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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.
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