The pace of software development — regardless of the licence — is pretty fast these days. The state of your systems need constant monitoring. New features, bug-fixes and (most important) security updates need to be properly managed. Here, in no particular order, are five ways that choosing a free operating system will make system maintenance a lot easier and simpler. In short they are ways that — when it comes to system updates — GNU/Linux beats Windows.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

Tony Mobily’s recent FSM post A future without Microsoft and the resulting comments have caused me to consider the way we use numbers to argue for free software in the marketplace. I’m not convinced that it’s the best strategy because those waters are particularly muddy when it comes to comparing free and proprietary software.

For those of you that follow my blog, you must have noticed that I’m a Mandriva user. Recently though, I took an interest in Ubuntu: I installed version 7.04 on a laptop, and it did look interesting, enough to make me doubt my commitment to Mandriva’s products.

Thus, when 7.10 came out with a bang in the media, and I got another laptop to de-borgify, I downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 ISO along with the install CD for Mandriva 2008.0 Free.