NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, March 2011
Should You Try Linux? (Well, it depends on….)
By Dick Maybach
n2nd(at)charter.net
(click to email author)

There are many good reasons why you should.

?It’s fast. Every time I use Windows I can feel myself growing older as it creeps through booting up, shutting down, and starting a new program. My wife had an old laptop with XP that had become unusably slow under XP. She replaced the operating system with Linux, and it’s now back to its original speed.

?It’s free. Not only is Linux free, but so are the great majority of its applications. Such things as office suites, desktop publishing, Web page design, photo, audio, and video editors, computer aided design, and games (to name a few) are there for you to try out and use. Many of these can import and use Windows documents, such as from MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

?It’s more secure. While no software is absolutely secure, Linux is far ahead of Windows. This is partly by design and partly because PCs running Windows are far more common than are those running Linux. Malware designers tend to target the most common configuration. Linux users must keep their systems up-to-date (a one click process) and must use the built-in firewall, but they very seldom worry about computer viruses.

?It’s more fun. Linux users are continually trying new programs. They are free, so why not try to find which you like best. Linux is also much more customizable; you can make your desktop look like Windows, like a Mac, or like something only you could love. Finally, because it’s open, you are free to poke around its guts to figure out what is really going on under the hood.

Good reasons for caution
There are also good reasons why you might not want to.

?Linux is not Windows. It doesn’t run most Windows applications. (There are ways around this, but they are more trouble than most Linux novices will find comfortable.) Worse, some Windows applications have no Linux counterparts. For example, although it may change, today you can’t watch movies on-line from Netflix in Linux, and there is no Linux program equivalent to TurboTax.

?Some hardware doesn’t work with Linux. Again, there are ways around this, but they require some experience with Linux. The most common offenders are printers, scanners, and anything made by Apple. This isn’t a problem if you are buying a new machine; you just buy only the devices you know are Linux compatible.

?Most PCs come with Windows and not Linux installed. You will have to install a new operating system, which is something most PC users have never done. Despite what you may have heard, installing Linux isn’t difficult (in fact, it’s much easier than installing Windows), but it does require some care.

Let’s suppose you’ve decided to look into Linux. How should you start? First, find a Linux user who is willing to help, not because Linux is so difficult, but because it’s new to you. He or she will probably recommend the toe-in-the-water approach. Many versions of Linux are available as a live CD, which lets you run Linux without writing anything to your hard disk. Shut down, remove the CD-ROM, and your machine boots Windows and has no idea it had been running Linux.

Set up your boot order
To do this, set up your PC to boot from a CD-ROM, insert a Linux live CD, and turn on the power. You will most likely have to select between trying Linux (right!) and installing Linux (wrong!). CD-ROMs are much slower than hard disks, but you can see exactly how Linux works with your hardware. Keep in mind that unless you copy your results to a read/write device, anything you do in the live session will be lost when you log off.

The next level of commitment is to install Linux in a dual-boot configuration. Here each time you boot, you choose either Linux or Windows. For instance, you might choose Windows to watch a Netflix movie, work on your taxes, or sync your iPhone and choose Linux to surf the Web, retouch you photos, or update your Web page. Again, the installation will be much easier with the help of a Linux-savvy friend. Just be sure to back up your files before you begin. Another good approach is to replace Windows with Linux on an old computer.

Linux is a rather large clan of operating systems, the most common of which are Ubuntu, Red Hat Fedora, and SUSE. However, I recommend that you first try Linux Mint, which is a variant of Ubuntu. Its appearance closely resembles Windows’, and you will probably be comfortable almost immediately. It shares Ubuntu’s compatibility with hardware, which minimizes the chances of problems during and after installation.

There are hundreds of other versions of Linux, and each one has its niche, for example to recover files from damaged disks, to be fast on old and slow hardware, to accommodate children, to run on netbooks and smart phones, and one even lets you use an old PC as a TiVo type video controller.

Give Linux a try. You will probably like it, and if you don’t, at least you will have better reason to use Windows other than being ignorant of everything else.

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