Why, indeed... Why not?! Isn't that the most frustrating response to a question, ever, especially if you're looking for some actual, factual reasoning behind something? For me, though, the choice to switch over, most likey forever, from Microsoft Windows to, in this case, LinuxMint, an Ubuntu-based distribution, is based on as many "why nots" as "whys." The "why nots" are in the form of "Why not Windows?" while the "whys" are "Why linux?" It may be easier to start with a quick clarification of an all too common misconception regarding why one would make the switch to linux, willingly.
Clarification
Misconception: "Linux users switch to linux because they're cheap and don't want to pay for the software they use."
Correlary: "...and are willing to accept an inferior product just because they're cheapskates."
Clarification: Over the years, I have paid for 8 distros, the most recent (and expensive) having been OpenSuse 8.2 at $64.95 when it was actually sold at BestBuy. I purchased Slackware 1.1 (came with a $50 book on Linux system management, which is good since it was a 50-disk download...), RedHat 4.3 ($5 from CheapBytes.com) and 7.1 ($2.99/CheapBytes.com), Debian 1.3 ($5/CheapBytes.com), StormLinux2000 ($2.99/CheapBytes.com), Mandrake4.5 and then 5.2 (both $5/CheapBytes.com), Caldera 1.3 ($10/CheapBytes.com) and the aforementioned OpenSuse 8.2. So, while some of those CD purchases through CheapBytes.com -- which still operates today with great prices for CD/DVD-based installations of various distributions for, basically, the cost of materials and shipping -- seem a little paltry compared to the $132 price attached to the Windows7 Pro retail package, some weren't and, most importantly, it wasn't about shelling out for the OS that was important, really.
Here's where we get to the "Why?" and "Why Not." sections of this entry. Please remember that, for the most part, these are purely subjective reasons and what's good for me might not be good for you or anyone else. Disclaimer issued...now what?
Why Not.
1. Driver this, driver that.
I think my biggest pet peeve with the entire Windows, hell, Microsoft period, experience has been the drivers. Yes, you may snicker at a linux user griping about drivers. Trust me, I've modprobed my little heart out, too...that said...
Since the days of having to squeeze xyz drivers for certain peripherals into
highmem and praying you still had enough free RAM to load whatever it was you needed in good ol' DOS, be it 3.2 on up into Windows95 (DOS with a WM...). With Win95 and moving forward, we had what was/is affectionately known as "plug-and-pray" technology which, when paired with manufacturer supplied drivers, was supposed to make any peripheral you plug into your system automagically function properly. Usually, this was the case -- after seven reboots and a few calls to the manufacturer to figure out why your faxmodem just blitzed the MBR on your hard drive. By the way -- that's a true story. What's worse is that when I called Gateway to figure it out, I got, "Oh, yeah...that." meaning that the problem had occurred before. Nice.
At any rate, enter WinNT4. I LOVE NT4. Given a choice between NT4 and Win7, if it weren't for PNP and hardware drivers never working quite right, I'd choose NT4, every time. Why? Well, now, mainly because it would ROCKET on the current hardware specs. At any rate, NT4 was a nightmare (but solid). My second choice for Windows OSs to use would be Win2000. I love (not LOVE, but love...) Windows2000. It was rock-solid stable and did what it needed to do with minimal fuss. When I installed it on a laptop this past summer, it flew. I had no sound and limited touchpad support, so I ditched the idea, but it was a very nice system. Drivers, however, were still a problem. I remember when XP came out, there were still huge problems with drivers for the hardware we were using and the drivers released from the manufacturer would say lovely things like, "[product x] for Windows95, Windows98, WindowsNT4.0 and WindowsXP. No Windows2000 support." Ugh.
That brings us to the current "engine" of Windows -- XP/Vista/7. You'll notice I carefully sidestepped ME and Bob. This was on purpose. XP was my OS of choice, even though it still had issues with older hardware, up until this spring. I was an early adopter of Windows7 after being one of the most vehement detractors of Windows Vista. To me, Vista was a beta test shipped out as a commercially viable product with a $259 price tag. With that kind of price tag, I expect anything -- software, hardware, car... -- to work as advertised. Vista hated me, and I hated it right back, going through tumultuous fits of driver hell with older printers, scanners, digital cameras, and video cards...not to mention sound drivers. Ugh. So, I went back to XP with which I had suffered fewer indignities. I figured Win7 might make up for this, since during my beta testing I had encountered very few problems with drivers not working or working ... differently ... than they should have. I was right, for the most part, but -- enter point #2.
