On Saturday 07 June 2003 05:07 pm, Cody Harris wrote: > Can someone come up with a few good reasons to switch from XP to > Linux? Someone wants to know the pros and cons and why he should > switch. > > -Cody Harris
06/07/03 1. My current system was designed from components I selected in the Spring of 1998. At that time Win98 wasn't out yet, or if it was I didn't have the $100+ to upgrade to it. I did get a copy of Windows NT 4.0 for the ability to run programs in their own space, so that one crashing app wouldn't take down the entire machine. How many flavors of Windows have been released since 1998? Take that number and multiply by $100+ to keep your Operating System current. I spent $80 for Mandrake 9.1 Power Pack, and I've already got it set up to keep the Operating System current from free downloads on the Internet. How much will that save me over the next 5 years if I had stayed with Windows? 2. I have no hard evidence to support this theory, but my gut tells me that the hardware drivers in Linux are tighter code than in Windows. Linux drivers seem to offer better performance than the comparable Windows driver. I speculate this might be because Linux is not a profit driven Operating System. This is significant. The driver writers are not faced with production deadlines. This allows them to take their time, test extensively, and tweak the code to the ninth degree. As a result the code is smaller and more efficient with less logic errors (bugs). I also speculate the Linux driver coders are doing it out of a labor of love. They have the hardware and they want Linux to be able to talk to it. 3. From my very brief look into the Linux world and the Open ?Source? concept, the documentation for the kernel and the drivers are made public to everyone. This allows talented programmers from around the world to develop code that will integrate with another's code. It's a worldwide community of programmers all following the same development guidelines. The final code versions should be very stable given the thousands of users/testers. Windows will never have the ability to have this amount of extensive testing. Summarizing my main selling points are: 1) Linux code is better, and 2) the Linux price is better. However, if you are dealing with computer illiterate people, a version of Windows is probably better since Windows development has evolved to make a desktop that is as human proof as possible. The Other
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