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Well, well, well! We seem to be going on a crusade here at iTWire - the old W vs L battle. The Windows is better than Linux creed - which I think is another way of proffering reasons why marketing is better than technology.

Ten reasons to run Vista? There are far more reasons than that to run GNU/Linux. And it doesn't take as long to enumerate them because the reasons are simple and you do not need ten paragraphs to outline each argument. When it comes to GNU/Linux, the KISS principle applies.

This isn't a matter of belief - just one of pragmatism. I have been running Debian GNU/Linux for the last eight years and some - six years on one PC and the balance on a second one which I upgraded to.

I've taken up the 10 reasons cited by my colleague Alex Zaharov-Reutt and then given my own. Double or quit, Alex.

1. Updates: if anyone is crazy enough to allow automatic updates with Windows, there is a good chance that you are going to hose your system sooner or later. That doesn't happen with any distribution of GNU/Linux. So when you factor in costs, please add the amount you, the average user, would pay to have your Windows re-installed. You can also calculate how much valuable time you spend getting all your applications/utilities reinstalled and customising them as you had done initially.

(Windows XP service pack 3 is sitting on the desktop of a PC next to me, one I'm building for a friend. I'm scared to install it after seeing all the negative reports about it. Yes, a 300mb-plus update released to the public by the biggest software company in the world cannot be installed on a system put out by the same company. Did someone say automatic updates???)

Remember, reinstallation every year, two years or three years, is NOT a normal feature of computer usage - not unless you are buying dodgy hardware. Neither is constant rebooting - at times, after moving your mouse a few centimetres to the right. These practices have been normalised by Windows.

My first Debian update - from Potato to Woody - took 44 hours on a 56k modem - the internet connection cut out twice but nothing happened to my system. Any comparable examples from the Windows crowd???

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Sam Varghese

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A professional journalist with decades of experience, Sam for nine years used DOS and then Windows, which led him to start experimenting with GNU/Linux in 1998. Since then he has written widely about the use of both free and open source software, and the people behind the code. His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.

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