2. Neverending Malware.
To be clear, I am a firm believer in antivirus software. While I believe Norton to be a virus in its own right, AVG and AntiVir have been staples on my Windows machines since they were viable alternatives to the McAffee and Norton products. Still, the rule always was if you had a Windows PC, you
had to have an antivirus package running at all times. This would be fine if a) the antivirus software didn't routinely suck up 50%+ of the CPU time and 60%+ of available RAM or b) it caught everything. Now, I know there's no catching everything. I've studied virus design. It's freaking fascinating if you've never taken the time to look at polymorphic code in old 8086 assembler that crammed the ability to display a message, attach itself to executable code, shift its signature and blow stuff up all in 4K. If I sound a little starstruck, as a programmer by trade, that kind of efficiency is something that we all could aspire to achieve. See point #3.
Still, my decision to shift over to linux from Windows7, which I was *really* enjoying at the time, for the record, revolved almost solely over a virus. It was probably, ultimately, my fault. That said, I had AntiVir running active realtime scanning and AVG running every hour or so scanning core files and had them both, at different times during the week, running full scans. I had a good system going and nothing had gotten through that system since I put it into place back on my old XP machines. I also had SpyBot Search and Destroy running with all its TeaTiming real-time protecting glory. Additionally, I had Microsoft's own Malware Destructor running its little scan once a week in case there was something SpyBot missed. It was with utter dismay that I got hit with something that rendered the OS unusable. Not command.com, regedit.exe, explorer.exe nor anything else system related would function. This, to me, was unacceptable. Even with a firewall, 2 each of the antivirus and spyware removal packages, something got through. Something BAD got through. I refuse to think that it was some new morph of something that made it past the heuristics, so I had to make a choice: reinstall an OS with enough security problems for this to happen, or go back to what I knew I could lock down with no worries -- linux.
3. Software obesity.
In a startling statistic, one in six Americans is obese. Not to be outdone, every release of every WinXX-based software package, be it operating system or new whiz-bang app, gains on the order of 1/4 of it's original size with every release. The system requirements for Windows 1.0 were an 8088 with 640K and roughly 5MB of space on a "fixed disk." Not horrible. My AmigaDOS 2.04 installation was ~800K and occupied ~55K of FastRAM, but who's quibbling? When Windows 2.0 shipped, it needed 512K RAM (which makes me wonder if the original specs for 1.0 were "mis-remembered" by someone along the lines...), DOS 3.0 and a graphics adapter card. When Windows3.0 came along, it added the requirement of DOS 3.1, 640K conventional and 256K extended memory to the game. Not too bad, right? Windows3.1 required DOS 3.1 running on an 80286 processor, 640K conventional RAM, 256K extended, with recommendations of 1MB extended for 286 and 2MB extended for 80386. A fixed disk with 6MB free was now required, with 10MB free being the recommended allotment. The obligatory video card requirements and, of course, a mouse. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 required at least a 386SX (no math coprocessor), DOS 5.0 or later, EGA graphics (sorry HGA users...) and around 15MB hard space.
So far, we have a 20% space requirment increase from Windows 1.0 to 2.0. From Windows 2.0 to Win3.1, we see a 66% increase in hard drive real estate required. From Windows 3.1 to WFW3.11, the footprint increases another 50%. So, in the span of 3.11 releases (major), we've actually increased the OS footprint by 200%. Yikes. It gets better.
