If you're a fan of desktop Linux distributions, as I am, you're probably waiting for Ubuntu 8.10 to be released on Thursday, October 30th. This blog entry is being written on a Ubuntu desktop, as is 90 percent of all the work I have done for the last two years. I advocated Linux and Open Source Software as an alternative to Windows and Macintosh systems for people wanting to save money on personal computers, so I switched myself.
Being that money dominates headlines today, let's ignore all the security advantage of a modern Linux distribution and look only at dollars and cents. Can using an Intel-based personal computer running some type of Linux save you money over the same computer running Windows?
The quick answer is yes, because Linux distributions are free or cheap, and Windows costs range from reasonable to outrageous (if you look at the Vista price chart). However, most new personal computers ship with Windows, so the price of Windows is included in the cost of the hardware. Hidden though it is, basic Windows operating systems only add $40-$60 to the price of the PC, depending on the vendor.
Linux fanatics quickly point out that a modern Linux OS includes OpenOffice, a free productivity suite that can do at least 95 percent of all work done by Microsoft Office. True, but Windows users can easily download OpenOffice for Windows, and that version is just as free as the Linux version. The same is true for the Macintosh version, as well.
Thousands of free and Open Source software titles exist for all operating systems. Wikipedia has a good starting place, or you can look through the branded download sites, like Download.com, PCWorld.com, and Tucows.com for thousands of programs you can trust not to have viruses and the like.
Will the Ubuntu operating system save you money? A little bit. Will the world of Open Source Software save you much more money? Yes. If you prefer the ability to easily install any program you or your users want, Windows works great. If you want fewer security hassles and an environment more closed so non-technical users can't mess things up, Linux works great.
Yes, you have many ways to save money today. But the tradeoff is a bit of work, time, and the need to make some decisions. Ubuntu may save you some money, but Open Source Software will save you buckets o'bucks.
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Ubuntu is stable and easy to use if you have typical hardware.
Unless you have rare or obsolete equipment, Ubuntu works like a charm.I have been using Version 8.04, the install couldn't be much easier and with a one gigahertz AMD processor, a gigabyte of RAM and a 100 gigabyte hard drive, an old system I bought for less than a hundred dollars from geeks.com.
Amazingly, my 3.3 Ghz Windows Vista system with 4 Gb RAM and a screaming fast 500 GB hard drive is actually slower for most common tasks!
The cheap system with Linux runs circles around a more modern system (and almost twenty times more expensive!) with Vista!
Thank God for Open Source!
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is great. I think it is the best distro yet of a Linux platform.Will it save you money? Probably not. While people see that Ubuntu is free and can run on older equipment, the part of the picture that is rarely told is that compared to windows, the maintenance costs (in terms of time spent keeping it up to date or finding dependencies for software that you need) and ease of use/learning curve, it is pretty expensive.
Make sure you know Linux quite well before jumping in. I have it installed on my laptop alongside XP using Wubi. I am a developer and have also administered Linux and several different flavors of Unix as part and parcel of my career over the years. So I am no stranger.
I find I tend to do more to keep the system up and running as I want it more than I find myself actually accomplishing anything with it. So I rarely even use it. While greatly improved, getting a wireless device, for instance, can still be a bit challenging. Try installing ColdFusion...good luck finding the dependancies you need. That took me several days to locate a source that still had them.
Even with the KDE4 interface (which is greatly improved), it can still be hard to navigate and find things that you need. You think vista's popup asking for permission is a pain, try have to use KDESU or similar command every time you want to run a program so it can access a file.
To sum it up, unless you are one of my fellow uber geeks, it's still not ready for prime time.
Have a Happy Samhain all!
Ubuntu is great, but Open Office is not so great
I think the Linux community needs to focus more energy on topping MS-Office. I've installed Ubtunu a number of times on various machines. It's my preferred OS, by far. But Linux simply doesn't offer very compelling applications. Open Office is pretty good. But I don't find "pretty good" to be a very compelling reason to switch. There are even some features about OO that cause me to open it up every once in a while on windoz machines (e.g. HTML tables paste into calc; equation editor), but because I get these features in the windows version of OO, and because I rarely need them, they are not compelling enough to cause me to change my OS.The key to unlocking Ubuntu's potential is killer apps. Someone needs to make killer office applications for linux. Then, I'll switch.