Hi, Before I start I'd like to make clear that this is *not* a flame or a troll, I genuinely want to know the answer to my question as I would quite like to continue using linux. Could someone tell me why I'm using linux not Windows 95? I've been told that linux is much better and I believed it and have been faithfully using linux (apart from the occasional trip into a win95 partition to play games) from then on. I've come to the conclusion that yes, as a server on a network, linux is much more stable and you don't need to reboot often. But for the home user, why bother? Linux is so much harder to set up (it may not be incredibly difficult but it is still much much harder than "stick the cd in the cd-rom drive and click on "next" until it's installed, possibly changing a few values on the way" which is all you have to do for windows). It's a complete bugger to install new things - dependency problems, compile problems, configuration problems. Oh whoopee, it's Open Source, it's free. So what? There's plenty of free Windows shareware and freeware - it just isn't "free" in the Open Source sense, should the average home user really care? Besides, all these developers working together on Open Source software has had no major effect that I can tell other than making me install new versions of everything all the time to enable the installation of something else and getting huge phone bills because of that. In windows if I want to install something new I stick the cd in and away I go - done. In linux I download the source, fight for hours with Makefiles and header files - or if I'm lucky ./configure will show me all the problems I need to fix in advance. OK, I can install .deb files (or .rpm files or whatever) instead but then I have to hope the package maintainer has kept everything up-to-date and hasn't mucked up - the number of times gzip complains about not being able to uncompress .deb files is amazing - and then I find someone's mucked up the dependencies and have to spend ages mucking around on ftp.debian.org (or mirrors) looking for stable-ish versions that will work and let me get on with it. Besides, most packages are optimised for a 386... As far as I can tell the following summary is true:
Windows ------- *) Complete ease of use - a GUI even an utter luser can understand. *) Plenty of support for developers at MSDN - with plenty of free downloads of SDKs. *) Piss easy installations. *) GAMES - is there a single good game on linux apart from ports of Quake? *) Oh look, is that *another* cover cd with free demos and software? Guess I won't be spending ages downloading like I would with linux then... Linux ----- *) Astronomical phone bills after downloading new software. *) CDs from CheapBytes may be cheap - but they're not free and they get out of date very quickly. *) Basic installation is easy - but from then on installing new software is not what I'd call easy. *) Great community of people ready to help - but should I need help? *) Not a single good game in sight :( Please help, I really don't want to give up something that is apparently so good - but I can't see why it is good for a home user... -- Charles
