Recently I’ve read an article about what is driving people to use Linux and is it really Windows Vista that constraints people to run Linux?
What I think is that it’s not the performance or anything in Vista that anti-PRs itself - it’s the media and rumors. Lack of performance? Well, Vista starting-up takes a little longer than XP, well, it consumes 200 megabytes more than XP, maybe there are a few network bugs and annoying User Account Control notifications unless it’s Service Pack 1. But what I think is that Vista is really bad-rumored.
And these days, you can ask for XP instead of Vista if you wish - as many businesses do.
Let’s throw an example. My boss was getting a brand-new Lenovo X61 - he had a choice between Vista which was 30% more expensive than Windows XP that was the second choice. What he chose was XP because:
- “XP is faster”
- It’s more stable (which is true, because it’s supported much longer)
- It’s cheaper
- It’s more comfortable
Why is he wrong? Because he never tried it - he hasn’t discovered Start search with which you can easily navigate through your file system, programmes, tags and so on with just one click and typing.
He never tried out the new Virtual Folders technology which dinamically generates folder content depending on search criteria.
And these are only a few advantages of Windows Vista over Windows XP. The fact is that who really cares about extra 200 megabytes of physical memory when it’s about needless gigabytes of memory in nowadays PC’s.
That’s about businesses switching default Vista to native XP.
Even if you did not want Windows on that PC, there is no way that the average retailer would have the skill or the patience to install GNU/Linux on it
Installing Fedora Core or Ubuntu from scratch takes about 30 minutes without updates, installing Vista takes approximately the same time. Anyway with current distributions installing Linux is much more easier than Vista - it really doesn’t require you to be an expert.
…we need some statistics showing that a sizeable number of people are asking their retailers to install the free operating systems on their new PCs in preference to Vista. In the absence of any numbers - and I doubt whether you’ll ever get them - such claims remain just anecdotal claims.
When I was buying my Hewlett-Packard 6910p with Windows Vista on-board I asked if I could buy it without software installed - one reason is that it’s much more expensive and the second one is that I, as a student, have a lot of priveleges from Microsoft (free software)
My request was denied since a lot of hardware shops have an agreement to sell the computers only with OS installed, so even if I ask to remove the OS on it - anyway I pay for it.
If we lived in a world where the better technology won out, then no doubt everybody and their aunt Fanny would be using GNU/Linux.
That’s what I really doubt - I tried tons of different distributions and nothing has fulfilled my expectations except for Vista. Even though consumes more memory and overhelms the CPU - overall it’s very effective and looking towards future OS which is being developed more than any Linux distro because of one simple reason - it gains more investments.
