QOTD: Have You Replaced Windows with Linux?

[jzsax_pr]

Man, I won't even start on how arrogant and uninspired you sound. If you dim witted employees would look past your fence and take a look at the outside world, that maybe you would write a filter for open office in that 1TB monster of a program you call Office. But that's a snazzy way to keep your ground in the software world, so spare me your Microsoft graduation propaganda before someone with more knowledge than me puts your face in the dirt.

Talk about arrogant! Office is big and i will give you that, but in the functionality department open office doesn't even come close to the capabilities of MS office. both in the foreground and background! So i rather spend 30 minutes installing this application with all the features and capabilities i need than try to spend months writing code for open office to add functionality. open Office is just not as mature.

i have been off and on the Linux bandwagon and i have to say it just is not for me... Again, what good is an OS if it limits you on the things you want to do? Gaming and graphic editing are huge in that department... Maybe in the future Linux will mature enough to warrant a complete move for users who want to try something else.

 

[QEFX]

No*

Still use XP (and soon 7) as a primary OS but Live USB for Ubuntu, Fedora & OpenSUSE.

 

[ceteras]

I use a 3 years old laptop, celeron 2GHz/1GB RAM, and I wouldn't upgrade it (replace it, that is) just so I can run Windows7 (a great SO, I think).
So, I plan to switch to Xubuntu asap.

 

[Hupiscratch]

No, pretty satisfied with Windows.

 

[matt_b]

[citation][nom]Blue_Hades[/nom]Back in the early part of the decade I tried out linux and thought it sucked. I thought linux fans were delusional. Then in 2005 I tried out linux for a couple years and began to get interested as I saw how fast it was improving, though it still had some deal-breaking bugs. Then I switched to Ubuntu full time two years ago and have never looked back. The thing with linux is that it just gets better and better. With windows it all works out if the box, but then begins a series of disappointments as your virus checkers and spyware checkers starts to slow it down and the registry gets sicker and loading the desktop begins to take minutes, then after a year or so you have to reinstall the OS, and all of your apps. With Ubuntu you may have a few things to sort out to start with (though much less these days) and then it just gets better, each new version of the OS gets slicker, the apps get better and better, support is brilliant compared to Windows (so long as you're basically computer literate) and upgrading or reinstalling the OS is absurdly simple (and you get to keep all your application settings). I still use Windows for games occasionally but I would never go back. If you're not tied to Windows for particular applications, make the change. Sure both operating systems have pros and cons but, for me, on balance, its a no-brainer. No way would I ever go back.[/citation]
Could not have said it better, this sounds exactly like my me. It continues to improve with each generation. Yes initial setup is much more difficult sometimes. I usually encounter sound config issues, file/drive permissions, and auto mount options needing to be setup through the fstab file. Other than that, everything else is play and go these days. My Radeon HD4850 works flawlessly (with the compiled closed-source drives from the ATI website), wireless internet actually works from the get-go (no more picking between WICD or Network Manager and cussing at the same time), Sata and hardware RAID have no conflicts, Compiz is getting much more ironed-out from the bugs that plagued it galore at first, 7.1 sound card works as it should. My favorite though is that a linux box running two years from now, runs just as fast and stable as it does from the fresh install day. Combine that with no resources allocated to bloated antivirus, registry fixers, defragmenting programs (although NTFS is much better than fat32), and so on. Only problem is that I need to play some of my games every once in awhile because of directX. OpenGL games get the green light for playing on Linux though!

 

[Thorfkin]

I tried several times. Once every other year or so I give Linux another go to see if they have worked out the issues yet and so far I have continued to be disappointed. My last attempt was with Ubuntu 8.10 and that resulted in about 2 days of frustration involving around 14 consecutive fried partitions all because Linux can't deal with my soft-raid solution. My machine's first and foremost use is gaming in Windows. That means Linux needs to co-exist with windows in a dual boot if it is to have a place on my machine. So far, every single attempt I have made with Linux has been thwarted in some way by a hardware compatibility problem.

 

[praedictus]

I switched about 5 years ago, basically when it became necessary to upgrade from Win 98. I used to be an early adopter, had to have the latest in hardware and software, a dinosaur from the days when the latest drivers and patches were downloaded from Compuserve, the internet consisted of things like archie and telnet, my first version of Windows was Windows/286. I use XP & Vista at work, most of the software we run is Windows only, though I´ve run some of it at home as a test.
Anyways, with linux I usually can figure out WHY a problem is happening and fix it. Sometimes its a pain in the ass, but once a problem is solved, it stays solved. I run Slackware, since version 8.1 or so. I haven't hit any insurmountable obstacles, wireless, printing, 3d acceleration, sound, networking & firewall were all solveable with a bit of Googling.
I do game, though my choices are more limited now, with native linux ports appearing to be rarer recently. I´ve been playing EVE since the end of 2006, and only once has a patch really broken things (Even then it took only a few days for a fix in WINE to appear). I've learned patience, so I rarely buy titles at launch any more. I may have to wait a year for Diablo III and the latest StarCraft to be supported under WINE, but by then they´ll be cheaper (I actually don't expect it to take that long).
I do get surprised some times, I was sent a Word .doc the other day, I opened it in Kword, & printed it off with absolutely no messing around.
Using Linux is also handy for removing viruses and other malware from digital cameras and pendrives, without worry of infection.
I'm considering playing with the Win 7 release candidate, after all I'll eventually be using Win 7 at work (the only installations of Vista are on laptops), so they'll be upgrading XP-Win7.

