Sword's Tavern

Maybe it’s me, and please feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you think.  In fact, I am asking you to comment or hit the feedback button/contact form and let me know your thoughts.  I have working with what seems like a bazillion different operating systems over the years, to varying degrees of proficiency and intimacy.  I don’t just mean various versions of Windows either, I have worked with BeOS, DOS, Linux, MacOS, MenuetOS, NetWare, OS/2, SkyOS, UNIX, and Windows to name a reasonable sampling.  That list then breaks down into further releases, variations, versions and more.  The point I am trying to make here is that aside from the fact that I enjoy tinkering with operating systems, I have a pretty wide field of experience with many, many different ways to boot a computer.

The one big thing that I notice as a glaring difference between practically all of the operating systems I have tried and Windows is multitasking.  I mean true, let us do more than one thing at a time multitasking.  Not just do a little here and do a little there, the “hand off a lot, back and forth, and it’s real slow but we’re gonna call it multitasking while we entertain you with pretty pictures” kind of stuff.

My two primary operating systems these days are Windows and Linux, Windows 7 and Debian to be more precise.  Depending on where I am and what I am working on those can vary, but here at home, I tend to stick to those two as much as I can.  I have gone all Linux before and I loved it, and to be honest I’d love to do it again, but there are games I want to play and some development and music recording/production software that I can only run on Windows that I just don’t want to give up.  Therefore I run both.

Now, on to the crux of this long winded diatribe.  It seems like I can run many applications, daemons, processes and whatnot on my Linux boxen and it is happy to do so all day long.  In fact, I can overload it to the extreme and it will still function, albeit quite slowly.  No crash, no fuss, no muss, and once I stop some surplus processes it will come back and to a more or less normal state.  Except maybe if I am running Oracle, there seems to be no way to recover from running Oracle.

Compare this though, to my Windows box, where I can literally bring it to it’s knees with two … maybe three processes.  And I don’t just mean performance knees either, I mean the box will sometimes lock up, or even if not it never quite recovers (I suspect memory leaks maybe).  This gets especially if not exponentially worse if these two or three processes are attempting to access files on the same disk or partition.  It’s like Windows cannot stand the thought of sharing disk I/O with anyone, even itself.

Now, all that being said, let me make another note, this is not another Windows bashing article that are aplenty all around the ‘net these days.  These are my observations and frustrations that make me shake my head and wonder why slick marketing and strong arm business techniques always supersede quality and performance when it comes to sales (Beta versus VHS comes to mind).

What do you think?  Am I crazy?  Getting senile in my middle age? Or have any of you out there noticed similar things?