I’m just going to start this off by saying I’m an OS agnostic. While I believe there may be a perfect operating system, I doubt it will ever see the light of day because humans aren’t perfect and can’t write perfect code. I use operating systems as needed and take each one with its draws and its flaws. At work, it’s XP, HP-UX and the Linux flavor of the month (which by the way is migrating from Gentoo to Ubuntu). At home its Windows 7RC, Vista and Ubuntu. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned OS X, but that’s simply because I don’t own a Mac nor do we use them at work. Note: I’ve been toying with buying a Mini or a Macbook for a while but having just bought a house I have more pressing things to spend money on. I don’t have any problems with any of the big 3 operating systems (other than availability of cross platform programs and support but that’s a different nut entirely), but I do have problems with fanboys and cultists. These people are so blinded with belief that their OS is perfect that they ignore any flaw and place blame entirely on the competitors. Don’t proselytize your OS, because chances are you’ll just confuse whomever it is and cause even more problems down the road. A good example of this single mindedness can be seen in an article I came across on Digg by Jack Wallen from back in February entitled “10 Reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows”. Stop now and read his article. Don’t skim through it. Give it a good read, contemplate it and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Okay, so Jack may be a great guy, but after reading his article I feel he comes across as an ignorant, Windows-hating cultist. Let’s begin with this quote:
I have an announcement: the error of Microsoft’s ways is finally catching up and will cause the once-invincible juggernaut to kneel before that which is Linux.
I’m really not going to touch this sentence, but it is one hell of an opening and Jack certainly got my attention with it and it makes it painfully clear where his OS allegiance lies. What I really want to address are the 10 bullet points that follow and the truths and fallacies within each one.
1. Not much to see here. Jack did a pretty good job of addressing the windows releases and their strengths/weaknesses. I don’t quite agree with 98 (I don’t think it failed that badly) nor do I think Vista was as bad a travesty as Windows ME. I’ve never used NT so I can’t make any conclusion to the accuracy of his assessment.
2. Again, Jack has used a good example. Linux has been steadily making gains across all the various flavors and across its various uses. Just look at the rise of Android for phones, the fervor around the newly announced ChromeOS and the pervasiveness of Ubuntu. His example of missteps was also a good choice. KDE 4.0 was a rough beta release and wasn’t incredibly stable, but has made incredible gains since then with both stability and feature improvements.
3. This is the section in which I feel Jack begins to lose sight of his original thought and delves into Microsoft bashing. Yes, Exchange is a huge part of the business side of Windows, but it is vastly outnumbered by the sheer number of the general public that uses Windows. As long as Microsoft has a firm grip on the consumer market, it shouldn’t matter too much how the business market does. In fact, I’d say the new Exchange pricing is a good thing for Linux. It shows that the recent trend of governments and businesses switching to Linux has hurt their market and they’re trying to recoup losses as best they can. I feel he should have focused more on consumer pricing and emphasized the inconsistencies therein. It really bothers me that there are several different versions of each Windows release and as features increase so does cost.
4. Ah Linux pricing. It’s non existent right…right? Uh how about no. Yes the vast majority of Linux flavors are free but what happens when you’re in an Enterprise environment that requires professional support? Well you either go with Red Hat or you find another flavor that offers support (and trust me there aren’t very many of them). As you may have picked up, we recently got hit with this requirement which is why we’re switching from Gentoo (don’t ask me how this was chosen in the first place) to Ubuntu because they have the Long Term Support releases and professional support without the license fees of Red Hat (our runner up). While Jack does have a good point here, but while he says OSS licenses are free it’s not always the case and sometimes operational requirements hinder Linux adoption. I also can’t help but include a humorous quote I saw on our *nix SysAdmin’s cubicle: “Linux is only free if your time is worthless”
5. I’m not going to touch the Vista Capable fuck up and its aftermath nor am I going to refute the “boon to Intel“. The fact that Vista could bring any decent laptop (or desktop for that matter) to its knees is also an incredibly valid point. However, driver compatibility, while a known problem, was also not entirely Microsoft’s fault. The vast majority of early adoption problems with Vista came as a result of poorly coded or nonexistent drivers. Just because an operating system doesn’t support a 3rd party peripheral doesn’t mean it lacks hardware compatibility, but it does mean that there was a lack in planning and preparation for release. Plus, Windows 7 appears to have awesome hardware compatibility with the Release Candidate so time will tell if its hardware range remains the same with the officially released version.