 

[Guest]

I did a few times, but went back to XP.
More out of curiosity. What Linux misses is the ability to play games like on Windows. (Eg: Direct X).
I had been contemplating Linux, because vista was a too big change for my taste!
Windows 7 seems to be heading back the good direction,and feels almost linux like.
Still, nothing beats WinXP at this time for me (a non gamer).

XP which I can trim and prune to my delight!
Now I'm running xp with 768MB of RAM used, which is about 500MB too much.
On my mini notebook I have less than 200MB always active RAM.

That's what I want. Windows 7 is heading to that (provided if we learn how to prune and trim that os too).

 

[KupuAnd1]

I am a fan of Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
For home applications those two are the best distros, BUT,
I worked in a small business windows 2k3 server with a Domain.
With likewise I was able to connect to the windows active directory with Linux Mint and Ubuntu (My laptop never had dual boot, just one OS)and I was able to share files and connect to printers but when it comes to work with Microsoft Office documents OpenOffice don´t was enough because we work with a lot of dynamic spreadsheets and with documents open at the same time and it was kind of buggy, but apart from that it was really heaven for me.

I think Ubuntu is really close to be an alternative for business.
Linux Mint is a great great distro as well.

 

[Guest]

For my usage (web-surf, e-mail, casual office-suite work, Java development, media playback, no gaming), Linux gives me a solid, easily managed environment. My wife keeps her Windows box and she's welcome to it. I built out a Vista box for my nephews to game on for the holidays and was shocked at the lousy performance on a box that would have been pretty peppy under XP. I see nothing to recommend the upcoming Win 7 over what I already have.

 

[jasonstokes]

I have given up running Windows... I run Ubuntu 8.04 9.04 8.10 on my home pc's / servers, eeebuntu 2.0 on my eeePC. 9.04 on my workstation at work. and I build 8.04 fileservers at work all the time. I have moved my family from windows to Linux. My wife put up a good fight, but after using the eeePC for about a week she fell in love with it. My niece and her boyfriend are at my house a lot. It seamed like every week I had to clean up some kind of mess with mal-ware and viruses caused by these teenagers bad internet usage habbits. After a long day at work cleaning other people pc. The last thing I want to do is clean my own. I moved all my pc to Linux and the only thing I have had to do is point these kids in the right direction. Most letting them know which apps replaces the windows apps. My house has been windows free for over 5 months now. And we don't really miss it. Oh and we do Game on these machine.

PS. Linux Programers ---- THANKS!!!! for all the hard work.

 

[werfu]

I've been using Linux for more than 10 years, starting with Red Hat 5.2. I've went through many different distro and I'm using Ubuntu today. But I've always kept a Windows install as I'm a gamer too. Nowadays I use Linux on my laptop on which I do most of my work and casual usage and I keep a striped down XP on my tower PC. This using scheme gets me the best of both world. I have a full blown Linux install and lite-weight, performing PC for gaming. I could be dropping the PC to game on consoles, but I haven't been able to adapt myself to controlers, I still need my keyboard and mouse!

 

[TidalWaveOne]

I played with Ubuntu but would never recommend it for "regular" computer users. Special cases, probably. I love Linux for my servers though.

 

[imrightbehindyou]

I have tried a few different Linux distros including Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake / Mandriva, and finally Gentoo. I'm pretty well set on Gentoo for my Linux choice now. But I will always dual boot with Windows. Linux just doesn't support games the way Windows does. Most notably DirectX.

 

[hemelskonijn]

On some of my systems i replaced windows with linux and some of those i changed to FreeBSD.

And to complete the circle i went from OpenSUSE to FreeBSD to windows 2k on my laptop (though only because i wanted to play wow in the train using my G1 and laptop).

 

[tleavit]

No. In fact when I took over as IT manager of this company I stripped out of the Linux (well Free BSD Unix) that was nothing but problematic and time consuming and replaced everything with a windows solution. Everything has run flawlessly ever since. The only Linux box I run right now is on a vm running Groundworks Monitor 5.3.

