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Why Do People Switch To Linux?
tadelste writes "During the last month, Lxer.com conducted a survey of readers who use Linux. They asked readers why they switched to Linux and received a plethora of answers. Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine. Linux stands on its own merits. Anti-Microsoft sentiment comes from Microsoft's paranoia, which results in quotes like the one that had Bill Gates saying he'd put Linux in the Computer museum like he has other competitors." A respondent quote from the article: "It took me about a year to switch from W2K to Linux. The timing in the development of all of the Desktop elements has obviously been critical. If I'd tried any sooner, the whole thing would never have come together. Improved hardware support and equivalent apps have been a big part of the successful transition, and, I owe thanks to many in the Linux community for making that happen at an astounding rate and giving me my functional Desktop OS." Why do you think folks switch?
I'm a long time IT guy. When I first played with Linux a decade or so ago, I couldn't get my Matrox video card to work with X Windows using a Slackware distro. So, I gave it up. Some time later, I gave Red Hat a shot. It installed this time, but then I just sat there and twidled my thumbs. Now what? I couldn't find anything practical to do with it. Windows did everything I needed it to. Years later I tried again, this time with Gentoo. I could get things to compile, so I gave up again.
This week I just installed Open SuSe 10.0. Why again? Because I really wanted to run Asterisk. I'm a total Linux moron, but it only took me a day or so to install the OS and compile and configured Asterisk. A few hours later, I had a full featured PBX system working and soon to be rolled into production for my small business, for free.
I was amazed at how easy both the OS and Asterisk were to install and configure. I really think that the usability of modern distros has improved dramatically. That isn't really what's keeping adoption down. In my case, and I suspect many others, it was internia. I didn't really want to use Linux until I found something it did that Windows didn't do, Asterisk.
I think it's time that many OSS developers stop trying to play catchup with MS; you're already there. If you don't set the bar any higher than trying to reinvent the functionality already present in Windows, the masses will never take notice. There seems to be this idea that people hate MS and/or Windows and are looking for any excuse to move to OSS (Lindows is a perfect example of this mentality). I don't think this is the case. I'm not looking for a reason to abandon Windows, I need a reason to move to Linux. And the best way to get my interest is offering me things that Windows can't.
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Because it works flawlessly once installed.
We do alot of heavy duty database servers and the windows servers have a tendancy to start locking up anytime you patch something to close a security hole. The linux servers have no daemons running except for the database and ssh, there are times we go 6-12 months without needing a hotfix or patch. Even when they need patched it doesnt require a reboot, it doesn't take the machine down, and it doesn't change the day to day operation of the machine with new errors and new crashes. We use linux because it works.
End of story (I'm sure BSD would work as well, but our familiarity with a company is much stronger on the linux side of things.)
Shadus
I switched because of morals. I felt guilty stealing software that people were trying to sell. I can't afford much of the software I used in Windows, and I felt better about myself using free software in Linux. That and, well, the stability, customization, etc that comes with the territory.
I switched for the games. I can play tetravex for hours (and I do).
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I switched because I was bored with Windows. I like trying new distros for fun. I enjoy learning something new because I feel it adds to some imaginary tool box of "things I can do and might need someday." I didn't do it to be cool because just about everyone I know has no clue what Linux is other than that it looks different than Windows. I've been using it exclusively for well over a year now. I keep a dual boot in case I ever need to do something in Windows, which is a rarity these days. I've gotten used to it and Windows seems foreign at this point so there's no "comfort" reason to switch back as there was when I started using it in the first place.
This is an excelent reason to move over, I find latex support in windows to be abismal, and only slightly better in OS X. But most of the people I know have moved to Linux becuase it's easier (for us). It's easier to install applications, easier to keep them update, and easier to make changes than in Windows. I also got fed up with breaking things in windows and having no way to figure out what had happened or how to fix it. I've found that everytime I break something in linux I can head to my favorite IRC channel, or Forum and have a clear answer in a couple hours if not minutes.
Clearly this isn't the case for everyone, but Linux/Unix just clicked with me, all the way to make config changes the applications and the underlying architecture. And this is not to expound upon the fun I have tinkering which just isn't available in the windows platform.
~Anders
Jefe> We have had many answers for the switch to Linux!
El Guapo> How many answers?
Jefe> Many answers, many!
El Guapo> Jefe, would you say we have a plethora of answers?
Jefe> Yes, El Guapo. You have a plethora.
El Guapo> Jefe, what is a plethora?
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I used Linux because it was more convenient. I was writing a lot of code that had to run on UNIX systems, and it was nice to be able to write and compile it on my home computer. I also had better connectivity; the Windows terminal programs I had at the time were quite lacking. I did use Windows for a while in the summer of 2000, when I had a job writing code for Windows and Macintosh.
Qualifying the reason I switched back is harder. I had an interview with Microsoft in 2001, and although I didn't accept their offer, I was quite impressed by the people I met while interviewing. So after I got frustrated with the distribution I had been trying in 2002, I decided to give Windows a try again. Windows certainly isn't perfect, but overall it has been a much less frustrating experience than Linux was. A big part of that is Cygwin, which has helped smooth out a lot of the rough edges that Windows has. My regular environment now includes the Windows port of Vim, Cygwin/X, and VNC, but I still find that Windows is more convenient than Linux is.
