Runs great, sucks less

14 May 2001 15:07

Recently, Rick Lehrbaum, my colleague at LinuxDevices.com, wrote about his transition from a Windows desktop to a Linux desktop.

For me, the switch from Windows to Linux came two years ago. Meanwhile, ZDNet's main Linux commentator, Evan Leibovitch, has used a Unix or Linux desktop since 1986.

Those who've already made the switch will tell you that, like anything else, it's really just a matter of deciding to do it and then living with that decision.

Every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, but at root, an OS is just an OS. For all its cachet as "a system by and for computer experts," Linux's similarities to Windows or Mac OS are far greater than its differences.

Or, as my MIT pal Richard is fond of saying, "All operating systems suck. Linux just sucks less."

If you've succeeded with the Mac or Windows, in time you'll succeed with Linux too. You'll forfeit familiarity and comfort at first, but soon enough Linux will be second nature and any other system will seem awkward.

Why bother making the switch and mustering up all that extra brain activity?

For me, the most compelling thing about Linux is the pace of innovation.

Mac OS, after revolutionizing desktop publishing in the mid-80s, saw only incremental improvements over the next 15 years. Microsoft, after bouying U.S. productivity and the whole economy with the watershed Windows 95 release, seems to actually lose quality (while gaining in resource usage) with each subsequent consumer OS release.

Now take a look at what's happening with Linux.

Two years ago, desktop Linux really didn't exist other than for zealots like Evan. Linux was a server OS. Servers are pretty simple. They run only a few programs at a time. Things are predictable, controlled and tight.

Desktops, by comparison, are complex and weird -- as varied as the people using them. But Linux users wanted Linux desktops.

First came the applications. All of a sudden, instead of a no-frills window manager like fvwm95 running buggy ports of Wordperfect and Netscape, you have several nearly complete desktop environments to choose from, each with its own object model.

Suddenly, there are scores of window managers to choose from, and many are excellent. There are several office suites and graphical word processors -- probably one that's right for the resources available on your machine. You can find open-source dictionary programs and spell checkers, personal finance software, full-featured spreadsheets, at least three graphical browsers, and a bunch of basic but usable database applications. It's easy to download MP3 players and rippers and servers that rival the flash and power of the best multimedia programs available on other platforms.

Fancy file managers have been built by enterprising startups (but managing your files on the shell is still where the real power is at). Developers have more tools than they can shake a stick at, including some pretty nice graphical development tools for HTML and various Web scripting languages. Artists get amazing 3-D graphics, CAD, and rendering tools. There are powerful and full-featured bit-mapped graphics programs and at least one vector-graphics program nearing usability.

Next, Linux evolved to support these more complicated desktop applications. Threading improved, memory caching got better, and along came journaling file systems so you don't have to wait for a disk scan after a power failure. The kernel got support for plug-and-play, PCMCIA and USB devices.

Several power-management schemes for battery devices were integrated, along with support for an ever-widening range of hardware. Linux now supports nearly every processor, sound card, graphics adapter, network card, motherboard, laptop, and peripheral device around, along with hard drives of any existing size, cartoonishly large files and nearly infinite RAM spaces.

The XFree86 windowing system, which, before Linux, had been stagnant for about 10 years, suddenly sprouted a leaner and meaner architecture, a new built-in font server, and support for powerful modern graphics card features like 2-D and 3-D rendering.

This stuff wasn't around three years ago. Some of it wasn't around one year ago. Linux is happening, and it's happening fast.

Both Apple and Microsoft know that consumers are hungry for a faster rate of change, and both hope to get new consumer OSes off the ground this year. One or both may succeed. Or, they may have mixed results. However, both are late. In fact, when they were first promised, desktop Linux didn't even exist yet.

I guess at this point I simply have more faith in the open Linux development model. That's where the momentum seems to be.

Is switching to Linux betting with the numbers? Or will new versions of Mac OS and Windows leave Linux behind? Let us know in the Talk Back below.

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