Hi Bob! :-)

 BB> But as far as 'run out of the box' thing forget it!   Mounting and 
 BB> unmounting things is pain in the ass and if Windows had you doing 
 BB> that the Lx dudes would be laughing their ass off.
Huh? Modern distributions have either a) an automounter running or b) icons
on the desktop to access, for example, the CDROM drive - and if you click
on that, it automatically mounts the disc.

 BB> Windows 98SE blows it away across the board.   Easy to use, tons of 
 BB> apps, tons of drivers, and a few warts that you can stay away from by 
 BB> using Mozilla firebird as a browser and Eudora as mail client.
There are thousands of applications for Linux also. They just don't look
like their Windows counterparts.

Windows 98SE or anything not of the NT line also doesn't have any security,
no matter what applications you use or don't use. There is simply no way to
achieve real security with FAT as the underlying filesystem. NTFS is a
different story.

You can do things with Linux (especially in networking) that you can't do
with any version of Windows, be it 2003 Server or something else.

It mostly boils down to whether you want a system that "just
works" (and you don't care how it does its thing - whether it is
secure or respects your privacy or whatever) or you want to be able to
influence what's going on on your machine in every detail. People in the
first group are fine with Windows, people in the second group enjoy Linux.

I'm amazed that people still defend Windows and MS applications after all
those security holes and privacy issues (like Word documents carrying tons
of information about the system they were written on and about the
document's history).

Ciao
Pascal

--- Msged/LNX 6.1.1