I no longer have Linux installed on either of my home computers, but I still use Linux almost every day at school. The biggest reason is that rebooting annoys me, so since I completed the switch back to Windows, I've rarely used Linux at home. I miss it at times, not so much since the connectivity of Windows to Linux is good, but there are still a few things I can do better with Linux. For example, gcc on Linux is more compatible with gcc on Linux than gcc on Cygwin. I'd really like a low cost virtualization option so that I could run Linux without rebooting.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
I agree - this describes why many people (myself included) switch. To paraphrase James Carville, "it's the applications, stupid". After years of using OS/2 and Windows 9x, I watched my brother-in-law scroll through a list of free debian apps until he found what he needed to solve an engineering problem.
Wow!
So I set up debian on an old box, and proceeded to duplicate all of features I used in our medical practice. I was sold, and although I use Slackware now, could never go back to "I need $functionality, so I'll need to go spend more money to get it".
If I use software at work, I support the people who wrote it, too. Applications sell the OS, which has worked in Microsoft's favor for years. Increasingly, this is working for Linux
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I think this brings up a general problem in that Windows is generally supported first by software and a lot of hardware where Linux is either an afterthought or it is supported soley by the community and therefore there is a lag time for getting the functionality I want.
Maybe it has been a while since I used Linux for "consumer" activities. Maybe it has improved enough to use. The fact is that most customers don't want to write device drivers or software for the problem that isn't yet solved.
I'm a non-coder professional who recently moved my office desktop to linux from Windows XP. (i.e. I don't know much about much when it comes to the mysterious boxes my office needs to do its thing.) I was able to madk the change by installing Open Office on Windows and practicing with it.
After I was comfortable with it and had moved over all of my many, many forms and other documents needed to run my office, I moved the rest of the way to linux. I chose Mandriva with a Gnome desktop. Though I have not found an open source counterpart for every proprietary application I used before, with Open Office I could make it work.
Why move to a linux desktop? Lots of reasons, but, at the top, I guess it felt to me that every time I turned around, another sales rep was billing me for another upgrade or another license.
If it wasn't that type of bill, it was a bill from technical support to fix a problem that did not exist before I made some vendor-mandated change to my office system. My old documents don't open any more. The formatted is messed up. That feature I need so much has been moved. Etc.
I'm embarrassed by how much money I spent for a technical support providers that ended up talking on the phone with the technical support provider of another vendor. To my mind, that's a ridiculous situation that is largely remedied by the open source approach.
It has been a long, steep hill to be sure. I am never going to look back though.
There is a lot more to say on this subject, but these reasons are at the top of my list.
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For me it was because I wanted a Unix-like OS on my PC. Why not *BSD then? Well, in January 1992, *BSD wasn't available at any price a teenager could afford.
/24 subnet, but it worked. Since then, Linux has gone from strength to strength.
But Linux was, however barebones it was. Unlike DOS, there was no 640K limit on the early release 80386 machine with 2.5MB of RAM I bought cheap from a mail order house selling surplus computers (this was the early 80386, complete with bugs). Instead of all the nastiness of DOS/Windows 3.0, it was a nice, smooth flat memory model. With a proper VMM. Demand page loading. Etc. In January 1992, you had a boot floppy and a root floppy. To install this "distro", after making your hard drive partition, you just did a cp -a from the root floppy to the root of the hard drive. Then you used a hex editor to modify a couple of bytes on the boot floppy to tell it the root device was the hard disk. There was no LILO - it couldn't actually completely boot strap from a hard disk, you still needed to put the kernel on a floppy!
But it was a real *nix like system on my PC with many of the limitations of DOS gone. Very quickly it gained LILO, a proper init/getty/login and a TCP/IP stack (before Microsoft even had heard of the Internet). The NET1 TCP/IP stack was *extremely* basic - it could only work on a
I learned C on that machine. In 1993, when I upgraded to a '486 with a whopping 80MB drive, I could install X as well - and learned all about Xlib. I wrote a media player on that 486 for playing Amiga MODs (basically a pure Xlib based playlist editor, complete with a VU meter for visualisation!) Wish I still had the source. In 1993, a 486 with 16MB of RAM could compile the kernel _under X_ without touching swap. I used that machine to learn about sockets, C++, NFS and all sorts of things that would have cost me thousands I didn't have in the proprietary world. My humble 486 was better than the Solbourne S4000 (Sun compatible) workstations at university that cost an order of magnitude more money!
I have had Linux on my PCs ever since because I like it. I've usually also had a Windows partition too, but a couple of years ago, I realised that I was only booting Windows once every three months and decided to blow it away when I got the then new Fedora Core 2.
Currently, my home is home to three architectures and three operating systems. I have a 333MHz UltraSPARC system running OpenBSD, a PowerBook running OS X and an Intel PC running Fedora Core. Linux still gives me the freedom to tinker - that's why I like it.
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