Windows95 arrived and required a 386DX or 486 processor, 4MB memory, between 40 - 55MB depending if it's an upgrade or a clean installation (the clean installation takes more...), VGA graphics capable of 256 colors and one 3.5" HD floppy drive, though I would recommend installing from CD. Really? Really really. So, now we're looking at a footprint increase of between 167% and 233%, depending on the installation. You also need double your RAM *if* you were already running 2MB RAM on your system previously. Windows98 required a minimum of a 80486DX/66 processor with 16MB RAM and depending on your installation (upgrade versus clean) and filesystem (FAT16 versus FAT32), it required between 120MB and 355MB and, finally, VGA graphics. Personally, I long for the days when any OS took "only" 355MB. Still, that is between a 200% and 545% increase in space consumption by just the OS. From the original 1.0 version, that's a 6,100% increase overall OS HD footprint. Ouch.
I refuse to acknowledge WindowsME as an operating system -- we called it "Mangled Edition" for a reason, so I'll just move on to WindowsNT4.0, since it's more the precursor to our current incarnations of Windows than the previous releases. It required a Pentium with at least 16MB RAM and roughly 110MB of hard disk space. That's not so bad, really, compared to Win98, clocking in from an upgrade on Win95, for example, of only a 100% size increase, which, to be fair -- NT4.0 was so much more solid than Win95, that's kind of to be expected. From here, we upgraded to Windows2000. Win2K required a 133MHz Pentium with at least 32MB RAM -- up 100% from NT4 -- and a 2GB hard drive with 650MB free. For those counting, that's almost 491% more footprint than NT4.
From Windows2000 we moved to WindowsXP, which needed, for the Professional Edition, a 233MHz Pentium running at least 64MB RAM, though it would prefer 128MB. Along with sundries of CD/DVD-ROM, keyboard, mouse, etc., it required *at least* 1.5GB of hard drive space. That's a 131% increase over Win2K. It doesn't stop, here, however. There are the *service packs* that clock in at 1.8GB for SP2 and 800MB for SP3. So, yeah, it required 2.6GB of *fixes* after its release, bringing the total footprint to 4.4GB. That takes the almost reasonable 131% and turns it into 777% more than Win2K. At this point, HDs were cheaper than they were, but still...if you look at those requirements versus what it needed back in 1985, it's a little staggering, and we haven't even hit either Vista or Win7.
Vista's introduction gave us a look into indulgent, almost decadent programming with no real restraint involved as it seemed to be almost entirely bells and whistles with very little "operating system" improvements over, well...AmigaDOS 1.0.... (That would be hyperbole...but when the disk subsystem takes 25 minutes to copy a 25MB file across two USB drives, it felt a lot like dealing with floppies all over again. While it says the minimum requirements were an 800MHz processor with 512MB and 32MB graphics memory, you'd be silly to install it on such a beast. It would be painful. However, the HD free space required by Vista clocks in at 15GB. Yes, that's GB...compared to WFW3.11 at 15MB... So, to upgrade from XP to Vista presents an increase of 241%, if we go from SP3. If you go from base installations, alone, it's a 1100% increase. I think a "holy moly!" would be appropriate, here.
Windows 7 is a vastly superior product in so many ways and actually comes with a lighter hardware requirements footprint than it's unwieldy predecessor. While I won't touch on the 64-bit version, as I haven't used 64-B anything, OS-wise, it should be noted that requirements are roughly double that of the 32-B version. The processor and RAM requirements are more than Vista -- 1GHz 32Bit proc running 1GB RAM (though I have a cobbled version running on 512MB, it's not pretty...) -- the HD requirements are what make me happy about this. It requires, according to spec, literally 1GB more space than Vista. That's right -- 16GB versus 15GB, meaning an increase of roughly 6.7%. That's more like it. Now, just fix all the blasted security holes and I might consider a return. Might not, too, but without it, the deal's off.
So, what we've seen, kiddies, is that in 25 years, HD space requirements have increased 319,900%. Yes, you read that correctly -- three hundred-nineteen thousand nine-hundred percent. Follow the math: 16GB = 16,000MB - 5MB = 15,995MB / 5MB = 3199 * 100 = 319900. That's a freakishly large increase in anything. It makes you wonder what the lines of code increase is, doesn't it?
