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.
We’ve put a variety of topics in here about all sorts of things that interest us, but at the back of our minds it’s also been a little experiment. If we write a post, how long will it take for a Google search to bring us up as a result? How can we use this to pro-actively market ourselves?
I always tell myself that I won’t be an early adopter of technology. I should wait until a new software package or operating system has been out for a couple of months and let all the other impatient idiots discover all the bugs. Of course after a couple of days I just can’t wait any longer and order the new product, and the new Apple operating system (OSX 10.6 – Snow Leopard) has been no exception.
In it’s raw form, a database is just a collection of tables, almost like a spreadsheet really, but for a database to be really useful there needs to be a relationship between these tables. All elmnet customers who have a content management system have a relational database in the background running the show. In brief, whenever they update their content they are in effect updating a database, and the changes that they make are instantly reflected in their website.
Rather that than delete a mySQL database that held all the content of a customers website, but I was very upset for a few seconds – until I realised that sitting on my desktop was a full backup of the database taken that very morning. Within a minute it was all restored back to how it was. If I didn’t have the backup I would probably still be trying to remember what all the pages consisted of and entering all the information back in manually.
When I set up my broadband account I carefully researched the options and decided to go with either Nildram or Pipex. They were both owned by the same company so I went for Pipex as they were a little cheaper. I remember thinking “These guys will be fine, anything but Tiscali”. Next thing I hear Tiscali decide to buy Pipex. “Oh well, at least it’s not ‘Talk Talk’” was my first thought, as they had been reviewed recently and came out with shocking results.
XP is old now and is showing it’s age, but it still works and as long as people are unimpressed with Vista will continue to feature. Personally I quite like Vista, but then our computers had plenty of RAM in them – vital for Vista to perform even reasonably. The problem is that Vista needs at least 3GB of RAM to function properly, and could benefit from much more, but the standard 32 Bit operating system can only handle 3.5GB max. For us this is a non starter – our work means that we need at least 8GB, but a standard office instalation can probably do fine with Vista on 3GB.
Linux is both the new kid on the block and the old timer! It’s been around for forty years, but it’s new to lots of people as it has become increasingly reported on in the computing press. It is more complex to set up and administer than Windows, and there are not as many applications available for it, but it’s far more stable, just as productive (most web servers are based on Linux) and some of them are even free. If you want to try it out download a Live CD of Ubuntu – you can run it direct from the disk without changing your computer configuration and see for yourself.
The jewel in the crown for me has to be Apple’s beautiful OSX though. It’s come a long way since it’s introduction in 2002, and is quick, stable, full of features and doesn’t need that much RAM to work well. One of the reasons behind it’s stability is Apples insistence that OSX only runs on Apple computers. This means that they can control the whole hardware and software package leading to a much more tightly integrated and efficient overall package.
“The megapixel myth was started by camera makers and swallowed hook, line and sinker. Camera makers use the number of megapixels a camera has to hoodwink you into thinking it has something to do with camera quality. They use it because even a tiny linear resolution increase results in a huge total pixel increase, since the total pixel count varies as the total area of the image, which varies as the square of the linear resolution. In other words, an almost invisible 40% increase in the number of pixels in any one direction results in a doubling of the total number of pixels in the image. Therefore camera makers can always brag about how much better this week’s camera is, with even negligible improvements.