I enjoy using Linux as I find it a much better, safer, faster, cleaner operating system than windows.
Hi there,
Not seen you round these parts before, so welcome
I'd love to be able to use solely Debian on all my systems, however there are, always have been, and always will be limitations to the linux OS compared to Microsoft's offerings. For one, Windows has a massive amount of money behind it, a massive amount of developers and a ridiculous amount of resources to work with.
Heh, with all their resources - both in manpower and financial terms - you'd think MS would know everything there is to know in writing an operating system, yet I don't particularly rate XP or Vista as prime examples of an ideal OS
Considering the number of man-hours that must have gone into designing, writing and testing their code, it's shocking that there are so many vulnerabilities announced for it each month.
I don't know how many employees are on the Microsoft payroll, an in particular work within the OS arena, but I'd guess there are just as many, if not more, that are prepared to volunteer their time, skills and experience to make Linux as good as it is. I guess there's some overlap, though, due to the number of distros available these days, whereas the MS code monkeys only have to essentially contend with one product.
I think this may be the reason why Ubuntu is proving so popular... Canonical provide the stability (in the organisational sense) that other distros have been lacking, and have brought a considerable amount of money to the table too. This results in the community expanding quickly... I'm always surprised at how few years Ubuntu has been around compared to some of the other distros. The growth of the community brings more developers to Ubuntu, which itself attracts more interest and that further attracts yet more users which attracts even more developers, and so the cycle continues.
Of course most software will be made for windows, and hardware made to be compatible. It's always taken a long time for new hardware to get drivers written for linux, which is always a big problem if you want bleeding edge tech.
Yeah, it's time we were all more vocal in demonstrating our anger at hardware vendors that aren't producing Linux drivers or at least making technical specifications available to the open source community to allow them to create their own. This isn't the fault of the Linux developers nor the community - it's purely the hardware manufacturers who are to blame for this, imo.
Of course you can always write your own drivers, but failing coding knowledge, you're left in a bit of a pickle. But yes, it's a great operating system, fun to use, and very secure (in a malware/virus sense anyway).
My coding skills are severely lacking in that department, but luckily there areplenty of coders out there who are prepared to rise to the challenge, so I've not had too many problems with hardware these days.
Sadly, I need to keep windows to one side for syncing my iPod, doing my video editing, and general shiny-ness. It could well be a long time before linux is the definite article, but it may happen one day. Until then, gotta keep using windows. Or buy a Mac
JK
Didn't know there were no iPod drivers for *nix... Isn't OSX based on a version of BSD? If so, are their OSX drivers open source? If so, I'd have thought someone would have ported it across to *nix by now.
Don't have to worry about this myself, as I use a Creative Zen instead of an iPod, and it works flawlessly with *buntu.
ps - not sure if this is the same for everyone, but your sig is a bit bigger than the limit in the FAQ (could be my PC in which case feel free to ignore me
). Here's how it looks on my screen...
You might want to edit it. In the past I've seen the Mods edit other people's sigs that exceed the limit.