Now, I know - there's the whole equal time thing and the whole issue that linux's footprint size has also increased. I can't argue that. My first linux partition lived, comfortably, in a 20MB partition leaving me with roughly 15MB free after installation. So, we start, in 1995/6 with a 5MB installation. Factor in that the most recent installation (the one I'm using, now) after OS installation and application installation (a LOT of stuff - OpenOffice; MySQL and Apache servers with data associated; several browsers; 2 ERP packages; Mono, C++; Gnome2 Xfce, WMii and all associated icon packs; Evolution, and so on...) and it weighs in at just over 11.7GB. The base installation, itself, was somewhere around 8GB. That's still not *terrific* from someone who views anything over 1GB excessive (I sometimes live in the past...), but it's a far sight better than twice that with 1/2 the performance. Did I mention the system I have has 2GB RAM a 3GHz proc and a built-in video card that doesn't support OpenGL or Direct3D? Win7 had to be scaled back considerably to get it to run smoothly. My current linux installation runs almost perfectly and I still have breathing room on my system to install a considerable chunk of anything I want, even on a "tiny" 40GB drive.
4. Memory shrinkage.
This may fall under "bang for your buck," but when I think of it that way, I feel bad for Windows, really, I do. What I really mean by "memory shrinkage" requires an example. Take Frankenstein, hereafter known as "Frankie." Frankie's a cobbled together system I built over the course of 3 or so years between 2003 and 2006, comprised of parts from here and there, hence the Frankenstein's monster reference. It's running an Athlon2800 which means somewhere in the 2.2GHz range and, at one point had 3GB RAM, but through a series of catastrophic RAM failures (the "newest" RAM being circa 2005, I believe...), it has been reduced to 512MB, which is roughly where it started back in 2003. This being the case, it started with Windows2000Pro. It ran very well with 512MB and life was generally good. Then came WindowsXP and after a a year of seeing how it played in the real world, I upgraded the system to XP from W2K and the first thing I noticed was that there was considerably less headroom and apps just weren't quite as happy, running slowly or, occasionally, trying to address memory that wouldn't be there, demonstrating the BSOD-ability of the newest OS.
This would be why I ran out and upgraded the memory. Here's the thing, upon installing Windows7, we were generally happy. When the RAM died and I had to do some creative replacement (try explaining ECC polarity issues to an 11-year-old...and not sounding like a loon...) and ended up the Win7 with 512MB RAM, once again. Unlike W2K or XP, Windows7 is by and large useless with that amount of RAM. Loading programs is like the old C64 days where you'd enter
LOAD "*",8,1 and then go get some coffee -- although, I was 11, so coffee wasn't really my bag...maybe...just sit and be grumpy for 5 minutes...
What's any of this have to do with "memory shrinkage?" Well, we know the size isn't
really shrinking -- 512MB is still
really 512MB. That said, it's what you can do with it, which is decreasing by the iteration of operating systems, regardless of origin, be it MS Windows, linux, bsd, OSX, what-have-you. I'm picking on Windows because it seems to have the worst time of it. For reference, I loaded the LinuxMint live CD onto Frankie for giggles and, well, it flew. Yeah, that's right -- flew. The only lag in loading anything was reading from the CD, which is to be expected since it's a live CD. So, my determination, in that regard, was that the $0.19 CDR with the name "minty" scrawled across it gave me much better bang for my buck than did the $219 priced Windows7 upgrade. For more expounding on "bang for buckness," see the next point...
5. Quality, not price.
Windows 1.0 sold for $100. Windows 2.0, when it was released, was priced at $100, as well. Windows 3.0, upon release, sold for $149.95 with an upgrade price of $79.85. Windows 3.1 sold for $149.95 for the full installation while it sold for $79.95 for an upgrade. Thankfully, it looks like a price-point has been set, at least, for now. WFW3.11 seems to clock in at ~$139 according to PC Magazine circa 1994, which means, it probably started higher and that's just what it was retailing for at that point. Likewise, it had Windows NT listed at $309. That was the "nice" pricing. When WindowsNT4 was released, it listed at $1,129. That's a load of bread. Windows95, on the other hand, for it's release, was $109. There were many specials at CompUSA and the like, retailing for $89, if I remember correctly, but I think my first experience with it was actually from a promotional copy sent to our office. I liked it enough to buy my own. Funny -- 3 months later, I was dual-booting with Slackware... At any rate, Next came Windows98 which initially retailed for $209 but allowed for more inexpensive upgrades -- $109 from Win3.1/WFW3.11/Win95 and $19.95 from Win98 first edition.
