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Peace, Love and PenguinsApr 27 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Linux is a great operating system which offers many things, but also has a cost for what it offers.
When one is making a decision about something, I figure it is best to be as over-informed as possible (this is why I find epinions to be so great). However, there are times when you just don't have time to do all of the research that you want, or there is a point where you want to get a synopsis of what is going on before you get in. These are the things I had in mind when I sat down to write this little essay about Linux. I've made a short list of the pro's and con's of using linux, and expounded a little on each one here for your benefit. I know there are probably some things that I have left out, but there is no rule saying that i can't come back and add more things later, so bring them up to me and I'll do my best to address them. :-) Benefits Stability If you talk to pretty much any Linux fan, the first thing that most of them tell you about is the stability of the operating system. Having been a stalwart user of linux for nearly two years now (which pails greatly in comparison to some) and a part time user for about five, I can attest to this fact. For one, you will never get a Blue Screen of Death that Microsoft Windows is so famous for. The number of times that I have ever had to hard reboot my machine (pushing that dreaded power button) while running linux I can count on one hand (and I'm a pretty demanding user), and one of those times I did it purposely with some programming stuff. Efficiency By this I mean the efficiency of the operating system. With Microsoft Windows, it was not unusual for me to have to reboot my machine about once a day for good measure, as enough memory had been leaked to make the system resources drop like a rock. After installing Linux on one of my machines at work, it stayed online without rebooting for nearly three months, only to go down after a renegade vacuum cleaner unplugged it from the wall (which is a testament to both the efficiency of the operating system and the stability of the operating system). Community The Linux community can be considered both a pro and a con. On one side, sometimes they can be the greatest thing in the world, offering you help quickly and successfully in many different situations. However, they can also be one of the big drawbacks as it is a big hit or miss situation. Sometimes the people who know the answers to your problems are just not there, which kind of sucks. Other problems can be found in how you deal with the people. I highly suggest that if you go to the IRC channels to find help, make sure to watch how other people are interacting before you jump in. However, I challenge you to find someone who is willing to hack into source code and make changes for you in order to get something working properly in any environment other than this one. Philosophy The Linux philosophy is one of the biggest draws to Linux, in my opinion. It is centered more upon community involvement rather than one corporate entity doing all of the work. In this sense, you can hope that somebody will pick up the work that you want done and then share it with the community. In the same sense, you can pick up a project and then share your work with everyone as well. This is a very good thing, as many things are done to "scratch an itch"... however, if there isn't a big enough itch to scratch, you can guess that it won't get done right away. This basically moves into the ideal of open source, which isn't the philosophy of linux, but linux generally follows it around. Work is done pretty much on a pro bono basis with everyone doing what they want to do. Cost The last big thing about linux is that it is free. Yes, if you go out to a store and buy a copy of it, it will cost you money. But with that you are getting a manual and usually some tech support behind the distribution that you are buying, which is nice but not necessary. Personally, the only thing I have ever paid for linux is time. Problems Time As just stated, the only thing I have ever paid for linux is time, and i've paid with quite a bit of it. Since I started using linux before the really nice installers came out, I was sitting down and wading through HOWTO's and email archives trying to find answers to all of my questions. I'm not really complaining, since I sort of enjoyed it (in a very demented and sad way) and I learned quite a bit about my computer. But, be forewarned, if you don't get one of the snazzy new distro's (and even if you do, if you try to install something new that isn't quite up to par, or if you need to fix anything), you will spend quite a bit of time figuring the problem out yourself. However, to go along with this philosophy, now that you have learned these things that other people may or may not have known, you can share it with others and let the information live on. Hardware Support A vast majority of consumer grade hardware that is out there is supported by linux. At some time or another, someone has come along and put the work into drivers that was required to get the piece of hardware working. In some instances, the drivers that the open source community wrote were better than those of the original company. These days, the only software that is usually unsupported is rather rare hardware and hardware that is brand spanking new, as nobody has had time to write the drivers for it yet. Sometimes companies will go out and publish their own drivers, but that's not something that you should count on. You should probably go out and find a linux compatibility guide to know what drivers are out there. Customer Support Customer Support is very different in Linux than it is with other Operating Systems. The normal old customer support exists if you buy a distribution from a well known and professional company. However, if you don't actually buy your linux distribution, then you're going to have to go out and get help on your own. There are common forums for this (such as email lists and IRC channels), but they are not as consistant as a professional place would be. Cost As stated above, the real cost here is in time, rather than in money. Though some people say that time is money, but you'll have to be the judge. The extra stability and efficiency of linux could pay off for you in the long run, or you could spend so much time researching things that you don't get anything else done, which would most likely be a bad thing (though I could see the pleasure in that). Tips Where to get help The thing that I usually do to get help is first look in search engines. A great one for this is Google, which has its own linux section, http://www.google.com/linux will lead you to what you need. One thing I will say for research is that you will learn to use the search engines much better than you did before. Once I've exhausted researching on my own and asking my friends (when I started though, none of my friends ran linux, so I didn't do much in this step) I moved onto the IRC channels [1]. For those of you who don't know IRC, it was the precursor to the modern day AOL chatrooms and the like. They are quite nice and a very good place to find the information that you are looking for [2]. This is usually a last ditch effort for me, since I really don't like going there, it is way too inconsistent. There are some rules to behavior on these channels that you will pick up, I suggest logging on and watching the text go by for about 10 minutes before you start asking. There are some good points of etiquette that you can pick up that way. Where to find applications This is a bit tougher to answer. There are all sorts of applications out there, you just have to know where to look for them. You're distribution's web page will probably have a listing of the applications that are included in the distribution already and then you just have to figure out how to start them. Usually, you can also find a webpage for the application that you are using. Open source projects needs a focal point, and a web page is usually the best idea. There are also some web pages out there that basically catalog all sorts of different apps out there [3]. These will come in very handy when you finally decide that it is time to get some more applications. Finally, some professional companies provide a linux version of their programs. Word Perfect provides their Word Processor free of charge, as does Star Office. Conclusions Well, I can't think of anything else that I should put in here at this point. If anyone who is reading this can think of some bit of information that I have left out, please be sure to let me know, as I would like to keep this as informative as possible. Good luck in the linux world!!! Footnotes [1] -- To use IRC, you're going to need to get an IRC client. I would suggest MIrc if you're on windows, and if you're already on Linux, try iirc, or the other major IRC client that has a name that epinions won't let me type out, but it ends in an X (and the first word is the same as that of a female dog). [2] -- Good channels include #linux and then #distroName where the distroName is the distribution that you are looking for, such as #debian [3] -- http://www.freshmeat.net comes to mind  |
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