 

[odoketa]

I originally had a dual boot laptop with ubuntu, but I found I never booted windows, so I erased that partition and went pure ubuntu. I recently bought a bigger hard drive and have been running Win7, and will be dual booting ubuntu 9.04, but I suspect in the end I'll drop Win7 and go ubuntu only again. The unix command line is simply too powerful.

 

[salopar]

I tried several time since windows95 . it`s been 4 year we all use it exclusively . When i buy a computer , I install linux , and put vista disc in the microwave.

 

[oldyellowcat]

If you are a gamer, you have to have windows, at least a dual boot, so let's leave that factor out of the discussion for now.

If you are an expert user, and only do a relatively fixed set of things, and you don't change your hardware too often, then Linux is the way to go, because once you collected all the drivers and applications, you can count on it to be a rock solid system.

Unfortunately I can't do that. I built at least two dozen PCs for myself and I have followed major Linux flavors since 1998, redhat, debian, Ubuntu ...you name it.
I also built linux kernels myself several times to tweak it the way I wanted it. But in the end, I realized that I am spending too much time tweaking the Linux and get it to work right(aka, plumbing), instead of spending time on real business.

As a senior consultant, my time is worth anywhere from $65 to $125 per hour, depends on which project I am working on. If I spend two hours plumbing, that is a huge waste.

New applications and hardware show up everyday, and I need deal with a lot of them, and my scope changes monthly, if not more frequent.

When new stuff show up, it has to work on Windows first, and depends on the nature of it, may take several months for a working Linux version --- until then, you are completely in dark.

Very often, your Linux application is developed by someone part time or as a hobby, so good luck if you want a bug fix or a new feature.
That hype of there is always a Linux developer somewhere to help you is completely BS.

In real world, you send a question to an user group, and maybe get a response in several hours telling you to look for an updated package xyz, which is a BETA version developed by someone across the world three months ago. By the time you got that package, you realized it requires another package, which requires an update of you lib, and you have to build from source code yourself ...

These things happened to me over and over again, which is very frustrating. And Believe me, this is the best case, very often you found out that there is no solution yet. So you either write it yourself, or wait.

VISTA pisses me off big time, and like all of you, I wonder if the windows team @MS are all brain dead.
But still, Linux has much higher TCO (Total cost of Ownership).

 

[halcyon]

Replaced. I think not. Tried it, sure.

 

[Windaria]

Absolutely, I don't even have Windows installed at home anymore. As far as what distro? I tend to install every major one every 6 months or so, just to try out the latest thing, and the advances over the last year have been INCREDIBLE (though I'm back on Ubuntu 8.10 at the moment due to an ATI x1700 and xserver 1.6 bit of fun...)

I had been considering it for some time, but Vista cemented the decision. The huge software as a service, and other such pushes, along with the insane price tag they put on Windows ($400 for Ultimate, are you kidding me?) made the decision easy. Not only that, I always find it funny how people think Linux is limiting. Once you start to really figure out how much software is out there for Linux in the various repositories (which are installed instantly, and free, at a whim), it's amazing just how much choice there is, and the best thing is that if you don't like one thing, you can just try out another. With all the choice, I seem to be able to do infinitely more now with my computer than I could with Windows. The only exception to this is gaming, but when I want to fritter away and waste a bit of time, Regnum and other MMORPGs do play in Linux, and I don't mind that minor reduction in choice. It's a worthy trade-off for the greater application choice.

As for all those fancy 'software as a service' and other enhancements, one of the best things has been figuring out how to host my own services that offer all of the features that I want, so that I can seamlessly move from computer to computer without losing files or functionality, and without having to rely on others. You can replicate it with Linux, and then you don't have to rely on others. It's great.

 

[dark_lord69]

Nope. Reason: I am a computer technician. I will not switch operating systems until the corporate world does. And good luck pushing that! LOL!!

 

[MerlinOS2]

Everything I run here is under Open Solaris and I virtualize any other OS I need to run for applications that don't have better replacements.

For me ZFS and the ease of using the massive amount of storage I have here and simplifying the access model and making it much more reliable in the process is a winner that none of the others can match.

 

[pylon757]

I dual-boot Kubuntu 9.04 and XP Home. Mainly I'm on XP as the wireless is somehow slower on Linux, and Xorg hogs way too much CPU. Still I would like to make the switch completely.

 

[damoisture]

My home desktop runs Ubuntu and my Acer Aspire One netbook dual-boots Xubuntu and XP Home (due to Xubuntu not wanting to read xD picture cards). My work computer, other laptop, and HTPC run various versions of Windows (Vista x64, XP, and Windows 7 receptively). Linux works just fine for me, and the occasional headache that pops up is a welcome challenge, not a frustration.

I use Windows at work because it is installed on the machines; I use Linux at home because I build my own systems and I know Linux well enough to not have to pirate Windows anymore...

The only place I recommend Linux is the community center I volunteer at. Reason being that they serve under-privileged families and have far better uses for what little money they have; so it's open-source all they way.