I am not a Linux programmer or Linux contributor, just a pragmatic PC user who utilizes it to make living. I will call myself a Linux dummy thereafter opposing myself to those good people who claim themselves big Linux specialists and just keep silent in forums when it comes to ask them a question which they have answer for. My position is be at least a little more helpful for those guys who decide to migrate from MS Windows to a better OS.
Why migrating to Linux from Windows? I have asked the Big Brother Google and immediately got the heap of the related pages. There is nothing new in my post, so I can easily summarize what has been already written in order of importance for me, a true Linux dummy.
I started looking at Linux (and not only at Linux) as a replacement for my PC OS in 1999-2000, installed Red Hat Linux 6, but, from a true dummy’s standpoint, it was still a beautiful replacement of the command line.
Starting from Red Hat version 7.1 through 9 it starts to be a better usable product but MS Windows still had more preference for end users because of the variety of software and supported hardware. I was not using it in my work a lot before Red Hat 9 arrived when I could use it for a couple on months in 2002 for my work as desktop system. In the mid 2002, I switched to Fedora Core 2 both at a home PC and my company’s laptop (Acer Travelmate of a forsaken model).
Still lack of software and and hardware support impeded me from using Linux before Fedora of version 6.
However, since then I was using it on the regular basis, and I am using exclusively Fedora as my only OS since version 8. I installed different versions of Fedora Core / Fedora consecutively on HP Compaq 8220, Dell D820 and Acer Aspire 6930 (the last is a pretty modern one).
Why Fedora? Just my personal preference, nothing else. I am not saying a word about the Linux variety, please bother to look yourself.
Coming back to Linux migration, I have a question to my readers who have not yet migrated form MS Windows: why not Linux? My strongest points pro are:
- Freedom of use and freedom of distribution
- Open source OS distribution of which is available through the internet
- No backdoors in your OS and software
- Honest, free and easily accessible community-contlrolled open-source software
- Built-in network firewall, built-in OS filesystem firewall (SELinux)
- Faster, more powerful, runs on considerably older hardware
- Almost no proprietary drivers, free drivers from proprietary vendors
- No consecutive performance slowdown, no instant reboots, no hard drive defragmentation needed, no registry
- Community support, report bugs and get fixes
- Better graphical interface
People who cannot part with Windows on various reasons are recommended to have dual OS setup or running MS Windows in a virtual window.
See also this link.
To be continued