Thursday, November 13, 2008

Linux vs Vista (64)

I have used both and is it worth paying for vista? Whether you’re getting a laptop with vista pre-installed or Linux without any of the extras installed.

Specifically I want to talk about file-managers or explorer vs (many deprecated file-managers for ubuntu).
Explorer is simply superior in every way to any file-manager that ubuntu has to offer, and this is the piece of the computer that has to shine for any OS to work in any reasonable way.
Ubuntu’s graphical file-managers are clunky, slow, and not intuitive like explorer is, and explorer completely demolishes any linux filemanager out there.

The offices suites runs on both.
The fact is, I have been running vista 64 for about 3 years now at work and at home. I had some issues at home, but all the issues I have had were hard drive related, and not OS related.
I have had motherboard hardware problems as well (which killed both linux and vista) as I tried both on the bad board.

I haven’t seen anything in linux that would make me want to “switch” except that I like the way linux installs with synaptic (much cleaner I think), but for developing software, Visual studio can’t be beat. .NET can’t be beat, and software written with .net is mostly reliable with fewer problems than the stuff even written in Open Source.

All in all, the only way linux well truly ever beat Microsoft is if they pull their head out of their “you know what” and admit that the only way to make computers useful is to humanize them in ways that Microsoft has clearly done better and better as time moves on.