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» phostenix - Windows v.s. Linux

So, how's that goin' for you?

I went thought this exercise about a month ago. Wow, do I appreciate Windows now!

My take away was, if you're anti-Windows & want a different OS, get a Mac. At least it works out of the box & has media support. (Mac mini for 599?)

I honestly see Linux appealing only to the PC equivalent of the Hot Rodder (kinda like over-clocking). If you want to be able to tweak the OS & play with stuff under the hood, Linux is your world. But, the learning curve is steep & there are so many things that aren't there or don't work out of the box. I wanted to setup a machine & just start with surfing & checking e-mail until I got used to the lay of the land & I'd worry about the "hard stuff" as I went. I couldn't even surf the net because of the lack of media file support in all but Xandros (and SUSE 10.1 to some extent).

I bought the retail box of SUSE 10.1, downloaded 10.2, downloaded the SLED 10.1 trial, downloaded Fedora Core 5, downloaded the Xandros trial. Xandros was the closest to a straight-forward install experience, but you still don't have Windows media support or Shockwave without using Crossover office or something similar. (Crossover Office gets you Windows Media Player 6.4 - 6.4? I don't even remember back that far.)

I finally gave up on the whole thing.

I understand the appeal to those who want to be able to make any mod possible & love the challenge of figuring out how to make Linux work, but I just don't have the time to invest in relearning so many things. Even installing a new program requires knowledge of which packages your distro uses, etc. Never mind compiling source code & figuring out tarballs....

I never could get dual monitors on an old Matrox G450 to work. I installed the various distros on 3 different machines. Display adapter setup always seemed to be an issue, except for Xandros. It reminded me of the old Windows 98 days.

In the end, I felt completely deceived by all that I've read over the years about how much easlier/simpler/better Linux is than Windows. Linux is a lot more complicated to install & configure, nowhere close to being intuitive to use, & left me with a lot of feature & functionality holes.

I was looking for Linux to be everything that Windows is & more without the malware issues, but the trade-offs were just too high for me.

Grace and peace,

Steve

-- posted by phostenix