Even if you have always worked with a Windows or Mac desktop, Linux offers numerous advantages that are worth trying, says Jack Wallen.
Many may harbour doubts about the Linux desktop. But after more than 10 years of using it, I can put those concerns to rest. Not only is the Linux desktop user-friendly, powerful and flexible, it is also an improvement on the more familiar operating systems.
Here are 10 reasons why the Linux desktop has an edge and why your interest should be sufficiently piqued to at least want to try it.
1. More efficiency
If you work in either the Windows or Mac desktop, you'll know that efficiency was not a key factor in either design. Simplicity, yes. Efficiency, no.
When you are working with many windows open in Windows, what do you do? You minimise them until your taskbar is filled with minimised windows, or you tile your windows until you need a bloodhound to locate the window you want to work with.
In the Linux desktop, there are many ways to help you work more efficiently. You can take advantage of the Pager and place windows that belong to various tasks on their own desktop. You can also use a feature like Fluxbox window grouping. If you like your windows all on the same desktop, but do not like to minimise them all the time, you can shade the windows so that only the title bar shows.
2. No more 'lock down'
With Windows or OS X, you get what you get and no more. Of course, you can install third-party applications in Windows, but you'll never have the flexibility you would find with a Linux desktop. And if you don't like the desktop you are using in Linux, you can choose a different one.
Because Linux distributions are not locked down to any one window manager or desktop, you should be able to find exactly what you want. Whether you want a complex desktop, just the bare minimum or something in between, Linux can make your desktop be and do anything you want.
Equally, you need not fear too much configuration or too many options. You can start with the basic desktop and live with that all your computing life, if you so choose. Eventually, however, you are likely to discover how far you can bend the desktop with Linux. Bend away — it will not break.
3. Easier use of removable media
For a long time, removable media was the Achilles' heel of Linux. How do I use my CD drive? Where is my iPod? No new user wants to have to mount a removable drive to use these. But now, thanks to HAL and D-Bus, this is no longer an issue.
Insert a CD and it is there to use. Plug in your iPod and you should find it in /media — ready and waiting. How does this improve the experience? When you insert a CD or DVD into a Windows machine, unless there is an autorun feature on the disc, you have to go to My Computer and find the disk drive to access the contents of the disc.
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With Linux, when you insert a disc, an icon pops up on your desktop with the disc's label. To get to its contents, simply click or double-click on the icon to open up a file browser to the contents.
In most cases, the desktop will automatically open the contents of the disc in the appropriate application. That behaviour is the default for most modern desktops shipped with modern distributions.
4. Eye candy
Have you ever played with Compiz, KDE 4 or Elive Compiz? That is what desktop eye candy is all about. Microsoft tried to offer eye candy with Vista, but it failed. It will try again with Windows 7, but I predict it will fail again. OS X offers more eye candy than Windows, but it is still limited.
Now you are probably thinking, "What does this have to do with anyone in the IT industry?" Not much, to be honest. But most users are not IT pros. They are less tech-savvy users who do much less work on a PC, but would love to have a desktop that they could play with. People, average people, like a wow factor.
The average user wants to be impressed with how things look. Otherwise, there would be no market for Apple computers. People like shiny, pretty things and the Linux desktop offers these in abundance.
5. No more random, over-crowded menus
Occasionally, I have to write about Vista. Typically, I am installing an application to write about, and Vista just tacks it onto the Start Menu. Before long, that menu becomes too large to be useful.
With Linux, this unwieldiness does not occur. In modern KDE or Gnome, when you install an application, the installation process inserts the menu entry in the correct place. If it is a word processor, it will go on the Office menu. If it is a network tool, it will go on the Internet menu.
This categorisation of menu entries makes accessing applications far easier than under Windows or OS X. Of course, you can create a desktop shortcut...
Talkback
I started playing with Mandrake Linux 7.2 back in2001. The command line, terminal, and compiling were used a lot, in those days. Linux has become the only system I use now. It has become simpler, faster, and so much more robust than windows, and you can have it any way you want it. You are not locked into any one distribution, you can change anything you don't like, so it becomes your personality. The penguin is fixin to fly.
Good article! Everything you said is true. I'm using Arch Linux (64-bit) on my new laptop, and Arch Linux 32-bit on my old desktop. Both run top notch. Linux has made my desktop experience fast, efficient, stable, and simplified.