6. Supposedly Linux is compatible with damn near everything from the oldest Pentium III’s to the newest Core i7 and beyond. However, I’ve had more problems with Linux recognizing various pieces of hardware (I don’t use a cheap KVM) than I have with Windows. To be honest it’s normally older nics or graphics cards or attempts at using multiple monitors, but they have improved as the years have gone on. This is also the problem I hear about the most with first time adopters. They tend to install Linux and maybe 10% of the time run into some incredibly arcane problem that requires an unhealthy (for them) amount of command line fu to fix. Until Linux can be installed and “just work” I think it will have a huge problem entering into the consumer market.
7. Linux advocates have been making the same proclamations of revolutionizing the desktop for as long as the boys out of Redmond. To be fair both sets have made incredibly strides and you can often see influences of one operating system bleeding over to features in another. Not really much to disagree with other than the one sidedness of the point against Windows.
8. I see how Microsoft could have been shrouded in mystery and not transparent, but they not only released a Beta and Release Candidate they didn’t cap the number of participants because of the overwhelming interest. While we can’t see the internal workings of the devs, the entire operating system is laid bare for tinkering and prodding of anyone who chose to do so. I for one had fun attempting to crash the early beta as much as possible, but at the same time sent in detailed bug reports in the hopes that Microsoft could iron out any bugs I and others found.
9. I don’t even want to touch this bullet other than to say that this is probably the dumbest section of the entire article. How can Windows not be transparent and yet you have the beginnings of a feature list? Furthermore, what the fuck is with better C++ support, Windows cross-compilers, fingerprint readers and DNSSEC being on the Fedora list? Windows supports C++, the ability to compile for Linux and the use of fingerprint readers and DNSSEC stub resolvers.
10. According to Jack, hardware requirements for Fedora 10 are akin to something in the 90s. Well let me tell you a little story about my thin client at work. It’s a Neoware box from before HP bought Neoware and falls squarely in the “Linux can run on that” group of old hardware. I need to upgrade to NeoLinux 4 so that my box can have SSH for routing scans by the SysAdmins and IAOs. However, I can’t upgrade because my neoware doesn’t have enough flash memory to support X via NeoLinux4 (32mb v 128mb) and we’re not slated to get funding for new thin clients anytime soon. So now our Enterprise environment which is using Linux is being held back by hardware requirements from the 90s. I’ll leave it at that and continue to the netbook portion of this bullet.
I think Jack is wrong in stating that Windows 7 will have problems in the netbook world. Windows 7 has been found to run perfectly fine on netbooks and with little decrease in performance. As for Linux on netbooks, both Canonical and MSI reported higher than normal returns on netbooks bought with Linux installations. There have been several reasons for this among them:
- early netbook linux releases seemed rushed and unfinished (I can attest to this as my Eee 701 with Xandros was horrible and promptly replaced with a tailored Xubuntu)
- lower hardware specs than Windows alternatives
- unfamiliarity and frustration with Linux
- expecting Windows and not wanting to learn
While none of these can be directly attributed to Linux (except for the early rushed OSes) the lionshare of it is a result of Linux adoption. It’s just deemed too difficult because it’s not Windows. As a result of this I feel Windows 7 will fare better in the market simply because it’s a Microsoft product.
As you can see, Jack started out with a decent sounding article (albeit with a wee bit of vitriol) and I fully expected to see well thought out points on the matter. He started out decently, but soon deviated to Microsoft bashing with incomplete depictions, one sided arguments or outright idiocy (mainly in the features list). Had he taken the time to set aside his Linux-is-the-one-true-path ideology, I feel he could have made a very compelling article by comparing and contrasting the various strengths and weaknesses of Windows and Linux