Linux vs Windows, a perspective

My father recently sent me a link to an interesting read about a woman having issues with a brand new laptop booting Windows, and her rant about why Linux is so much better. It’s biased opinions like this that make the rest of us Linux ‘evangelists’ look bad, but here’s my take on things:

The biggest complaint people have when switching to Linux is that the software they’ve gotten used to using on Windows is no longer available to them because so many software vendors aren’t producing Linux-capable software. I’d switch my parents’ computers to Linux in a heartbeat if I could be sure that all of their necessary Windows applications would still work.

Thankfully, some companies like CodeWeavers and Cedega are working very hard on cross-over application support so you can run native Windows applications, like Office, within Linux. Of course, there’s the Windows emulator, called ‘wine’, that natively runs a *lot* of Windows-based software, but more complex software bundles like Office won’t work in ‘wine’ alone. But then you don’t need Norton or McAfee any more either.

I can’t envision a day where I don’t need Linux any more. A GUI is a GUI, it’s the underlying technology that changes things and makes a difference for me, and I have way too much flexibility in Linux that I feel very constrained in Windows, like “I want to _____, oh, wait, I can’t, I’m in Windows…” I’ve added lots of add-on software to mimic a Linux shell (cygwin) and have similar development tools available within Windows (ActivePerl), but like the author of that article said, the more you add to Windows, the slower things get.

I’m guessing the lady who wrote the article had XP preinstalled, which has some definite performance issues. Then again, Linux can have performance issues too if you misconfigure it. In her case, it was all of the add-ons that caused her laptop to boot so slowly.

I have a beta version of Windows 7 running on my laptop, and frankly it is SO much faster than XP (even running the 32bit OS on the 64bit cpu). I’m actually considering taking XP off my system at home and putting Win7 on there. Of course, the only reason I even boot into Windows any more is to play World of Warcraft. I *could* play WoW within Linux using Cedega, but frankly my video hardware is better supported in Windows, so I don’t mind dual-booting. I’m a firm believer in using the right tool for the job, so might as well keep Windows around just to play a game ’cause that’s all I need it for anymore.