On Sun, 8 May 2005, Dan Kaspi wrote:
Hello,
I tried to convince somebody I know to move to Linux at home and at work. I am myself an advocate user of Linux at work and at home.
He works with a XP at work (a hightech company; however , he is not a programmer) ,and also XP at home.
When listing the main advantages of Linux , the most important one
I had thought of was security ; when you access the internet from a Linux
machine, chances that you get a virus or spyware or someone will intrude
your machine are smaller ; He answered that , when thinking in the long
term (2-3 years) , as more people will use linux as a desktop,
this can be easiy changed; moreover, he claimed that since Linux is an open source,
maybe it is even easier to develop viruses/spyware to it. In this point
I did not know what to answer him. I am not a
security expert; it could be that he is right in this point.
Hi Dan,
Your friend is correct, it may be in fact easier to develop malware for
OSS. Yet the same problem (access to the source code) makes it harder to hide "bad" code. You are also not dependant on one source to provide fixes to the problematic code.
Other Linux benefits that I thought of is that since Linux is open source, all applications he will probably need are handy for download; in winodws you cannot download office ....
He argued that migrating to Linux will takes time because you need to learn many new things; The security solution of XP (the XP firewall) and the free antispyware sw are enough for him; And he isn't convinced that it is worth to inverst time in migating to Linux.
Remember for non geeks a computer is a tool. Your friend will use whatever tool will let him accomplish his goal quickest.
Are there other Linux benefits which I can pose for moving to Linux ?
You may want to take a different route. Encourage OSS use on any platform. I convinced my relatives to use Mozilla Firefox on their XP at home. There were two advantages to this.
1. They stopped called me over to clean up the spyware from their machine
2. I tweaked the firefox settings to speed requests up. Now when they need to use MSIE to browse they complain that browsing is to slow.
-- - Josh
(except the idea of moving to open and free source).
Dan Kaspi
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