What a totally biased article.
The comments below are my views, and my veiws alone.
I do wish that when people write articles like the one I am commenting on they would make that point clear.
Everyone is welcome to their opinion, but don't try to present them as fact.
So, to my comments,
What is the "Linux Desktop" the author mentions ?
There is no such thing.
There are oodles of them - so which one is the author refering to ?
He mentions KDE4 - this ( in my opinion ) is the most bloated, un-user friendly desktop I have come across is years.
Vista - a brilliant OS from my perspective as a user of it - I do wish people would stop jumping on a band wagon and bring some reality to the topics they write about. OK - Vista needs a modern PC for it to work well, but these are very cheap now ( mine cost £140 from Tesco and is brill ).
Mac - I can't comment - I have not used a Mac for about 20 years.
My views on the subject of which OS to use are ( as I heve mentioned before on this site ) :-
1. There is no one best one.
2. Choose the one that fits your needs bearing mind :-
2.1 Windows has by far the better applications available of the 3 ( although you have to pay for them normally )
2.2 Mac is only available on hardware with a vastly high price compared to hardware equally as good for running Windows and Linux.
2.3 Linux - which distribution do you want - there are so many. I use Ubuntu on 2 computers here ( one Laptop and one PC ) - they are only used for basic WP and Internet work - I personnaly would not use Linux for anything else as the apps available are no where near as good as are available for Windows ( my opinion ). I have tried, and I found myself having to dual boot, or go Virtual - I tried Wine, but it would not work with the Apps I wanted.
Remember, these are my views.
I do wish that when people write articles like the one I am commenting on they would make that point clear.
Everyone is welcome to their opinion, but don't try to present it as fact.
Far from me to stand-up for Messrs Wallen, but this is a _comment_ piece. Comment pieces are subjective. It's not presented as fact.
If you like Vista, then great. If you don't know anything about Mac then also great. Jack wants to convince you that you need to rethink your preferences and that this *really* is the year of the Linux desktop! Whoop, whoop!
: What a totally biased article.
Which freely translated means "I disagree with this article", well, that's your prerogative of course.
: I do wish that when people write articles
: like the one I am commenting on they
: would make that point clear.
I think, as the other commentator mentioned that the fact that it was a named comment piece, that was a given. What you have the problem with is that you don't agree with it.
: Everyone is welcome to their opinion, but
: don't try to present them as fact.
So you wouldn't mind it if another comment piece made claims and stated opinions that you DID agree with then??!
So, to my comments,
: What is the "Linux Desktop" the author mentions ?
: There is no such thing.
: There are oodles of them - so which one is
: the author refering to ?
I think the author will have been referring one of the two main front ends, Gnome and KDE. In terms of the user interaction, they are now almost indistinguishable, and deliberately so. I suspect that in a few more years they will all but merge.
: He mentions KDE4 - this ( in my opinion ) is
: the most bloated, un-user friendly desktop
: I have come across is years.
Once again, you are welcome to your opinions, but I have to say that Vista takes the biscuit as far as bloated and slow. I recently converted a friends all but unusable Vista laptop to Fedora 9 and the speed up was incredible. It was a completely different machine thereafter. I was using Gnome, but I haven't really noticed that much difference between the two wrt speed.
: OK - Vista needs a modern PC for it to work
: well, but these are very cheap now ( mine
: cost £140 from Tesco and is brill ).
Where "Modern" is a code word for a machine that would be considered a supercomputer scant few years ago. Two gigs of RAM as a minimum??! scary.
: 2.1 Windows has by far the better applications
: available of the 3 ( although you have to pay
: for them normally )
Rubbish, it doesn't have Evolution, or Gimp, or Rhythmbox, or Ekiga, or MythTV, it's got nothing that I use every day !!
So what you actually meant here was that it doesn't have the Windows only apps that you use every day. This is not the same thing as saying that it cannot do the things that you do every day, just not the way you do them today. What a shock. It's a different OS.
: 2.3 Linux - which distribution do you want
: there are so many [...]
So if it's Windows it's "What do you want to do today" where variety and choice is a good thing. If it's Linux you're talking about though, variety and choice is a bad thing.
Your comment screams that you are easily as biased as you accuse the article of being. You just assume that being biased in favour of one of the largest, richest, criminal enterprises on the planet is kosher, but giving props to a system that is now up there with the other top performers can only be a biased puff piece.
