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Windows Tech Writer Looks at Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Three days ago I accepted Linux into my life and while I'm not yet a convert, the experience has shaken my faith in Windows. It's hard to reconcile because for nearly 20 years I've mostly stayed on the one true Windows path."
You defrag to make it easier to repartition the disck drive. Without defraging you may be limit on how much you can shrink a partition because of a file out near the end.
RTFA. He liked MacOS (back in the day), but switched because he got a job at a PC mag, and also tried OS/2 but ended up going back to Windows. Let's also try to remember that he works at a PC mag, so more than likely everyone he works with uses Windows for their day-to-day activites, all the documents he works with are MS Office documents, etc. Why would you deliberately alienate yourself from everyone else, especially if you needed to be able to swap documents with everyone for work-related purposes? He doesn't follow Linux news, so he'd have no idea that stuff like OpenOffice even exist unless some kindly folks took the time to dispel his false assumptions.
There are plenty of local linux user groups that do similar things in the States, but not on as grand a scale of course.
For example, there is the Colorado Linux Users & Enthusiasts group here that did an installfest a few months ago.
Do a bit of searching and see if you can find one in your area.
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
Redhat 5.2 was a much older distibution, compared to today's stuff, Similar in to windows 3.1 with windows 2000. There wasn't much available when windows 3.1 came out, and many people said, "I'll never move away from dos, the applications for windows just aren't there."
Fast Forward to today.
Most people wouldn't touch DOS anymore (Most Slashdot users exempted from that), and the application base is there now for windows.
On the linux side most modern distros (Redhat 8/9) (Mandrake 9.1) (Suse 8.2) All include more applications than you could ever need. Need a word Processor, You've got 3, same with spreadsheets. File Managers, Got a few of them, Games, Lots of small ones, and If you want the better ones, You can use most of them through wine. and even a few Games have a native linux version Unreal Tournament, UT 2K3, Quake. I Run Warcraft 3 though winex, and it works great.
As for Development, it comes with all the development tools you could need, 2 different SQL Based Databases (mysql, Postgresql), a Very nice IDE (Kdevelop), Photo Editors (The GIMP).
And the list is only getting longer.
You probably remember having trouble getting most hardware to work, That's a thing of the past as well, It's a rare case for me to install Linux, and have to manually configure hardware. Much better than my luck was ever with windows.
All in all, linux has improved a lot over the years, and Is worth a try again.
For something you can try out without committing yourself, Try Knoppix(mentioned a few times before) It includes an Amazing amount of applications.
Eh? Depends on what you do with your computer. RedHat 5?! You're talking massive changes since then.
What did I do next? Not much else to do. None of my apps (read : games) were available at the time for Linux.
All you do with your computer is play games?? Hmmm. True, maybe Linux isn't for you. Although I'm a hardcore Quake3 player so that's my favorite game and it just happens to run great in Linux. I play some Tribes2 and UT2003 in Linux also.
I was unable to find replacements for any of my tools (read : an XTree clone such as ZTree, Office, Visual Studio, Drive Image, etc.)
Xtree? Try "ytree" in Linux. Personally I'd rather use a GUI file explorer or the console though (Konqueror, Nautilus, ROX, etc.).
Office? OpenOffice, Koffice, the GNOME office stuff... What applications do you use? There are many, many word processors besides the "office" suite versions. Same holds for the other applications.
Visual Studio? I do a lot of VS development and agree there is nothing as good for Linux, but there are tools if you're into that kind of thing. Kdevelop, wxPython (VB-like), Eclipse, NetBeans, and many others. There are craploads of development tools on Linux.
Drive Image??? How much time per day do you spend in that app?? There are a ton of backup applications for Linux. I can't comment on any of them because I don't back up as much as I should. Kbackup and others are easy to use.
I mean what really do you spend your time doing on the computer?
Need to web surf? MozillaFirebird, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx, Nautilus, etc.
E-Mail? Mozilla, Balsa, Kmail, mutt, pine, and all the others I'm forgetting about.
Other popular and useful apps:
The Gimp
VMware
I could just go on and on. It really doesn't sound like you gave Linux a fair shot. Plus that was 5 years ago, that's an eternity in computer terms.
Burn the Knoppix ISO and you won't even need to do anything to your computer to run a newer Linux. It boots fully off the CD and contains a ton of applications. It will kinda chug because it has to read from the CD so much, but it works good enough and doesn't touch your current system.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Show me a Linux replacement for Adobe FrameMaker (or better yet, a port) [...]
Several years ago, Adobe actually released a beta version of a port, but then decided not to release a final product based on it. Check out this page for more info. There's even a specific e-mail address for comments.
Install CygWin and have a true bash shell on Windows.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Well, I can assure you that Chris Barton is a real person -- a journalist for the New Zealand Herald technical and business pages, (not a "technical writer" as written here) i.e. He is a real person who needs to get real work done irrespective of what operating system he's running. He's a journo, not a techo by trade. That's what's news. More and more, musicians, artists, novelists and soccer moms are flocking to Linux in NZ because of what Chris Barton writes in the newspaper. Particularly his promoting our INSTALLFEST which is what the original article was about.
Now Chris has also written numerous good articles about WETA DIGITAL , the people who brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen, running linux clusters (at least two generations of them), as well as numerous other commerical linux deployments throughout New Zealand and the rest of Australasia. I was actually quite surprised that he wasn't running Linux on his desktop already, but, then, a lot of us are literally forced to use Windows at work by brain-dead MSCE-infected ITdiots who advise Upper Management. The more of a groundswell towards Linux adoption they see, the better.
It's the less mainstream stuff that's still missing. On Windows, I have some excellent topographic map software, nicely integrated with my GPS unit. I have some excellent birding software, with videos and birdsongs. Great genealogical software. Great sound editing software. Etc., etc. I looked pretty hard, but was not able to find Linux equivalents.
This may seem silly, but have you considered asking the software publisher if they would consider releasing a Linux version? Only by hearing from their users will a software publisher consider a new platform.
I've done this several times with software that I like. I've been using Linux at home 100% since 1998 but I still have a dual-boot laptop for work. So I sometimes see software for Windows that I might like to use under Linux. For me, that's mostly games. But this applies to all software, I think. I've written to the software publishers and asked if they have a Linux version. In all cases, the answer was at least "we're thinking about it, but haven't heard from enough Linux users yet". But in a few cases, the answer was "yes, one of our developers is working on that .. want to beta test it?"
I guess my point is that you need to talk to the software publishers if you want to use that software on Linux. They need to know that people want to use their software on Linux, then they'll release for Linux.
-jh
Good luck, Tim, wherever you are.
Finding God in a Dog