Star I Hate Windows - I am Afraid of Linux
Linked by Robert Gering on Tue 17th Sep 2002 18:11 UTC
Editorial First, a little background. I am a Windows user who has been using Windows since 3.1. I am not a programmer or a developer, I am a user. I process photos, use the internet, e-mail, write letters, play the ever important games and even use it to develop my comic strips. I am not computer illiterate and I use my computer with confidence and skill. Now with that said. I hate Windows.
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Couple of comments here.

1) You have to choose between Windows distros too (Windows ME or 2000 or XP Home or Pro, etc.) Which is the right one? (The answer is NOT ME!)

2) Mandrake is the absolute hardest Linux distro to work with. They like to claim to be easy to use but I have used them, Red Hat, Suse, Caldera, Storm and others and find them to be by far the hardest to get working.

3) Windows makes you choose a root password. If you don't choose, it sets to NULL. Many Linux distros will do the same thing. It is dumb on Linux just like it is on Windows. But you can do it - at your own risk.

4a) Windows makes you choose the filesystem as well. FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS are your choices. The differences, most Linux options are pretty good choices. Different, but not that important for the home user. On Windows - only NTFS is any good.

4b) Windows, by default, does a pretty crappy job of setting up your drive (one big dumb partition - good way to loose data and performance.) Most Linux distros (all the ones we are talking about) do a much better job of using your hard drive efficiently by default.

5) Microsoft brings out updates for its current OSs (NOT Win95) every couple of days - just like your distro does. The difference is that you just never updated your Windows. The updating process is much easier in Linux (SuSE at least) and updates much more than just your base OS like Windows does. SuSE updates all of the installed packages (which can be as many as 2000 seperate applications - like GIMP, KDE, etc.)

6) Without updating, Linux will run great forever without being online as well. Start putting any old system online and you are going to be vulnerable (moreso than usual) to all the dangerous things out there. I guarantee your Linux box will last longer at better performance than any Win95 box.

Many of the problems that you found here are from a very unriendly installation (Mandrake) and I urge you to try a popular and more friendly one like Red Hat or SuSE where they take their customers seriously. Mandrake is a black eye to the open source industry. Also, you should compare Linux as a serious network operating system against other competitive products like Windows 2000 Pro and XP Pro (at $300 each) which have almost all of the same "problems" that you found here.

What does make Windows easier (sometimes) is that all decisions are made for you. That is good for the one hour of installation time. But this is your computer. Don't you want it to do what is best for YOU? Not just for the average web surfer. Take the time to set up Linux correctly and the system is customized for you. Take a long time with Windows and it pretty much all ends of the same.

- Scott Alan Miller, Linux User since 1998, MCSE+I