Win98 -- all kidding aside

[Mumia W.]

On 07/30/2008 04:09 AM, Jimmy Montague wrote:
> 
> Win98 had its good features -- and some bad ones. I remember when I
> first installed Win98, it was able to access floppy drives with no help
> from me at all. As a home user, the worst problem I had with my new
> Win98 system was that I couldn't shut it off.
> 
> By contrast, I've had Ubuntu in this box for two weeks, now, and I'm
> still trying to make it handle my floppy drive correctly. That any
> flavor of Linux should be unable to handle floppies correctly, out of
> the box, after the OS has been nearly 20 years in development speaks
> volumes about the quality of the Linux development process. Those
> enraged by that statement may get their ire cooled somewhat by my
> admission that, also unlike Win98, Ubuntu is easy to shut off.
> 
> 

I agree. Modern-day Linux can be very difficult to get working right. 
Ubuntu tries hard to work "out of the box," but it often misses. And 
frankly, Linux has been making some dumb decisions recently, such as 
establishing dependency upon udev (unreliable device manager), 
asynchronous device driver loading, and xrandr1.2 (X random 
configuration--ignore the user).

When I first started using Slackware Linux, it was very predictable and 
very reliable. Today's Linux is anything but predictable and reliable.

BTW, I have also experienced the floppy problem that you mentioned.