I hate Linux. With a passion. But even my hatred for Linux pales in comparison for the loathing I feel towards those who tell me Linux is better than Windows. News flash: it’s not. Comparing Linux to Windows is like comparing a little league baseball player to Ken Griffey, Jr. They both do the same thing, but one does it better and for money.
All right, I don’t really hate Linux. But it’s most certainly not better than Windows in any respect. For one thing, gaming on Linux consists of old Doom ports and Mario clones featuring Tux the penguin. As much as I love Doom, I’m not willing to have that be the only thing I can play. Yes, there are programs (wait, they’re called packages in Linux, aren’t they…) that will allow you to play Windows games in Linux but you have to pay for them. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather just buy an operating system with native DirectX support than get a free OS and have to pay to get an imitation of DirectX.
But it’s not only games that won’t work with Linux; almost any useful program I’ve ever used won’t work with Linux. That includes Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Outlook (heck, any of MS Office), iTunes…the list goes on and on. Indeed there are free programs that do the “same” things as these commercial programs, but don’t kid yourself. GIMP and Nvu are nowhere as powerful as their commercial counterparts, Thunderbird lacks a lot of the features I like about MS Outlook, and while OpenOffice is indeed very nice, I will always prefer MS Office (especially now that I’ve used Office 2007).
In terms of usability, Linux fails miserably. The only people well-suited to use Linux are those who don’t mind having to use the terminal (command line) all the time whenever they want to do the simplest of tasks. A while back, I installed Ubuntu on an old Compaq laptop. It worked fairly well, except when it locked up every time I tried to use a wireless PC card, which I never solved, no thanks to the useless Ubuntu support forums. But the thing that irked me most is how freakin’ impossible it was to install anything. Ubuntu does built-in program download/installation thing (with a graphical user interface), but when I was using it, almost every program was horribly outdated. This couldn’t have been more than a year ago, but it would only let me get Firefox 1.0.7, even though FF 1.5 had been out for a long, long time. So, if I wanted the newest versions of anything, I had to go into the terminal and figure out how to download files, install them, and run them. This was seriously the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Harder even than editing the registry in Windows.
Was there any help for the poor Linux newbie? No, of course not. The Ubuntu documentation appeared to assume you already knew everything there was to know about Linux, and the support forums seemed quite dead, at least in the area for the version I was using. Granted, I was using an old version of Ubuntu (a few months old), but even Microsoft supports old versions of Windows for a few years after they become obsolete.
Not only that, but I couldn’t even muddle around and discover things by accident. I’ve been using Window for as long as I can remember, which also means for the earliest part of my computer-playing days, I mucked around playing games in MS-DOS. DOS commands are pretty intuitive. Even when I was ten, I could figure them out pretty easily (with help from my dad, of course). If I didn’t know what to do, I typed “help” and a list of commands came up. When I wanted to see what they did, I typed them. Edit something? Let’s see if “edit” works…oh, wow, it does! And so on. Linux, on the other hand…well, “edit” didn’t do anything (instead you have to figure out what text editor is installed and type it’s name), “delete” didn’t either. Heck, I couldn’t get any useful information from “help”! I had to type something completely different. And all the useful commands were in strange abbreviations, most of the time of different words. You don’t delete something in Linux, you “rm” it. Eh?
Of course, had I learned about Linux commands before MS-DOS, I’d probably think DOS commands were silly, but I would probably still recognize them as a little smarter than two letter commands that really don’t mean anything to new users. Mostly I’m just annoyed that most everything you need to do in Linux must be done in the terminal. Props go to Windows (and even Mac OS) for simply double-clicking on a program to install it.
Linux is better for servers, I will concede, and it is pretty cool being able to find everything you can install through wget (or whatever it is), but I have no desire to ever switch to Linux. And I really wish people would stop telling me I need to.
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