Just for the sake of arguement and to bring up a few things in a non-mean way:

Quote Originally Posted by Aardpsymon
I refuse to believe that. Its like when people say that there are far fewer viruses for mac. Of course there are. If you want to catch as many credit card numbers as possible you write your virus for the mainstream OS. I very much doubt that mac OS has fewer bugs in total than Windows.
I doubt that too, big companies suck at writing software without some problem or another. Why? Because they have motivation called money where as some dude who needs something that doesn't exist has an actual need to make the software and make it work.

Basically how Linux was started. Linus needed and wanted a UNIX type OS and didn't think Minix was enough so he made his own. He didn't do it for the money he did it because he needed it.

However, I also believe people should be paid for their work. Linus has a BMW so that evens it out I guess lol.

There was a comparison on The Register - bugs in IE vs bugs in FF. They both had a similar number of bugs, but as has been said - bugs in Firefox don't compromise the entire OS. (slight irony here as I realise that "Firefox" is not in the Firefox dictionary. Haha.)
Just a quick point here on this:

When software comes on CD like for example IE, you can't see the source code to it. Open source and Free software on the other hand, come with sources, and you can actually look at it and find the bugs yourself, so, in theory mind you, these things SHOULD have more problems since you can look for them right in the code.


Lets face it - the real reason that most people don't change from IE to other browsers is that IE does the job. Sure, it makes designing a website a PITA because IE renders it COMPLETELY differently to FF, but for the average dumb user who just wants to read the news, emails and maybe visit a chatroom thats not really a problem.
I agree. My family has a lot of people in it and they all want a computer. Guess who gets phone calls (or used to before I left the country and became long distance, rendering myself more expensive to call than tech support *Giggle*) to help with computer problems? Of course

One day I got tired of my cousin calling. I had him bring the machine to my house and had the agreement of how much he'd pay me to fix it. He wouldn't pay so I took his brand new computer, installed PC-DOS on it which did wonders for price bargaining, and then when paid I just popped Linux on there and set up SSH so I could fix problems without a phone call heh.

Worked like a charm. I just set it up for updates and didn't give him root, and the box was fine.

And Re my "how do I download...." statement, how do I download the FTP client? how do I download the telnet client? point being, at some point the OS has to come with SOMETHING and it might as well be IE. Again, thinking of the home user. That will always be my argument. Its all well and good us saying we can get firefox, or even code our own browser, but in the end the home user CAN'T and MS have done the clever thing and made an OS that will sell to the home user. Why? because there are a lot more home users than people like us. That means a lot more income for them.
Again I agree. An OS needs tools to be useful, that's what makes it an OS in the first place really. I mean I could easily sit down and show someone how to install Slackware in 50 keyboard clacks or less and tell it to run init 4 at boot, and they wouldn't really know the difference after I changed the icons to look like Windows ones, but when someone buys a computer and they know damn near nothing about it, which in my experience is most of the time if you walk into any BestBuy, then they aren't going to go home and know how to partition a drive or install a whole new OS.

My Mom bought a computer not long ago. She said "Make this work" heh. For the record though, I installed SUSE on Her machine and She used it just fine.

I told Her the icons on the desktop were browsers and email clients and how to type things up, and She was fine with it. I installed multiple browsers to show Her what it meant to have a choice and She used a mixture of Firefox and Netscape and once ina while Konqueror depending on which Window Manager She used and it actually worked out.