On Saturday 07 June 2003 05:07 pm, Cody Harris wrote:
> Can someone come up with a few good reasons to switch from XP to
> Linux? Someone wants to know the pros and cons and why he should
> switch.
>
> -Cody Harris
06/07/03
1. My current system was designed from components I selected in the
Spring of 1998. At that time Win98 wasn't out yet, or if it was I
didn't have the $100+ to upgrade to it. I did get a copy of Windows
NT 4.0 for the ability to run programs in their own space, so that
one crashing app wouldn't take down the entire machine.
How many flavors of Windows have been released since 1998? Take that
number and multiply by $100+ to keep your Operating System current.
I spent $80 for Mandrake 9.1 Power Pack, and I've already got it set
up to keep the Operating System current from free downloads on the
Internet. How much will that save me over the next 5 years if I had
stayed with Windows?
2. I have no hard evidence to support this theory, but my gut tells
me that the hardware drivers in Linux are tighter code than in
Windows. Linux drivers seem to offer better performance than the
comparable Windows driver.
I speculate this might be because Linux is not a profit driven
Operating System. This is significant. The driver writers are not
faced with production deadlines. This allows them to take their
time, test extensively, and tweak the code to the ninth degree. As a
result the code is smaller and more efficient with less logic errors
(bugs). I also speculate the Linux driver coders are doing it out of
a labor of love. They have the hardware and they want Linux to be
able to talk to it.
3. From my very brief look into the Linux world and the Open ?Source?
concept, the documentation for the kernel and the drivers are made
public to everyone. This allows talented programmers from around the
world to develop code that will integrate with another's code. It's
a worldwide community of programmers all following the same
development guidelines. The final code versions should be very
stable given the thousands of users/testers. Windows will never have
the ability to have this amount of extensive testing.
Summarizing my main selling points are: 1) Linux code is better, and
2) the Linux price is better.
However, if you are dealing with computer illiterate people, a version
of Windows is probably better since Windows development has evolved
to make a desktop that is as human proof as possible.
I think that's where someone should step in and make it usable to the average non-computer literate person. It took my awhile to learn how to do things. I think that could be solved with a little more automation and not painstakingly doing everything. urpmi(sp?) is great, but what about someone that doesn't know about it? Windows update if good because it says: "Here's a list of crap that we think will make your computer better". Even if it doesn't help. Of course, i'm saying this from experiance, so i'm most likly wrong. How many of you that have had wives that didn't know how to use the thing?
PS: Sorry about spelling.
The Other
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
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