Saturday, August 23, 2014

Reasons not to replace windows with Linux

This is the eternal question everyone newbie wanting to shift to Linux ask, Which version of Linux he/she should install to replace his windows system? 



I have spent tons of time experimenting with Linux, Fedora was particularly my favourite one, and Ubuntu came next, but if you are not going to do the serious programming or start a server, my answer is none of Linux version is good enough to replace Windows(or Mac) on your computer.

Strange answer huh? 

Well I have tried many flavour of Linux and the things puts me off that none of them has full support of the hardware or software we use: 

  1. They are not optimised for my laptop battery.
  2. Graphics card driver is hard to find.
  3. If your sound card has 5.1 channel, good luck using that.
  4. They say there are no viruses for linux, but sadly there are and once you get infected saidly there are no good antiviruses.
  5. Bluetooth will work or not? it depends how good you luck is.
  6. No native MP3 or MP4 support for native (absolute version of linux) as these format are propritarty and free version don't include them. 
  7. Buy buy Steam or Any other popular gaming platform.
  8. Bye bye good graphics games.
  9. Very less support of external hardware like printers scanners. 
  10. Missing UI for many of the good utilities.
  11. Big learning curves for newbies. 
  12. Wine can run windows application? Well it is the biggest lie in history of Linux, its API support is so limited that it is worst than working on a simulated Windows inside Linux. 100% of the program which claim to be workable on Linux using wine are either give very limited or error prone usages.
This list is not small, and they don't tell you this on internet forums. 

Every time with every version upgrade when I switched to Linux with a hope may be in this version they might have solved all the issues, but the aid never came. There was always a serious compatibility issue finding whose solution was not worth my time. With Windows it just worked. (True story!) 

I don't say that you won't find the answer for these question in the largely supported Linux community, but it is like solving a murder mystery, you just know that you have to find a murderer, the "how" part is a tough journey. Where as Windows, it came with the hardware optimisation, almost any external hardware you buy is intrinsically  compatible with windows, not because Windows so generically well written program, but because there is a PR team in Microsoft department, which pursue all the big manufacturers to write good drivers and compatibility routines for windows, and all other small companies follows it because they want to compete with the big companies. 

Yes there are counter argument that Linux is well written, free opensource and stuff, but the bottom line is that offers little or no actual support for local hardware, all is company driven and only thing which might ensure that your Linux will support all the internal or external hardware you use(or gonna use) is prayer to god that some good Linux Kernal or OS developer ends up using the same hardware and write support drivers for it (even if they do, the installation is confusing and have little or none interactive UI).

I don't say that Linux is a bad thing thing, in my opinion it is the greatest thing ever happened to software industry, but it still give you no edge over Windows 7 above operating systems, (If you are stuck with Vista, probably you can go for Linux).

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