My life with Linux: Day 7 and Final Verdict - The daily ups and downs of switching to open source

by Stuart Turton  |  Tuesday 8 December 2009
My life with Linux: Day 7 and Final Verdict - The daily ups and downs of switching to open source

Stuart Turton spends the final day of his one week odyssey with Linux, gets drunk on the gaming possibilities of Wine and gives his final verdict on whether Linux is worth the trouble or not.

In days one , two  , three ,  four ,  five  and six of his seven day experiment with Linux, Stuart Turton handed his life over to the alternative OS, trying to ignore the spell of Microsoft and getting busy with his first ever Ubuntu and Fedora install. 

Now on his final day, Stuart gives his ultimate verdict: Should others follow his cue and go down the Linux path or flee for the relative safety of Microsoft. 

Is the world even ready for Linux? And does it have what it takes to go mainstream?

click to view full size imageRight, I've gone almost a week without a gaming hit and I'm experiencing withdrawal. Mercifully, the advent of virtualisation has opened up a world of possibilities and I've heard reports of people playing Team Fortress without too many problems.

My needs are more modest: StarCraft and Football Manager 2007 are my gaming guinea pigs.

My route back into gaming bliss is Wine, a virtualisation package that emulates Windows in Linux. Heading through the now familiar terminal I locate the package and it installs with minimum fuss.

From now on it's as easy as putting the command "wine" in front of whatever I want to run. I install StarCraft and I'm soon happily exploding intergalactic monsters with no compromises of any sort.

Gamers have no fear, at least gamers who enjoy the ten-year-old games I do.

Emboldened, I turn my attention to Football Manager, but it turns out to be as complicated as astrophysics to install.

My trusty Linux gaming website offers a vast sheet of intimidating instructions, and given that my football side is facing relegation anyway, I decide to return to waging intergalactic war.

click to view full size imageclick to view full size imageclick to view full size imageTHE VERDICT

Linux isn't ready for the mainstream, of that I'm certain.

While the applications and community are in place to make it an eventual success, the number of times I was left to fend for myself when something went wrong through no fault of my own means I could never trust my mum with it.

But for anyone with any modicum of computing confidence, Linux deserves a try.

The ability to create a desktop entirely to your own tastes is a unique selling point, and one Microsoft and Apple are unable to match. It's also fun, and when was the last time an OS
was accused of that?

Related Articles
See more about:  linux  |  source  |  os  |  vista  |  microsoft  |  windows  |  gnome  |  ubuntu  |  mozilla  |  wine
 
 
Comments: 7
BuitreMx
9 December 2009
 Hello Stuart, I have to disagree with you regarding your opinion about Linux and Windows. I have been selling and servicing computers since 1989 and been a Bill Gates fan (I mention this so nobody will call me a Linux fanboy) and using Linux for three years now.
Unfortunately, what you said about something going wrong through no fault of your own and being left to fend for yourself applies to any OS. Or didn't you ever work with MSDOS, GEM, early Windows versions, Atari, Commodore, Apple OS's, etc. etc. etc.?
I believe that any OS that makes you comfortable to work with it deserves your praise. But being an opinion builder should make you aware that a lot of people might not eve try something different because you say that it's not ready for the mainstream. This might be true for gamers in the case of Linux, but that's not the largest market and it might also apply to Apple, right?
Greetings from Mexico!


Comment made about the PC Authority article:
My life with Linux: Day 7 and Final Verdict - The daily ups and downs of switching to open source?
Stuart Turton spends the final day of his one week odyssey with Linux, gets drunk on the gaming possibilities of Wine and gives his final verdict on whether Linux is worth the trouble or not.

What do you think? Join the discussion.
whitespiral
9 December 2009
 Ridiculous. I bet you were as lost after your very first week with windows.
ruel24
9 December 2009
 You mess with a distro which is not designed to be easy to use, then switch to Ubuntu which isn't as easy to use as they claim, and you come to this conclusion? Why didn't you use a truly easy to use distro like PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, or OpenSuse? Simply put, you made dumb picks for a starter Linux distro. I don't have anywhere near the troubles you have. I'm not a geek at all, but I have no trouble using Linux. Either you make it too hard for yourself, or you're just too dumb to use it - take your pick...
jwaustincrowe
9 December 2009
 I agree with Stuart. Linux is great for servers, but not ready for the desktop market. Unless you essentially use it as the most basic platform, eg., wordprocessing, a little bit of spreadsheeting, etc, you'll find the apps piecemeal, difficult to install and flaky to say the least.

