Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace

[James Knott]

Tim Writer wrote:
> James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> writes:
> 
>> billt-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org wrote:
>>>> Incidentally, a few years ago, I was supporting users on OS/2, Windows
>>>> 95 and NT.  One thing I found is that once an OS/2 user was set up and
>>>> running, I almost never heard from them again.  W95 generated many
>>>> problems and while NT was much better than W95, it still wasn't anywhere
>>>> near as good as OS/2.
>>>>
>>> OS/2 had its share of weird problems, but to its defence it did successfully solve the 'stupid user' problem without sacrificing usability. Did you know that there was a way to add code to the kernel at configuration time.
>> I haven't done that, but there were a lot of things you could do.  OS/2
>> supported hardware profiles long before Windows did.
>>
>> Just this morning, during breakfast with some friends, one of OS/2's
>> benefits came up.  I was mentioning how I was recently working on a
>> Windows problem, where about 150 GB of a 750 GB drive was unusable on a
>> Windows server, because of the number of files was maxed out, despite
>> all the free space.  That would have never happened on OS/2 with HPFS,
>> as there's no concept of clusters.  And of course, in Linux, we'd just
>> change the number of inodes.
> 
> Also, the mkfs defaults are such that it's pretty rare to run out of inodes on
> Linux.
> 
> On a related note, I'm constantly astonished Windows still doesn't have a
> file system that doesn't need regular defragging to maintain good
> performance. Afterall, BSD FFS was around when MS began work on NT and, given
> the BSD licence, they could have just used it. It seems to me that MS has a
> really bad case of the NIH syndrome.
> 

It's worse than that HPFS was developed by MS, yet they dropped support
for it, prior to NT 4, IIRC.  It resists fragmentation, doesn't use
cluster and has really fast file location.  It also supported 64 KB of
file attributes!.


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