Interesting. I've not seen that. Usually microsoft is better at bundling everything together. The only exceptions I've seen to this are when it comes to the .Net framework (Which is just too big to bundle with every 1mb download).
Yea, I would've laughed out loud had it not actually been so sad and frustrating.
Not true. Windows 7 has MUCH better driver locating features than I've seen from previous versions. I was dreading changing out my mothers old XP laptop for a new Win7, I was surprised at just how many drivers it installed automatically (finding printer drivers especially impressed me). Yes, it doesn't grab everything, but it is tons better than it used to be.
Better than previous versions, sure but that still doesn't mean it'll contain every driver for hardware released after it. As soon as it doesn't support your NIC or wifi card you'll be back to Googleing for drivers on a secondary machine or your phone. Yes, it comes with more drivers out of the box but because the Win7 installer is essentially static, it'll always get back to being a huge PITA to install like XP is now unless you slipstream your drivers into yourself in the future.
Linux isn't exactly a shining beacon here. Yes, it keeps better logs of whats happening, that doesn't always make things "easy" to fix or figure out what is going wrong.
It's a lot better than Windows. I can use standard text tools to read the logs and the message are almost always relevant. I had an instance recently where a patch downloaded by WU wouldn't install and WU gave me some error code that wasn't even from WU so clicking the help links gave me absolutely no help at all, it turned out to to be the MSI return code and the problem was that MS removed a compiler in another, previous update and the patch I was trying to install needed files that were removed. But the bigger point is that these kind of broken error trails are common Windows and that isn't the case with Linux at all.
And AFAIK there's no way to tell the new event viewer to show me all but a certain type message without writing XPath queries, which of course is second nature to everyone...
This is true, however, a user that THINKS they know what they are uninstalling/need can really screw things up. Even a user that just wants to trim things down is going to be lost in a sea of acronyms. Even though you can do it, the entrance level for being able to do it is pretty high. Just about as high as doing a nLite installation of windows.
Those users shouldn't be forcing the package manager to remove stuff blindly just like they shouldn't be removing MSI packages by GUID either. The package managers in Linux do a good job at hiding the low level stuff and give you lots of warnings about what it's doing before you commit. Anyone who tries to remove something and gets their desktop taken with it should have known better because the package manager will have listed a hundred+ packages to be removed. If they're going to blindly click through that, there's nothing that can be done about that and they'll inevitably break their Windows machine just as bad, if not worse.
That depends on what installers you are using. The guy that makes the installers is also the one that puts the "reboot the computer now" thing on everything. Some of that has to do with legacy, some of it has to do with lazy and "Just to be safe" logic.
I understand that, but not even MS does it so that means that it either doesn't work well or at all.
I've NEVER had vista or Win7 BSOD on my for printer problems. In fact, the only BSOD I've had have been heat related. Vista introduced the HAL which pretty much removed the ability for a printer to BSOD.
That being said, the last time I've dealt with cups was with an old crappy epson printer several years ago (07 I believe). It was a PITA to work with. The web brower configuration thing was just wonky. Even though my printer was supported, it would just sort of randomly stop working.
NT has had a HAL since it's creation, that's nothing new. Vista and Win7 moved more more into userland like sound and parts of the video driver, but that's it. It even differentiates between kernel and userland print drivers so as long as your print driver is a kernel one, it has the ability to BSOD your system easily.
That why we speak in averages. For example, for the average tablet user the iPad is the perfect solution. Pointing out fringe cases that most will never encounter (or want to encounter) and saying "See, windows can't do that, that makes it non-modern!" is almost like pointing at a random crappy OSS piece of software and saying "See, Linux will never be a modern OS".
But being too vague misses the point. Windows has many technical limitations that can cause it to be considered non-modern but many of them only affect a specific are, lack of a checksummed filesystem like ZFS or BTRFS is probably a big concern for people right now.
Not all free *nix's have package managers, easy changeability, or any of the other stuff you mentioned. *nix is so varied that you can't really say that every *nix operating system supports or does everything that you've listed.
AFAIK ports works on all of them which despite being source based, counts to me. And they all most definitely support removing open files and setting up mount points during installation. The only one that might not apply to all of them is the ability to add/remove kernel modules at runtime.
I don't really see closed source software as being a software killer. Being able to see the code for software is really something that most people don't care about (even programmers). Heck, even paying for a software licence isn't something that is going to kill it. Microsoft has a licence that is peanuts in the grad scheme of things while often offering deals and lower prices for businesses.
So that's why Google and Apple built their software on free software instead of licensing something closed from a 3rd party? Of course Apple took something open and closed it, but that was their rights under the BSD license even though it's a douche move.
In the short term you're right, Windows is so entrenched in it's niches right now and most people don't even know there are alternatives out there. But a lot of the big stuff right now is open at some level. Google/Android/Chrome, Amazon, Facebook, virtualization from VMware and Citrix/Xen, iOS kinda, etc. To me it just doesn't make sense to reinvent or even pay for so many pieces of the puzzle that makes up a product when there's so much free software out there already.
Even from the end user standpoint, for example why should I use WinRAR or WinZIP when 7zip is out there, free and supports pretty much all archive formats already?
I agree, which is why listing "defragging" as something windows does that makes it "non-modern" is sort of silly.
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