Linked by Robert Gering on Tue 17th Sep 2002 18:11 UTC
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.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
The fact of the matter is that there is no truly amazingly perfect OS out there.
Like the author of the original post, I too was very frustrated with Windows9X, mainly with the poor stability and command-line interface (DOS mangling long windows9X filenames). Adding to my frustration, Win98SE was much more unstable than Win95b, but brought with it increasingly necessary USB capability; the unfortunate Windows Me users I've met say that Win Me was even more flaky than Win98SE. WinXP might solve the stability problem, but it brings with it draconian registration issues due to Microsoft's hardware ID scheme, yet more expense, and, I believe, no more command line at all.
I tried BeOS and loved everything about it - until I found a browser unable to deal with JavaScript and other advances in Web design, no major apps except Gobe Productive, and very limited hardware support, all of which issues were worsening by the month due to Be Inc having switched their interest to BeIA.
I tried Linux several times over the last two and a half years. My experience with most of the distro's I tried early in that period was that while the Linux kernel itself was rock solid, everything else could and did crash, lock up, misbehave, or plain not work. Just like Win9x, only harder to configure, uglier GUI's and widgets, and less software choice. (sometimes seemingly trivial things crashed some Linux distros - I crashed TurboLinux 4 by changing the background color of my desktop; I crashed Caldera 2.3 by replacing the mouse when my old one died.
When Mandrake 8.1 arrived, I finally found a Linux distribution, that IMHO "sucks less" than Win9x. It's still riddled with lots of unstable or buggy or just unuseable software (has anyone ever really used some of those hideously garish Gnome themes included with LM 8.x??). I have broken LM 8.1 and LM 8.2 installs simply by adding a printer after the install and running PrinterDrake; I have broken the XFree configuration simply by trying to change the screen resolution. And Mandrake's Internet Connection Wizard created my dial-up internet connection, then promptly crashed, leaving me struggling to create a manual configuration. I own a number of Linux books, each of which has a section on manually setting up a modem - unfortunately none of them worked, as the Mandrake wizard had corrupted something when it crashed. (I finally did get a working config, using an article in Linux Journal magazine).
But among this ugly mess, there were good things beginnng to show. There was Galeon, Evolution, OpenOffice, Mozilla, cdrecord - good apps that work, every time, and some of them finally look as good and are as easy to configure and use as their WinXX counterparts.
So that's why I use Linux - because, though it sucks, it sucks less than Windows, and because it is rapidly becoming better and better. In the next couple of years I expect Linux will become clearly better than Windows in almost every aspect, though guessing the future is always error-prone.
My suggestion? Find what "sucks less" for you, and use it.
-Jules Verne