Very well said Andrew, thank you for this.
jw
Sleightholme I think you may have missed the point slightly.
I use Windows on a daily basis but recently I built a modest pc from components I had kicking around the cupboard.
These included an old GeForce MX440 (64mb) 768mb DDR1 ram and an old AMD XP 2000+ cpu on a cheap motherboard.
I installed Ubuntu and used Gnome as my desktop manager.
Even with all my favourite compiz effects enabled (3d cube, wobbly windows etc.) the machine never skips a beat.
I regularly use the Gimp in place of photoshop and open office instead of Word, Excel etc.
If I were to use Vista on this machine it would slow to a crawl. I know this because I recently installed Vista on my tablet PC which is of similar spec to the Ubuntu box and it was completely unusable.
I agree that Windows Vista with all the eye candy enabled looks good. But there's no way you'll get any of it working on older hardware. With Ubuntu you can save that old machine from the skip and still get a fantastic desktop experience without having to invest in 4gb of ram and a quad core CPU.
The reasons I haven't installed Linux are as follows:
- if anything, there is too much choice. I think if there were one Linux desktop more people would try it
- I don't want to have to spend time trying to find drivers for my peripherals, e.g. a Minolta film scanner (it was a bit of a nightmare getting it to work with Windows!)
- although there are alternatives to mainstream software, such as The Gimp (which is, incidentally, available for Windows), it's not necessarily as good (the Gimp is slow and clunky compared to Photoshop, which is fair enough as it's free)
- if you're in to gaming, then it's got to be Windows: can I install Valve's Steam client in Linux (not yet, despite rumours)? Can I play Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Halo, Fallout 3, Roller Coaster Tycoon etc?
I'm not knocking Linux, but it's not quite enough to drop Windows (or MacOS) completely, for most of us.
Well it's not for everyone ok. But I dont see myself going back on Windows personally. So I would say that windows is also not for everyone!! There are things that I can do on Linux and not on Windows. I am using Linux not by choice and not because of the GPL license but because I NEED it.
- if anything, there is too much choice. I think if there were one Linux desktop more people would try it
It's like music...there are still 'mainstream' ones :
- Ubuntu (or some of its derived flavors if you want to look around)
- Fedora
...
- I don't want to have to spend time trying to find drivers for my peripherals, e.g. a Minolta film scanner (it was a bit of a nightmare getting it to work with Windows!)
I can understand that some people still have problems with drivers. I would say that unless you buy Mac-only products, you re bound to get the same issues on Windows for instance.
- although there are alternatives to mainstream software, such as The Gimp (which is, incidentally, available for Windows), it's not necessarily as good (the Gimp is slow and clunky compared to Photoshop, which is fair enough as it's free)
Photoshop can be installed on Linux within a few clicks (not guaranteed I agree).
- if you're in to gaming, then it's got to be Windows: can I install Valve's Steam client in Linux (not yet, despite rumours)? Can I play Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Halo, Fallout 3, Roller Coaster Tycoon etc?
There a lot of games that runs natively/non-natively on Linux. Add to that all the online games that are getting increasingly good. I am pretty sure some people play HL2 on Linux btw.
Thank you for your comments, maybe I should give Linux a try (I did attempt to install a version of it, can't remember which one, about 5 years ago, but it kept crashing).
One other thing that concerns me, is how easy is it to set up for connecting to the internet? I had problems getting my Xbox 360 to connect to my router, and would not like to have to struggle to connect via Linux!
Installing software and updates is certainly easier. Configuring wireless is very straightforward in most flavours of Linux, certainly no more difficult than in Windows.
The days when Linux was hard to use are in the past. Choice of printers and scanners is, however, critical as not all are supported. That is my one gripe.
I can tell you this much for absolute certain - if it has been five years since you last tried Linux, you definitely need to give it another try. I think you will be amazed by the difference.
Linux is undergoing constant development and improvement, and the results of that are fed through to the general distributions. As a result, most of the problems which are identified are resolved very quickly. My purchase of an HP 2133 Mini-Note netbook was a good example of that; when I bought it, there were all sorts of problems with loading Linux because of the VIA C7-M CPU and VIA Chrome graphic adapter. Now, barely six months later, any of the major Linux distributions load on it with very little or no problem at all.
Try it. You'll probably like it - and if you do, it will pay off for you many times over, very quickly.
jw