Seth Kinast’s Blog

Do I really want to even try?

You apparently already have Windows or Mac OS, since you’re reading this. Less than 1% of my blog’s traffic comes from Linux, and I think it’s all me. So you’ve already paid the $70 - $100 cost markup associated with the manufacturer’s provision of your operating system. But if you want to build your own system, Linux can be a great option. Since it’s free, you can save a lot of money over a comparable system coming from, say Dell or HP.
That said, if you don’t have high-speed, you’d probably just better stop right here. If you’re thinking of downloading Linux on dial-up, you’re in for a nice treat of 20 to 30 days of tying up your phone line. The Linux kernel is only a few megabytes… but its dozens of gigabytes of supporting software wouldn’t make it far past your telephone wires. Patches and additional software you may want after installation are easy to grab on cable or DSL… but a few hours every day on dial-up? Forget it.

You can run Linux with dial-up if you get a CD distribution, which will provide you with four or five CDs of software. Linux doesn’t care for modems too well sometimes, but they usually work.

You won’t lose any of your existing software or Windows stuff. Linux can live very happily next to Windows, providing you with the option at boot of starting Linux or Windows.

So if you have time, you should definitely try Linux. You won’t lose money, data, or friends if you don’t like it. And you’ll be better-educated about the alternatives to Windows that are out there.

Linux is for nerds! Too hard to use!

This one was true for many, many years. I still remember my early Linux days, spending hours trying to enable NTFS read support in Red Hat, or getting my sound card to work in Mandrake. Too many sessions with the terminal editing arcane configuration files, coupled with poor documentation, led to my removing Linux after just a few weeks, too frustrated to continue.

The times, they are a-changin’. With cheap, quick Internet access everywhere, updated software is available days or even hours after problems are found. Countless support options are readily available every time you have a question, no matter how silly. And if you can’t find it by searching (chances are it’s already been asked), swarms of eager volunteers are ready to help you out. Because the BOE to Linux is (sadly) still fairly high, you’ll find that those who have made the jump are often more tech-savvy, thus more capable of helping you out.

The beauty of Linux is that you are not locked into using just one GUI, what Linux calls a “window manager”. With Windows, you pretty much are forced to use the old Start-Menu-with-taskbar paradigm. There are a multiplicity of window managers available for Linux, the two most popular being KDE and Gnome. Come on, does this look scary and hard to use?

You even have the Start Menu if you want it, with helpful tooltips that fade in as they appear:

In years past, the “curve of appeal” for Linux looked like a parabola. At one end with high appeal, you had the basic users… those who surf the Internet, play Solitare, and write letters. Linux does all of these things as well or better than Windows. At the other end, also with high appeal, there were the techie sysadmins who regularly recompiled their kernel to get that 1.2% performance boost, and the server techs who knew that Linux was the most secure way to put their websites online. In the large middle area were all the “normal users”, perhaps those who used some applications that weren’t available on Linux, especially games. Lately, the curve has flattened considerably. I consider myself right-center on the curve: a “power user” that also plays some games. Linux can meet almost all my needs just as well as Windows, and many it meets far better.

In sum, Linux is no longer hard to use, with arcane command prompts and confusing errors. It’s becoming a desktop OS.