1) More people around have windows thus more people know it……”

I had this argument with a guy on another website forum. His constant argument is that for the “average user” Linux isn’t user friendly.

I asked him how the “average user” maintained their Windows system.

He listed a number of things that he did to maintain his Windows system:

- runs PC Tools Registry Mechanic
- runs Norton Internet Security
- regularly defragments his system
- doesn’t download “dodgy 3rd party apps”.

So I asked him again. How does the “average user” maintain their Windows system?

On ubuntu 8.4 all I had to do to get my epson photo printer working was to turn it on. So on my system I was able to “just print”. On XP I had to download and install drivers. On ubuntu I find that for many things the drivers are already in the kernel, so I don’t have to download anything. For proprietary drivers, ubuntu downloads and install them for me.

As far as windows “just works”. Well, as a long time windows user, I have seen plenty of blue screens of death. Part of the problem with windows is that it’s easy to break. If you do stuff online like most people, eventually you will get a virus or malware or something. There are ways to minimize that, like not running as an administrator. But it seems that many windows users are lazy or ignorant. And telling people what to do to secure their system is many times pointless. Many people don’t bother to listen and take the time to learn. So I guess I better keep a knoppix CD handy to save people when their windows breaks.

1) More people around have windows thus more people know it.

2) Drivers for everything, oddball chinese GPRS/EDGE/3G modems. Cheap bluetooth dongles, printers have windows versions. I can’t even get my standard and popular HP laserjet 1020 working in Linux all the time.

3) You can get free software for virtually everything in windows so that negates the cost issue. The cost of windows itself is negligible. In most cases a similarly configured PC preinstalled with linux or windows costs the same.

And lastly in a country like Bangladesh where I live, there are pirated versions of everything you can get for less than 50 cents, barely above the cost of media. Until that problem is fixed people will stick to windows. I’d like to see piracy end just to give Linux a boost.

Now for why I use Linux

I’m poor and can’t upgrade my machines. Everything I have is 4 years old at least. And I have scavenged a few more machines that are old.

I run a proxy server, share internet connections, share printers and files, stream media, use bittorrent all off a machine someone threw out. Try that with windows.

Linux kept me virus free for a decade.

And lastly, its the principle of the thing.

It didn’t recognize ANYTHING. The only thing it NEED to recognize was my network card, so I could at least download drivers for everything. But it didn’t. I thought that XP had at least a decent plug and play system and would be able to recognize it. But I was wrong. So I was forced to install Vista because it was the disc that came with my computer and would work with my system.

Ubuntu at least recognized my network card so I could at least do things with it. But I’m still having issues with both Vista and Ubuntu so Ubuntu isn’t perfect, but it does a lot more out of the box than Windows (at least from my experience. I’m sure other people will disagree).

After all, Apple doesn’t charge for iTunes. Mozilla doesn’t change for Firefox. I know a ton of Windows and Mac users who spend a lot of time researching cost-free software so they won’t have to pay exhorbitant prices.

More people trust cost-free software than they trust cost-free wine.

After tasting, the unlabeled bottles had a fairly random ranking with regard to price, but when the prices were attached people preferred the more expensive one and (this is the best part) when the prices were put on the wrong bottles the testers still preferred the ‘more expensive’ ones (i.e. not the ones that were actually the most expensive, but the ones mislabeled to be the most expensive).

Maybe there’s a similarity in the OS world, and people would think Linux worked better if more distros charged a fee for a startup disk…

As a future IT major who will probably end up making open source program suggestions to his future company, that phrase scares me.

Maybe if Linux was more commercial, ppl would appreciate it at least as much as other commercial OS.

As for Mac: I think it would require someone like Guy Kawasaki to come and explain to me why Macs are so great.

The Acrobat Reader is mega-bloatware, it is no surprise it crashes. The current Windows version Adobe Reader 9 is 33.5 MB!! Why do you need that big an application to read a PDF?

I would recommend she remove it and install a really good open source Windows PDF reader, Sumatra PDF http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

Sumatra works quite well in its new 0.9.3 version and is only 1.2 MB, which is 1/28th the size of Adobe’s Reader!

If you have to use Windows, use open source free software!