These were, really, the last of the DOS-based Windows OSs, so let's move to the next generation. When Windows2000 arrived in Feb 2000, it retailed, for the professional edition, for $309 with the upgrade price being $219 from Win95/98 and $149 (after rebate) from WinNT3.51/NT4. To me, that's pricey for an operating system. From Windows2000, we get some intermediate server editions that don't apply to the average user, so let's move to WindowsXP. The Professional Edition retailed for $299 with an upgrade price of $199. If you wanted the Home Edition, subtract $100 from each price.
From WindowsXP, we were saddled with Windows Vista. I have very little good to say about Vista, so I'll stick to the facts -- for the Home Basic version, it retailed for $199 with a $100 upgrade price. For the Home Premium, it ran $239 with an upgrade cost of $159. The Professional Version was renamed to "Vista Business" and retailed for $299 with an upgrade of, you guessed it, $199. The version that every seemed to want was the Ultimate release, and it retailed for $399, $259 for the upgrade. Once the first Service Pack was released, those prices dropped to $319 and $219, respectively. Yeah...
Finally, Windows7 was released to the world in the Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate editions, costing $199 ($119 upgrade), $299 ($199) and $319 ($219), respectively.
Now, what does the above have to do with anything? Well -- from where I'm sitting, if you're going to pay for software of the size and complexity of an operating system, especially the prices we're talking, they should work
well right out of the box. They should also be relatively easy to "fix" with updates and such, but, really...for $319, shouldn't I be paying for some *extensive* beta testing in there? I know that for Win7, there was a LOT of beta testing...I was a beta tester, myself. That said, I also know that there are some things (issue #2) that aren't covered, really, in beta testing and fall squarely in the lap of the manufacturer's either inability or unwillingness to plug the security holes that allow bad things such as virii to infiltrate and render the entire OS useless. Remember, that's $319. It's not $109, nor is it $59, nor is it $2.99 to cover shipping. It's with that in mind, that I choose quality over price. It's not that "it's free and that's cheap and that's why I'm going to use it!" It's "my system ate itself and I paid *how much?*" and that's where Linux comes in. Not only is the price right, but it doesn't routinely go down in a situation as best described by Roy (IT Crowd, Series 4, Episode 5), "if it were a person, I'd shoot it in the face."
Finally, in the "quality over price" debate is this -- when I installed Windows7, what did I get? A fairly polished operating system that came with with MediaPlayer so I could listen to my MP3s and Internet Explorer so I could search the web for things I needed to raise my productivity levels above simply listening to my MP3s.
When I installed LinuxMint, what did I get? I got an OS that was lighter weight and faster. I also got OpenOffice (no need to shell out for Office) , GiMP (not quite PhotoShop, yet, but more than adequate), RhythmBox (no need to download iTunes with the dreaded Bonjour service/virus), VCD (so I wouldn't miss MediaPlayer and all the licensing weirdness), FireFox (for web traversal), Gwibber (should I feel like tweeting) and a slew of other utilities -- right "out of the box" that precluded the need to scour the web for things to get me going.
So, the quality argument is, as follows, "why should I pay $319 and not get what I need when I can download, legally, an OS that includes what I need?" You know the answer.
In Conclusion
This ran a little longer than I intended. I guess I start to obsess over stuff. This is why my hockey articles would take longer and longer to write, as well... At any rate, this is the "why not Windows" aspect of why I've turned back to a friend who treats me well, most of the time, and laughs at my jokes: linux. I can't say that these reasons are your reasons and I can't say that anyone else has taken the same path to get here that I have, nor can I say that linux is for everybody just as I can't say Windows is for everyone. Although, really, I guess I could say why not? For me, linux's pretty GUI (either Gnome2 or KDE4.5 are flashy enough to compete with the "gee whiz" factor of Aero) belies the stability and power under the hood. That's my decision and I'm sticking with it.
