Over at arsgeek, there’s a brief article on some things you might experience when transitioning from Windows to Linux. I traveled that road myself a few years ago, and I can relate to some of those experiences, many of which might trip up the person considering switching operating systems, or at least dabbling. I’d like to talk about a couple of those in particular, and then I have another one to add to the mix, that sort of sums up the whole process. I’d suggest you read the article over at arsgeek first, so you have some idea what I’m talking about.

Stability

Say goodbye to the crash. Computer crashes are a thing of the past for me.

This is one point that I can completely agree with, with some caveats. One measure of so-called stability is the length of uptime one can get (the time between reboots). Now, this is slightly flawed, as it’s possible for things to break, but you to still run the machine. So even though your uptime hasn’t reset, the machine is less than functional. The single test case I have is my desktop computer, which currently runs Linux. A while back, I ran Windows XP on the machine, and it routinely had uptimes of two to four weeks. The longest uptime I ever had with it was nearly ten weeks, at 67 days or so. There’s a caveat, and I’ll get to that later. By contrast, my Linux install also has long uptimes, though they tend to be longer. My current uptime, for instance, is 122 days, and most of them are well into the several weeks zone.

Another question to look at is the ultimate reason for rebooting. With Windows, I’d say the vast majority of my reboots were because some application stopped working properly or I installed something that demanded a reboot. During that nearly ten week uptime, I tended to ignore both of those reasons, installing myriad applications, and by the last few days of the uptime, the overlay function of my video card wasn’t working, so my experience watching DVDs was completely degraded. On Linux, the primary reasons I reboot are random kernel upgrades that I choose to do, power outages, and a problem I was having with the driver for my NVIDIA card which was causing X to lock up.

When I finally rebooted that Windows machine, the built up file changes and registry changes from all the installs I’d done caused the computer to be so broken that I didn’t even want to deal with it. I just reinstalled again. Perhaps slightly overkill, but I’ve always tended to be of the mindset that if you’re a heavy user, you want to reinstall Windows every 3-6 months anyway. Linux, on the other hand, barely changes after a reboot. Yeah, I have to remember what long-term applications I might have been running, and since I almost always take the opportunity to upgrade my kernel, there are occasionally issues to deal with there, but overall, it’s a much more stable process, and while I sort of dread the end of my current 122 day uptime because I know that might come up, I remain confident that I won’t have to do anything as drastic as a reinstall. It just doesn’t happen as a matter of course.

Gaming

Gaming just isn’t the same. … I do still like the occasional game but I don’t spend hours and hours in front my CRT anymore. If you’re going to switch to Linux, you can say goodbye to high end gaming with ease. Sure there are games that run, some without a ton of futzing about but you’re not going to get the ease of use and massive selection you will with Windows. There are a few FPS titles available, and some really interesting native games, but if you’re going for a new game every week, you can forget it.

For the most part, that pretty much sums up the situation. More and more games are coming up with Linux ports, but the professional gaming world is still largely Windows-centric. Wine is getting better and better every day, and a lot of popular games now run reasonably well, but newer games take a while before the bugs get worked out, and there are pretty much always annoying glitches or other things that might lessen the experience. If you really are a person who always plays the newest and latest games, it’ll seriously behoove you to keep a good Windows box around for gaming. Linux just isn’t quite there yet, but depending on the games you want to play, it may work just fine, and the situation should improve drastically over the next five years.

Applications

This wasn’t expressly mentioned in the arsgeek article, but it was sort of an overall theme. Anytime you change from one environment to another, the application set you use may have to change with it. This is true to a lesser extent even when upgrading a single operating system, but really can hit you hard when you change operating systems altogether. This impact is lessened by the rise of cross-platform applications like Mozilla Firefox and other Gecko-based applications.

Where the particular application you’re used to isn’t cross-platform, a lot of times there are good alternatives. The problem is getting used to the alternatives. A case-in-point might be your IRC client. The most popular client on Windows, bar none, is mIRC. mIRC is a native Windows application, and while I hope one day it will be open-sourced, for the moment, it’s not. When I first tried the transition to Linux in 2002, applications was the biggest problem I faced. First, I was a big mIRC user at the time, and as a result of not wanting to discard the scripts I used, I chose to run mIRC in Wine instead of investigating the alternatives. This was suboptimal, as I’m sure you can imagine (Wine wasn’t nearly as good at what it does back then). I eventually went back to Windows simply because I had an application I needed to use for school.

When I finally made the permanent switch to Linux a couple of years ago, I gave in and tried X-Chat, a popular client. It was different, and you can be very sure that initially, I was somewhat uncomfortable. I made the efforts to port some of my more important scripts, and I eventually got used to it. These days, the thought of using mIRC again seems foreign.

The lesson to take home is that it may be worth your time to investigate the alternatives. Some of these alternatives may have Windows versions so you can get used to them before making the switch to Linux, and that can make the process a whole lot easier. If you’re considering introducing someone new to computers (your parents or perhaps your children), consider making a Linux machine the first thing they use. I maintain that, especially today, learning the basics of using a Linux-based machine can be just as easy as with an equivalent Windows machine, and perhaps even easier. Many times, it’s our own biases, preferences, and what we’re used to that make us feel that Linux is “harder”, so to speak. But in the end, use whatever makes you feel comfortable. There’s no sense in forcing yourself to do something that you’re not prepared to do. And at least for today, there’s definitely no compelling reason to switch from Windows to Linux other than perhaps curiosity and a desire to learn something new. I took the plunge, and am glad I did. Your results may vary.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 11:01 am and is filed under Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.