Friday, December 26, 2008

Why I Like Linux As A User

The best thing about Linux distributions today is that pretty much all the stuff that I would need is in there or can be installed quite easily.

In the Windows world, if I want to get rid of everything and start over, I have to re-install Windows, find and install all the drivers which means changing a bunch of CDs and manually running the setup, install all the software (MS Office, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, MS Visual Studio, MS SQL Server, MS Enterprise Library, other 3rd party .NET development libraries, Adobe Reader, Antivirus software, VLC player, Flashget, Nero, Java Runtime Environment).

With Linux, I boot up with the DVD and start the Linux OS installation which installs pretty much everything. If anything is missing, I use 'yum' on the command line (that can probably be scripted) and everything is setup with minimal user interaction.

The one thing I don't like about Linux is the time it takes Linux distros to get working drivers out-of-the-box. Till the last version of Fedora and Ubuntu, the wireless on my notebook didn't work on install.

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