Well, I've seen a lot of "because the other guy is bad" stuff. And I've
seen a lot of "I want my computer more stable" stuff. But neither of
those really address the reasons I've been fooling with Linux for years.
And none of my reasons may be meaningful to you. The context in which I
run Linux is really a bit different than an average home user.
The reason I run Linux, in addition to, not as an alternative to,
Windows (pick your flavor) is I want the toolkit that grew up in the
Unix world. I had been a Unix system administrator for years before I
got stuck with my first Windows 3.0 box to take care of. That first
Windows experience I found frustrating because of the very limited
tools, so I would dump the ini files to an SCO box to actually work on
them.
Linux, Windows, Novell, the various BSD packages and the commercial
Unix's have come a long way since then. But I still find the toolkit
that's standard in the Unix world to be superior to the toolkits that
cost money in the other worlds. It's basically a simple math problem.
The tools are better (for what I need, maybe not for what you need) and
the price is almost free. (OK, It's free, but for Heaven's sake buy at
least one CD from some poor sucker trying to make a living at this.)
Can I dump Windows. No, I'd go out of business. I'm sitting here at an
NT 4.0 box writing this in Outlook Express because I've been working on
something for a customer this morning. When I hit the send button this
NT box will find the outbound SMTP server using a DNS server on a RedHat
box, and drop the mail into the queue on a FreeBSD box at the ISP office
by routing through another RedHat box running pmfirewall to set up the
ipchains. Our NIS domain in handled by a Sparc running OpenBSD, and the
home directory and printers are handled by a Mandrake 7.0 and a Mandrake
7.1 box. The inbound mail is handled by another Mandrake box, and when
my mailbox gets out of hand I drop back into a shell and use procmail to
move everything around. If I'm on the road I still read my mail with elm
(oh goodness, this guy must be *OLD*). My own personal workstation is a
dual boot between NT 4.0 and RedHat 7, and the workbench machine behind
me is a dual boot between W98 and Mandrake 7.2. All of the other
desktops in the office are some flavor of Windows.
So, why do we use Linux? Because it fills a niche, and does it well.
Michael
