Linux it's free... Good Thing Because It's Full Of Bugs.. 4622

Glenn

Quite: but I suspect most of us who have tried and switched to Linux had lots of things which didn't quite work in Windows - or worked with such a level of difficulty that they were a constant incentive to wish there was an alternative.

Then one day one of those things just got annoying enough to make us look seriously elsewhere, and found that 'almost as good' in several areas combined with 'rather better' in several others. (The fact that a complete start-to-finish Linux installation, including printer, scanner etc, involved precisely one reboot, when the same machine had spent most of the previous evening being rebooted after a few minutes uptime over and over again to get Windows and various drivers installed was the first 'rather better' for me).

I have machines running both systems in the house: which one people (myself, my wife and five children aged between 6 and 21) prefer to use depends entirely on what they want to do. I have to say that the Linux machines are more heavily used, by quite a long way: there is just the odd thing where Windows is easier, though.

Perhaps one day Windows will catch up with Linux on the things Linux does better, and vice versa: for the moment, each has its own very real drawbacks. It's a question of which drawbacks actually matter to you.

For me, the security, ability to do most maintenance without half a dozen reboots, and seamless local networking brought Linux out well ahead, even after years of working with Windows (from 3.1 through to XP) in network and desktop environments.

-- David Aldred