As for 'using Linux' the main proponents are more than happy to fiddle around with the OS to basically just get 'Hello World' running.

For people like me who have a real need for a system that works with little fuss, it is, unfortunately, windows XP, or, OSX. They have the apps, the support, the unfragmented user base and are targeted at professional users, not spotty little hackers.
ruel24
9 December 2009
 @jwaustincrowe: You're waaaay off base. I'm no geek by a mile. I don't like fiddling with any OS.

Here's what I'll bet you: Install Windows 7 and all the software and drivers necessary to get together a usable system. Now, install Mac OS X, and all the software and drivers to make a usable system. Finally, install Mandriva One and all the software and driver necessary. Then set them all up, getting your hardware to work, etc. I'll bet you, that unless you have exotic hardware that isn't supported by Linux, you'll spend far less time installing and configuring Mandriva. I'll also bet you, that it'll be extremely rare that you'll ever open a terminal to make something work or to configure something.

You you people talk about using a sytem that works with little fuss, you refer to pre-installed systems. You're not talking about installing the OS and setting it up. Yeah, that's a fair comparison... Whatever...
Bradison
10 December 2009
 Dude, you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

I wouldn't have my mother do a bare metal install of Windows and expect success. The point you are missing is that there is a difference between "using" a system and "installing" it.

Have someone who knowledgeable do the Linux install for you, then use if for a week. I think you will come to a different conclusion. Head to head, both systems will perform equally as well.
ferniefromla
10 December 2009
 What a waste of 7 days. The other day a friend came by with her IBM laptop and I installed Linux Mint in about 30 minutes. Everything worked out of the box. I downloaded some software she needed and she was up and running. She emailed me back saying that she loved it and was almost never using her Win XP.

The difference between your experience and mine. I knew what I was doing and you didn't. Not with Linux anyway.

It is as I said in my earlier post. You declared that Linux was not for the mainstream. Now how about you getting someone who knows what they are doing with Linux, then sitting down with the user and asking what do you want to do with Linux? After that you determine whether Linux is the right choice. If the person is a gamer then I would be honest and tell them to stick with Windows. Linux cannot compete with Windows in this domain. But if the person said, I want to play some simple games, some music, view some videos, do some word processing and surf the net, then I would install Linux. I would do what I did for my friend, install Linux Mint and be done with it. But as a backup, I would also have some different versions of Linux that might work with a given machine better. If I don't know the machine, I go to the net and see what the Linux community says and then go with the recommended hardware/Linux combinations based on the community recommendation. Then I would do the install, tweak and make sure everything works. Only then would I turn the person loose on Linux. I would also make sure that I retain the XP system as a dual boot to ensure they could use that system if needed.

I would also direct my friend to documentation for the programs he/she would be using most. In the case of my friend she was using Open Office already on Windows, so no problem there, ditto for Firefox and she needed Skype, also no problem. The learning curve was basically teaching her to use K3b to burn a CD.

What pains me about articles like this is that your experience is only valid for a person willing to risk screwing up their system by installing an OS without any knowledge. This is like trying to fix your own brakes. You better know what you are doing or they might fail! But if an experienced mechanic installs the brakes they will work properly. Same thing here. So don't blame the problems you had on Linux. Knowledge trumps ignorance every time and on this exercise you get an "F" .
Comments have been disabled for this article.
Most Read Most Discussed

Latest Comments

Powered by Disqus

Latest Poll

Which broadband network do you think is the best choice for Australia?
or View results
The Coalition's.
  19%
 
Labor's.
  63%
 
Screw this I'm going back to smoke signals and string on a can.
  18%
TOTAL VOTES: 1672

Vote now
View previous Polls »
Ads by Google

From our Partners

PC & Tech Authority Downloads