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Our Blogs Open Sauce The Linux tinority responds | The Linux tinority responds |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 21 November 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 The word "usability" is a relative term - I find mutt, the mail user agent that runs from a command line, the best mail program for my purposes. It ranks very high in terms of usability, configurability and I can manipulate it to do what I want. But then that's me; there are lots of GNU/Linux users I know who prefer Evolution, or Kmail, or Icedove (better known as Thunderbird). Featured Whitepaper
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The longer you use something, the easier it becomes to use it. The first days are hard, then it becomes progressively easier. Usability, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder. To answer another question that Stan raised, what do you do when your Linux system breaks down? I fix it myself, whether it be hardware or software. Truth is, in the eight years plus of using GNU/Linux my system has failed twice - once due to a bug in CUPS, the common Unix printing system software, which made the system unbootable, and the second time due to a motherboard fan failure. Both were easily rectified. I think that's a pretty good record for eight years of use, and two PCs. But what does the luddite do? Help on forums isn't that tough to come by - I fixed the CUPS problem that way. Hardware problems arise less often because GNU/Linux tends to stress test the hardware during installation and any bad apples show through. Microsoft is not the devil - but as veteran FOSS journalist Nicholas Petreley put it, if the devil did meet up with Microsoft people, they wouldn't struggle to conduct a friendly conversation. The company has done enough damage to the computer industry in its 33 years. Even a cursory glance at the history of the computer industry would reveal that its not exactly kosher tactics that have reaped marketshare for Microsoft. I doubt that any GNU/Linux company has ever talked about beating Microsoft. They would like to play alongside and co-exist. Sadly, it's Microsoft that's paranoid, always looking to embrace, extend and extinguish everybody else. It starts at the most basic level - can you install a single Windows installation on anything other than the first primary partition of your hard drive? GNU/Linux lives happily anywhere - even on an extended partition. In the end the whole thing comes down to a series of tradeoffs - do you want to be beholden to the whims of a big corporate which actually has the temerity to sometimes fix bugs after seven years? I certainly don't. Do you like being spied on when you are using your PC every day. I don't. Do you like paying through your nose for anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, firewall software and so on, to have a chance of keeping your PC from crashing in the big smoke which is the internet? I don't. Do you fear for your PC's life any time you bring in a CD or DVD from a friend for use on your home PC? I don't. Do you like a system on which updating is a pain in the a***? I don't - on my Debian system, it is dead easy, be it from day to day or version to version. Do you like to keep learning until they carry you out in that little box? I certainly do. Moving to GNU/Linux is eminently possible and is a great adventure. But, given the level of your dependency on Windows, it does take time and effort. The rewards are immense. This is not anecdotal evidence, this is my personal experience. |
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