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why do people who try free operating systems like linux ubuntu switch back to windows?
I recently tried Ubuntu and it seems to work great as a windows replacement. I would like to hear from people who don't like it and why.
Public Comments
- Im doing dual boot, however, im using windows xp now for one reason, "World of Warcraft".
- i've just gotten too used to windows and woudn't be able to switch
- Because the Windows emulator is nice but doesn't work for everything. Lets get this straight, its hard to accept but most of the better software is made for windows. sure u can say the freeware products are good and they are definitely but at the end of the day some softdevelopers
STICK WITH UBUNTU - it is really nice if you don't need to do anything advanced, if ur writing a report use open office, internet - mozilla, IM use pidgin. Use ur add and remove programs to find stuff u need to get work done.
- I've liked it for years -- been using Linux on and off since the nineties, but I do have a few thoughts.
Most of the older techies who use it have read their Robert A. Heinlein (a science fiction writer) and are willing to quote his slogan/acronym TANSTAAFL -- There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. So why use Linux? For someone like that, generally, using a GPL OS is taking ownership and responsibility for your computer in a very direct way. A distro like Gentoo which breaks things all the time (it just broke sound on the two boxes I have it installed on) or Debian which also encourages you to poke around under the hood) is as good as anything which holds your hand, for better (Ubuntu) or worse (Windows).
The difference between Linux and Unix can be pretty iffy. What is Unix? It began as a cross-platform operating system, written when such things were new and by people who liked to use acronyms to name their executable files, for example tar for Tape ARchiver or vi for Visual Interface (to name two programs I still use). Linux is a kernel of an OS intended to run what were mainly UNIX programs -- I remember learning Linux because my College discovered the Netscape Web Browser before it was available for windows and couldn't afford UNIX. So we suddenly had a Linux lab.
Unix and Linux, because of their popularity, indeed heritage, in academia, assume you know what you are doing when you issue a command. Windows doesn't.
Windows is a consumer operating system. Uber-geek Bill Gates has said roughly that Microsoft should own your files because they know more about it than you do. That's blunt but it's part of their appeal. You are not responsible for knowing anything about your OS. Of course they practice unsafe computing on your machine -- Linux generally does not recognize the current directory in the path variable, that is does not look for executable files in the current directory unless explicitly told to precisely (in part) because it makes it that much more inconvenient for some trojan to install and run files -- the more the bad guys have to do the more mistakes they are likely to make. After all these years Windows still does not consider something as simple as that. And a lot of people prefer to have Microsoft own their files because, as they sometimes argue, their lives are so stressful they don't have time to take responsibility for their computers.
You either pay with money or you pay with needing expertise. Linux has always been like that -- it's part of the bargain for using it. It provides a straightforward path to getting that expertise and I'm always glad to hear about someone willing to take that step.
