Why do people switch to Linux 13493

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005 11:27:05 +0000, Sinister Midget

Enough to make anyone chuck chairs at the wall, sounds like :-)

I just keep the one dual-booter haning around, but I find myself using it rarely, even for the sole purpose I bought it for: video-capture. I've got a really nice capture card, a gift from a friend, and sadly, it's Windows only. But for that, the machine would be a Linux box totally.

I suppose you could say that most ordinary users don't actually know it's meant to be different. (In fact, I said something similar myself, to T.G, I think). All right, the adverts always make it sound wonderful, but no one really believes everything they see in adverts, do they?

Speaking personally, my experiences with Windows - XP, certainly - have been pretty good. But I don't use it very much. I hear about my friends having problems sometimes. People tend not to bother to mention when a thing works, obviously.

Windows, but he's gone to Africa now. He's mostly self-taught, too. I've now inherited the role of Windows guru to my Mum, whose got an XP laptop, a rather slow and not entirely reliable one (it started life with WinME, and isn't completely up to carrying XP, but it works okay, mostly). One of these days we're hoping to sneak Linux onto it. She doesn't use it for much more than mail and surfing.

I've had a few problems here and there, usually fixable by me or occasionally my brother, who's more knowledgable that me. Most recently (and annoyingly, since I had posted in praise of it) a problem with Gnome. Well, not actually Gnome itself, I think, but some screwed up user setting or other which caused Gnome to misbehave in SUSE 9.3 - it was fine one day, and the next, all my window decorations had vanished, along with the min, max and close buttons, and I couldn't grab apps with alt-click to move them when they showed up in unusable places, plus some other annoyances.

To check it was-wasn't a system-wide Gnome problem, I created another user and logged into Gnome: it was fine. So I went back to being me in KDE, and deleted all the gnome-related user .files directories. Switched to Gnome again, it was back to normal.

At least with Linux, you get that chance to put things right.

I didn't post about it, because I thought, well, it's a minor matter, dealt with pretty quickly, and I probably caused it myself in any case, mucking about with themes and suchlike. I was glad to get it sorted, though, as I really do like Gnome a lot nowawdays. My other laptop, which I bought off my gone-to-Africa pal, currently has Ubuntu on. When I took it off his hands, it had XP Pro on, and a slew of really nice apps - he does a lot of graphics and electronics work - yet I don't regret getting rid of XP. It's become my 'mmm, I think I'll try *that* distro today' machine :-) Much more fun.

I might use Windows again I might even one day buy a new PC with Windows on it - but I'll never go back to Windows-only and abandon Linux. I don't care if Windows is 'better'. I like Linux.

What a lot of anti-Linux people seem not to realise is that if you are a many here are, the great new things in Windows become virtually irrelevent. If we really cared about those things, we'd be using Windows, wouldn't we?

-- Kier