Linux is for everyone
If this is too long an entry here’s the gist: Go try Ubuntu Linux if you think your computer is slow and all you use your computer for is web browsing, e-mails and office work.
With Windows XP finally kicking the bucket for home users, now seems like a better time than any to push Linux to the uninitiated. And not for any brand-loyalty reasoning, as much as I personally love Linux and many of its distributions (or distros for short), I recognise that it can seem like the only people who use it are the kind of 90s hacker-wannabe you’d find in terrible TV shows or films, see Hackers. But nowadays Linux is far more than a tool for computer geeks like me, and is much more approachable and, more importantly, useful.
I’ve always maintained the opinion, since I first started using Linux about six years ago, that the average user can do everything they need/want to do on their computers faster on Linux than they could on Windows. Most of my family use computers for one or more of the following:
- Web browsing
- Office applications (Word, Excel, maybe PowerPoint)
And that’s ALL. You can easily install Firefox or Chrome to Linux (most distros come with one or the other, usually Firefox) and they run much faster than their Windows equivalents. My girlfriend’s old laptop (about five years old) stopped even registering that it had a wireless card installed, so couldn’t go on the internet without a cable connected to the router, and couldn’t use it at university since they don’t exactly allow students to connect directly to their networks. This, along with its terrible battery and horrendous speed (it took a good five minutes to boot, aka get to the login screen), led to the purchase of a new laptop, which meant I could tinker with the old one! One install of Linux later and the wireless works and everything else runs ridiculously faster than it did on Windows. It’s essentially brand new, apart from the battery still sucks, but blame Dell for that. I should point out that she did have Windows *entire-body-shudder* Vista which really didn’t help but that’s a huge issue in and of itself! If you have Windows Vista installed, chances are that at some point you’ve been impatient with it, give Linux a try, right now.
All of my e-mail needs are met just by having a web browser since I use GMail but Mozilla have their e-mail client, Thunderbird, and I’m sure alternatives exist but I’ve never bothered to look. Those of you who do use e-mail clients (such as Outlook) would feel at home using Thunderbird.
I have to throw my hands up here and say that on Linux you can’t use Microsoft Office (not Linux’s fault, Microsoft still want to believe they have a monopoly). But you can use Oracle’s OpenOffice, or the LibreOffice suite (both essentially the same) which look like Microsoft Office did before it changed to the new “ribbon” menus in 2007. Everything you can do in MS Office, you can do in LibreOffice, there are a few nuances with the Excel-equivalents whereby the calculations are slightly different but you’d be forgiven for never noticing.
So we see that Linux can do everything that the average user needs. The big “use case”, as us computer-people would say, that Linux falls short is gaming, where only a small number of games work on both Windows and Linux, usually not the big titles like Call of Duty either, which is the only reason I still have Windows installed. Another beauty of Linux is that you can have both! If you have Windows installed, you can have Linux installed too, and continue to use Windows for the things you really need it for, if you have to. For example, I have a desktop PC with Windows 7 on one hard drive and Linux on another and a laptop just with Linux on it since I can’t game on it anyway.
I wrote this with the XP users in mind, but honestly, if you are using any version of Windows, and think your computer is running slower than it used to, or you are sick of Windows *shudder* 8 being unintuitive, go download Ubuntu Linux (the best place for newcomers to the Linux scene) and install it. If you don’t see an improvement, I’d be very surprised, to the point where I’d almost put money on it (student though so not happening!).