Considering how much i've abused my Kubuntu installation, I am suprised it is still running well - better then ever in fact! I still remember when I first starting using Windows, and how often it would crash because of my n00bness. I'd get blue screens, critical errors and such like. But not Linux, it seems that whatever newbie punishment I give it, it still continues to live on! Amazing! Not so for SuSE though, that distribution did suffer at my hands.
i have to agree, with win an install of XP never even lasted until WPA ran out but Mandriva is still going strong after a few months of me (apart from a few weird problems, like net only working if i disconnect eth1, but its still going strong, so can´t complain, Mandriva is much better than XP IMO, i can´t believe its still working)
I get worried because you dont get any hints from the OS when your not doing something right, it just gets on with it! I think i might try one of proper distros just to have the decent package managers features.
If you run as root, you have full control with no hand-holding. The desktop Linux systems I've setup for "regular people" never use their root account at all, as they have no need to. As a result, some of these people have machines which have been running tip-top since 2001. I like that the OS gets out of my way when I want to do something drastic, yet as a regular user the security is tight but still feels unrestrictive for everyday use.
Yes, Linux is very stable. BSD is even more stable. Although, a properly administered Windows machine will also be extremely stable. You can't really judge uptime since a lot of MS security updates require a reboot. So you lose your uptime to keep up to date.
Windows is stable as long as you don't try to multitask. In that case, I find that it must be rebooted several times a day. The more you multitask, the more it needs to be rebooted. Otherwise, apps start to crash, hang, and preformance slows to a crawl.
i usually have windows running for 12 hours a day, and as you go through the day, windows starts to slow down and wants to go to sleep, the longest windows instalation i have had it about a month, once it never lasted past a week or 2!, i cant belive it! all i am running is azuerus, aol, creative panel, some entertainment center thing, getright, daemon tools and windows media player, and i am using nearly 600mb of ram!, my last instalation took ages to load windows media player!, i was on 512mb of ram tho, hopefully with linux i can take a stick of ram out for my old computer.
