How I dumped Windows for Linux - Day 1 - TechRadar UK

7. About the command line: Most any thing your told to do in the terminal on a forum or IRC can be accomplished within the GUI. The reason commands are posted is for ease of use. It's much easier to ask someone to open the terminal and copy/paste a few lines of commands than it is to ask them to click here and there and check this box and hit apply and.... So, while people are afraid of the command line, it is actually the easier interface.

6. Linux is good but I can see its benefits on my Asus Eee PC in a way that I don't when I use it on a desktop.

On my Asus, it enables a low price and access to a bunch of quality apps that fit its profile as my 'second' (actually third) machine brilliantly. But on my desktop, I want access to standard applications and that means Windows or the Mac.

Of course, at some point in the future this may well change as the real triple AAA applications move into the cloud and the choice of OS becomes subsequently less important. But that's still a while off.

5. temporary, a few things...

Driver support in both XP and Vista is completely awful; I've been a PC tech for 10 years now and 99% of the time I have to download and install new drivers. Recently linux has made leaps and bounds with driver/kernel integration; rarely do you have to install drivers anymore---and when you do, it's still sometimes easier than in windows.

I agree that the majority of device drivers in linux were initially made by "hobbiests" but I reject the idea that manufacturers simply "want their products to function exactly as designed" as you implied.

The reason that they don't make linux drivers is because the pressure to comply is far less then for MS/Apple; and the reason that these drivers don't get made by the manufacturers (and are made by "hobbiests" and are sometimes "generic") is because the manufacturers often do not release their driver manual data to programmers in the open source communtiy who can then create the drivers.

Thus, it is the closed-source, MS dominated marketplace that is in control here, not

manufacturers trying to make their devices work as intended. All they care about is the bottom line.

Also, the reason that MS/Apple do not write generic drivers is because they don't have to; the market is completely (and in some ways unfairly) dominated by Microsoft; which being a top-down juggernaut of a corporation cares little about compatibility--they also assume that the manufacturers will take care of this for them.

And finally, let me just say it's great to see these articles popping up all over the place these days. Keep it coming---there's a lot in linux to criticize, too.

4. You don't need to install any FUSE plugins to read/write NTFS; full read/write access has been integrated out-of-the-box in many linux distros over the past year; for Ubuntu it's been built-in since Gutsy Gibbon came out last October.

3. I'll keep my OS preferences out of this and I don't disagree with what you're doing, but I think a couple of things about this article might be inaccurate:

1. Windows (let's leave Vista out of this, as it's a very new OS) actually has the vast majority of drivers already built-in, just like Mac OSX and the various consumer versions of linux. I suppose your point here is that far more were built in in Linux. As far as I am aware, this is possible because there are far more generic drivers made for Linux (like your printer driver, which is unlikely to have been coded amazingly well for your printer because it may be designed for maximum compatibility, not quality) by dedicated hobbyist coders. For Windows and Mac OSX, the companies who make the components want their devices to function exactly as they designed, so they want to make their own drivers (and thus Microsoft/Apple are unlikely to make generic ones which make most devices work out of the box).

2. Motherboards very rarely need separate drivers to be installed in Windows (i.e. drivers which do not automatically activate as part of the basic Windows install). I have installed 95, 98, 2000 and XP on around 50-60 different computers over the years and have NEVER had an issue with motherboard drivers.

It just seemed that there were some things implied about Windows (and indirectly about Mac OSX) which were a bit misleading. Otherwise, very interesting; I look forward to future updates.

2. Wow, yet another "I'm trying Linux" article. Well, welcome. You may have some issues getting the various audio/visual players to work with "proprietary formats" such as MP3's - this isn't a technical issue so much as a political one. BTW OpenSuse 10.3 installs all the players working out of the box, so there's less hassle there.

You're probably using GNOME but don't let that stop you from running KDE apps, such as K3B which I find to be the best CD burning software on any platform. Have fun.