Reply #73: As flawlessly as any technology ...

[RoyGBiv]

"Flawless" is of course an overstatement, but I'll put it this way. I haven't had to reboot my machine once the OS has been installed for any reason other than a kernel upgrade for, well, years. (Current up-time is 23 days, which coincides with the last time I shut down and booted Windows.) Since beginning to use Linux several years ago, I recall two crashes that required a reboot. One involved a hard drive crash. The other was essentially a database problem involving a program that was written very poorly and itself caused a nearly unrecoverable crash. I say "nearly" because the underlying OS was not really dead, but the program was stuck in a nasty loop that made killing to try to recover insufferable, so at length I hit reset.

Linux, the operating system, tends to work near flawlessly. Some software written for it does not. But, Windows has that same problem.

The biggest problems with Linux are caused by proprietary drivers, software that utilizes hardware in ways that require those proprietary drivers, and web based technologies that are geared toward Windows users.

And that's a big part of the answer to your question.

For the record, I've had very few problems with XP. However, given that I use it at a ratio of maybe 1 days for every 150 days I am working under Linux (this is at home, btw), the fact I've lost count of the number of times the Windows operating system itself has experienced an unrecoverable error requiring a reboot while I know the number and the precise details of my Linux problems says quite a bit about how well they work.

Vista is another thing altogether.