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Story: Open source developers provide 'glimmer of hope'

Posted by: Arunas Ruksnaitis (Monday 25 April 2005, 12:49 PM)

Discussing "quality" without defining what it is is quite a useless exercise. Just counting bugs per line is one thing, Open Source is a clear winner there. If code usability is considered, proprietary code comes out a lot better. Then again, "usability" depends on the user, and what is indispensable for some users, amy be useless for others.

I run dual-boot PC at home with Slackware Linux as my primary OS, but I must say it is a real pain to get some of the things, like printing, scanner and camera working. On Windows 2000 it works first time, all the time. I prefer Linux because I am in charge of what it does and what it doesn't, and it is more stable in performance sense, while W2K tends to slow down with time. I have to say W2K never crashed on me so far, while Linux I have to reboot once in a while because of a runaway printing process hung on USB. I also have much greater variety and choice of software on Linux, also most of the times the "choice" means I have to pick one decent program out of 200 primitive excercises in programming, investing my time in research, trial and error as opposed to investing my money in just buying it. I like it more investing my time than my money, but that's my choice, and I can see that most people will prefer to invest money, not time.