Linux over Windows..? Well, the argument continues

"Linux may be great for servers and the like but fails miserably when it comes to providing an easy to use system for unskilled home users."

This is a myth. Mandriva has Mandriva Control Center. Pardus has PSi, Ubuntu has Ubuntu Control Center. My non-technical mother (in her 50s) uses Pardus Linux without any problem. I’ve seem more users experience problems with Windows 7 than she does with Pardus.

I found this article hard to understand. The author’s grasp of english sentence structure, and grammar goes from "informal" to "unparseable" very quickly.

I like Linux, but the TCO argument is a silly concept no metter whether "Linux has lower TCO", or "Windows has lower TCO"; TCO is a "made up" concept that tries to say that something that is free isn’t necessarily going to save your business money, over something that costs 837 gigabucks. The scale of the insanity that goes on under the name "TCO" is such that you should avoid using the term.

Linux is free. Freedom is not about money only. But it’s also less expensive than things that cost money, and expensive studies by people who have vested interests that produce results that blatantly contradict common sense, only fool stupid people.

But when we start using the "TCO" term and buying into the current diseased IT management mindsets, we are merely contributing more noise, in an already noisy world.

Linux is about freedom, not money. In the developing world, especially, Linux, and Piracy are the two feasible options. I say, for both moral reasons and economic reasons, choose to be free.

Warren

I enjoyed DRDOS, then OS/2 until it failed and a brief agony with MS Windows 95 drove me to Linux (Mandrake). I moved to Debian sid with KDE years ago and maintain it with smxi. It’s paradise for me!
I’m 82 years old and have no technical training, but always found Linux to be easy to use, fast, reliable and cheap (on my ageing computers).
I find it convenient to use a few bash commands occasionally on yakuake, although the command prompt is only an option these days.
I gave up helping MS Windows friends with their problems years ago and can no longer understand that convoluted, awkward, expensive, intrusive system with its nursery-style appearance.

A majority of people don’t give a damn about radically changing the look of their Windows desktop. For those that do, there are tools available to do so.

"Bet you cannot even think of creativity with a Windows on your desktop."

Typical partisan insults that are flat out wrong. Happy trolling.

The above arguments are the same drivel that I have seen in a multitude of other places. The TCO one is hilarious. The only cost mentioned is initially acquiring the software. nothing of the retraining necessary to make people aware of how to use it and become efficient with it. Another consideration is the lack of "GOOD" software for Linux. I do a great deal of work in the design and coding of automation. There is nothing for Linux in this field that is even remotely useful. Even the CAD programs that are available are far from production ready. Many corporations have invested in either their own software or some other proprietary software (databases, financial, etc.)that would be expensive to replace on a large scale even if a replacement is available. I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t have the time to go write these applications and few companies are willing to invest the time and money to develop an alternative to something they already have. The only place that Linux would be able to replace Windows is in a home environment or small office where all I need is web and basic office apps or as in my case I use it as a primary operating system with Vmware to run Windows for all the things that Linux lacks software for. Oh, and yes I tried other virtual machines but they are lacking by comparison to Vmware. The one benefit of proprietary software is that they want to actually sell it and to do so they have to make it so that I would want to actually pay for it as opposed to taking the free alternative. I personally have no issue paying people for their work. That also holds true for software. Granted many of these companies go out of their way to make some things far too expensive (Autodesk and Eplan are great examples)because they believe the market will bear it.
In terms of servers Linux makes a decent alternative but NFS is still a problem in terms of the fine grained access control that I do have in Windows. Samba still is not up to snuff in my view for interfacing to the Windows machines. Although it has made great strides over the past few years. I do like using Linux as a mail and web server and it has performed relatively well in that regard. Zimbra went a long way to convince me to migrate over as it was well written and very functional. This is one area Microsoft has really failed as it is far too complex to set up a good web and mail server, secure it and maintain it over the long term.

Overall I would like to see Linux improve and become a viable option for more than the casual user.

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