured system" - which is a fair enough comparison in the business or school lab domains, where someone else does the setup and maintenance. For the "mass" market, however, well, nobody's going to preconfigure linux for you, and god help the person who can barely handle email when they need to upgrade their kernel to get a new driver.

Linux is great (for what it's great for), but it's not going to hurt XP for the mass market anytime soon.

Sigivald, I believe that's being addressed. Look at Lindows and Wal-Mart: preconfigured systems and maintenance contracts for cheaper than the equivalent Windows machine could ever be sold.

It's the DIY-homebuilder who is actually in the worst spot, having to install and configure Linux himself; everyone else buys the box with the OS installed and pre-configured, and usually with the major apps installed.