Over the years I have seen many operating systems, development languages, applications, etc. come and go – I have tried many of them – not all – don’t think there is enough time in the world anymore to to that. I have never been a true zealot as many become for the Mac or this or that platform, but I have always tried to give products their due.
Recently picked up a copy of openSuse 11.1 with most of the standard included Linux packages like OpenOffice, Kmail, Gimp, etc. I have used Linux in the past on servers and have used several other Unix and Unix derivatives over the years for primarily server functions but haven’t looked at the desktop for a while and wanted to see how far it had come. Since one of the features of Linux is that it doesn’t require as much horsepower to run as a Windows or Mac environment I installed it on an older Dell laptop that I have available. The machine has a 2 GHZ Pentium 4 and 1GB of memory and an 80GB drive. It has reasonable graphics with a 64MB 1600×1200 screen and the normal array of I0. Did not have any trouble with the drivers for the system or for the HP j6400 series printer (did not pick up the scanning or faxing part of the printer but network printing is available – don’t know if the drivers or applications are available for the other pieces yet).
I have to admit that I was reasonable impressed – the installation went much simpler than I had expected and the interface and applications are not that unintuitive and cover a reasonable range of products, including the standard office functions, Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Data, Graphics, Photos, etc. Some of the packages are very good, some not as good as their commercial counterparts, but in many cases the differences are in areas that the average person might not notice. I selected the KDE interface – had a choice of Gnome as well so you might want to read up a little and see if one fits you better than the other.
Will this replace my Windows desktop – not likely – not all of the applications that I use are available in the Linux world and since a good chunk of my business involves Microsoft products, there are items that won’t work in the Linux environment. Before I hear it – yes I know, I could vitrualize a Windows environment under Linux and have access to those things that aren’t avialable, but for right now I have my systems set up for what I need.
There are some other tradeoffs – I haven’t rung them out completely by any means, but you can probably expect some incompatibilities with commercial versions of the applications. Probably nowhere near what it was during the Tower of Babel period of the 80s, but don’t expect every nuance to transfer without issue. Also don’t know the current buglist for the applications – I know that OpenOffice did have some issues a while ago and I will have to wring it out some more before I know if most of them have been addressed.
One other issue is the social issue – you probably won’t be able to turn to your friends and neighbors for questions or support and when they recommend the latest widget or program – it may not be available for Linux, and likewise when you come across a nifty package in the OpenSource world (you will be doing your application shopping a little differently than in the past), it may not be available on their platform either, so it works both ways. It can be a little disappointing not being able to share. And the people who you will get support from, in many case tend to be a little more on the technical side and may be somewhat of a zealot – so you may have to slow them down a little to get your help.
But – all of that said, do I think that the Linux desktop fits, espeicailly for some on a limted budget. Yes! There is sufficient function in the desktop coupled with many of the SaaS web based applications like those from Google and Zoho, that a person could function more than well enough with this operating environment.