Re: Linux is as buggy as Windows

From: Fred_McGriff (fmcgriff_at_nospam.com)
Date: 09/25/03 

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 22:12:50 GMT

> > For Red Hat Linux 7.2, you go to the Red Hat "errata" page https://
> > rhn.redhat.com/errata/ and from there to the page specific to version
> > 7.2 https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh72-errata.html . There, you'll see
> > that, to date, Red Hat has issued 151 patches and updates (mostly for
> > security issues; that's what the "broken lock" icon means) for that
> > Linux version. For a very crude sense of scale, that works out to an
> > average of around 2.3 patches per week.
> >
> > Next, let's do the same thing for XP Professional, starting on
> > Microsoft's errata page, the "HotFix & Security Bulletin Service"; use
> > the pull-down menu to isolate just the XP-related items. You'll see
> > that the page lists 21 XP-specific patches and updates to date. That's
> > an average 0.35 patches per week.
> >
> Bingo! What he really compared was many open source programs from
> multiple sources against one closed source program.

 This is a really old article. I have both Windows XP Pro and SUSE Linux 7.2
installed. The logic used by the author is flawed because some of the
Windows XP patches referred to conatin multiple patches in a single file.
People, like myself, who try keep their OS up to date installed many more
patches than implied by the article. I contacted the author with an actual
count from the "readme" files for the XP Pro patches, but was ignored.

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