History is written by the winners –George Orwell (maybe)
So the dust has settled, the wounded and fallen have been cleared from the battlefield, and the cartographers are redrawing their maps. Linux is the definite winner, by a large margin, but Windows still got a few good licks in.
One area where Linux shines is in it’s much lower hardware requirements. Different versions of Windows have had low minimum requirements, but they always ran pretty poorly for those who actually tried to use those minimums. Linux is both very usable and fairly fast on a machine with 256MB of memory and 8GB of hard drive, which is extremely underpowered by today’s standards. And when I bumped the memory size up to 512MB, even the small delay that I’d been seeing when opening programs vanished. People with older machines that can’t handle Windows Vista (or even XP!), could probably run Linux without any trouble — and anyone with more powerful machines would probably be very happy with it’s speed.
The price is another nice feature. It’s not only the OS that’s free… all the little utilities that make life easier are too. With the exception of VMware (which doesn’t really count because I already had a license for it), I didn’t have to spend a single dime on software for the Linux box. And despite that, I have nearly all the software that I ever use under Windows on it… more, in fact, since I now have multiple desktops and a useful little sticky-note program as well.
I can’t give it any more than a C+ for ease-of-use. For most things, it’s fine even for a technophobic grandmother; but for some, even twenty years of computer and software-development experience barely saw me through. Compared to when I briefly played with Red Hat in 2001, it’s come a long way though. I expect it will keep getting better, probably very quickly.
There are a large number of software packages readily available, nearly everything your average computer user could ever want (including quite a few games of various types). Installing them has become a very simple matter too, easily done from either the GUI or a terminal window, whichever you’re more comfortable in.
It’s at least as reliable as Windows 2000 and XP. The one crash that I had with it, I’m fairly certain, was because it ran out of memory — I’ve been watching Thunderbird’s memory usage, it grows by a large amount when the program is left running constantly (maybe a memory leak due to my odd setup, maybe just normal requirements, I don’t know). Since giving the virtual Linux machine more memory, I haven’t had any repeats of that. And when there is a problem, you can generally fix it without reinstalling the entire OS… having had to nuke a few Windows systems from orbit after failed experiments, that’s very encouraging.
The security is light-years ahead of Windows. Even if most viruses and Trojan programs were targeted at Linux, I’d still feel safer running it; in today’s world of primarily Windows-specific malware, I’m even more confident.
Windows didn’t give up without a fight though. Some specific combinations of software packages simply aren’t available under Linux; some hardware has no drivers, and no foreseeable ones in the future either. Besides my Canon F50 printer, I have a few VTech Skype phones; drivers for those are only available under Windows 2000 and XP. Even Windows Vista won’t be getting any. And of course, most games are written solely for Windows, though there are ways around that for many of them (such as Cedega).
Linux developers also have a different and much more laid-back philosophy than Windows developers. When I was writing Windows software commercially, we had to always have the latest features; our customers demanded them, and got antsy when we didn’t deliver them as quickly as they wanted (i.e. yesterday). Linux developers, on the other hand, are generally much slower to release new versions; things are more carefully tested, and they feel little need to stick every conceivable feature into their software. If something works, it rarely gets changed, which is both good (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) and bad (it doesn’t get improved any further either).
In summary: Linux is good, and getting better rapidly. It’s probably good enough to replace Windows for the majority of users now, though using it can still be painful at times if you’re trying to do anything out of the ordinary.
Will I keep running it? Definitely. But I’ll also keep running Windows as well, and not solely for writing software in.
I don’t know about features, Firefox and Thunderbird have gotten plenty – more of course if you count the extention community. (Another good part of Linux is that it has more of a grass-roots software community.) Also, this is part of the GNOME 2.x philosophy, minimal features; ever since usability studies by Sun put them along that path, which still recieves strong advocacy from people within the GNOME community in general. KDE programs tend to have more featuritis, probably at the expense of usability.
Personally, if software has the features I need I’m happy, and if not, not. Most of the time GNOME software happens to, and I find the environment more pleasant. Others of course vocally differ, it’s as much a case of personal preference. (If you want to play with KDE, you may want to run certain distros, perhaps PCLinuxOS. Another is perhaps openSUSE if you want to deal with a package manager that sucks (my reason for not caring for it) and don’t care about political correctness (MS+Novell deal), that have a better KDE experience – Kubuntu IMHO isn’t as good out of the box when it comes to KDE.)
Maximum usability demands minimal options, not minimal features. Though the two are often closely related, they’re not the same thing at all.
I don’t plan to play with any other distributions at present. Ubuntu (and GNOME) seems to have everything I need (that’s available anywhere, that is), and I really can’t justify wasting time on others when I’ve got a perfectly acceptable setup already.