Has Linux finally come of age?
I’m a Mac user, and whilst I wouldn’t describe myself as an ‘Apple Fanboy’ who worships the ground they walk upon I have to admit they are pretty damn good!
I used to use Windows systems, right from version 3.0 through 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, the awful Millennium Edition, the brilliant 2000, XP and then Vista. Around the time I was using Adobe products with Vista I started to get frustrated with Windows. I found it rather unstable, and resented the fact that it needed regular reboots to keep it ticking over. Usually a reformat was called for every six months, and I found myself spending more and more time trying to keep the operating system running rather than actually getting work done.
I’d been watching the development of Apple’s OSX quite closely, and ultimately decided to bite the bullet and buy a Mac, but before I spent the two grand needed to get the machine I wanted I thought I would give Linux a quick look. So I did – I gave it a quick look, didn’t take to it, and bought a Mac. Shortly after my purchase I wrote a brief comparison of the operating systems (over a year ago now) on this blog, you can read the article by clicking here.
It’s a decision I have never regretted. The Mac is on all the time, never needs a reboot, has only crashed once in two years (and it was a Microsoft product that caused it!) and has just worked. Perfect! Having said all this, it’s an expensive machine. It has an 8 core chip with 10Gb of RAM, four hard disks and a fast video card, so I would expect it to perform well. However, when my five year old PC laptop started to struggle with it’s Windows Vista installation requirements (an issue with the age of the hardware rather than the operating system) I figured it was time to perhaps give Linux another look before I splashed out on another MacBook.
My PC Laptop is really a spare computer. It’s the one I take to meetings when I need internet access, and all I really need from it is an office suite, web browser and email client. The stumbling block with Linux two years earlier was that I required the Adobe Creative Suite for my work, and this isn’t available unless your on Windows or a Mac. With this computer that wasn’t important as it’s not my main work machine.
I took a look online to see what was around and one of the most popular versions of Linux available was Ubuntu. You can download Ubuntu free, and then burn a DVD disk image. From this DVD you can either install Ubuntu to your hard drive, or you can try it out direct from the disk. I decided to format the drive and install Ubuntu direct.
Installation was dead easy, and within half an hour or so I was ready to go. All of the software I needed was already set up – this included an installation of the excellent Open Office, social networking tools, the Firefox web browser and Evolution email client. In addition to this there are numerous imaging applications available which allow you to organise and browse your photographs.
If this software isn’t enough then installing more is far, far easier than I remember in previous Linux versions. Under the ‘Application’ menu there is a link to the ‘Ubuntu Software Centre’, and from here there is a range of over 1,000 software titles covering just about everything you can think of. Installing a title is as easy as clicking ‘install’ – the system takes care of the rest.
But the real surprise to me was how everything just worked as soon as the installation was complete. There was no searching for printer drivers, no problems with network cards, nothing like that – it all just worked! The Linux kernel already contains all of your hardware drivers, and as soon as it detects a piece of hardware it loads the driver up automatically and activates it. You could take your Ubuntu laptop to an office anywhere, connect it to a printer and 9 times out of 10 it will work with it straight away, automatically.
Linux is far less resource hungry than Windows, so my old laptop now runs as fast on Linux as a brand new laptop does on Windows. Start up time is halved, shut down time is around 80% faster, and there’s a much snappier feel to it.
Overall I’m very happy with it. It’s a very well specified system, incredibly stable (a large percentage of the world’s web servers run on Linux) and very cheap, in fact everything I’ve spoken about so far is absolutely free! It’s not quite as polished or pretty as Windows 7, but if all you want is an operating system that works on older, slower hardware then it’s hard to beat.
Would it be enough to move me away from a Mac? In a word, no. The reason for this can be summed up in three words, and that’s ‘Adobe Creative Suite’. I know that there are other applications you can use instead, but in my opinion Adobe make the best software in it’s field by a considerable margin, and it’s so ingrained in the way I work that I don’t think I could consider anything else. A modern Mac with plenty of RAM and the astoundingly good OSX operating system is still the number one choice for me, although I hear that Windows 7 has done a pretty good job of catching up.
Where Linux really shines though is with computers that have older hardware, like my old laptop. It’s breathed new life into it, it’s given it a reprieve from eBay, and it’s turned it from an infuriatingly slow Windows based PC to a quick and snappy machine with a range of software that has most users covered.
Has Linux finally come of age? I think it has! For so long it’s been ‘almost there’, but today it’s an extremely accomplished operating system and I’ll certainly be keeping it on my laptop for the foreseeable future.
