Programmers and Enthusiasts – For programmers Linux is already a
near perfect solution. No other system gives so offers you a wider array of
tools and platforms for development. The flexibility is simply amazing and
it doesn't carry a price tag. An added benefit is the sense of community and
that's priceless.
Enthusiasts never had it so good. There is aways something new to
discover and since the system is totally transparent your chances of
understanding computing and programming in general – you will be
interested if you aren't already – are infinitely higher than in
Windows. Tinkering will never be the same again.
For the home user – There are 5 separate
areas here, the internet,
gaming, basic word processing, administration and multimedia. We aren't
going to talk about ease of use here because the days of an ugly and
unwieldy interface are long gone, at the moment as far as usability and
sheer visual pizazz is concerned Gnome has
taken the pants off Windows so
there is nothing to worry about there. File management, installing and
uninstalling software and basic administration are more streamlined and
centralized and as you use Linux more you probably will get over any
prejudice toward the command line which is nothing like the impotent
DOS prompt. This is an outrageously powerful shell that
will accomplish anything
you can think off faster than it takes you to select a button. You might be
intimidated at first but its the heart of Linux the control centre, the
headquarters, your direct line to the kernel. Hardware configuration is not
as simple as in Windows mostly because plug and play has complicated things
not eased them but it's not difficult either, the best thing to do is set
your BIOS to non pnp so that it
can configure things especially the sound
card, but read read read. There is a lot
of documentation on your system and with that behind you everything
becomes simple. There is no excuse for ignorance.
Corel WordPerfect is good but for the
simplest solution try Abiword –
http://www.abisource.com/. It's good
and bears an uncanny resemblance to MSWord
– now now. Both are free and
widely available – I don't know about
Wordperfect 9 , 8
is free, good and available. Other options are
Applixware and Star
Office. I haven't used Applix
but Star Office is really ugly and slow and
just the sort of software that could put you off Linux and its just as
bad in Windows. Version 5.1 was tolerable but after Sun took it over its
deteriorated and version 5.2 is the pits. Plain text and html editors are
sprouting by the day. Most distribution carry a lot of software so
look. I'm not much of a spreadsheet person but there is
GNUmeric which is
not unlike Excel and a glaring inadequacy in
printing is now rectified. It looks good. Corel have ported nearly all
their apps and they are not as expensive as their Windows counterparts
and with the same functionality.
This is one area where Linux will not be found wanting. There are
as many if not more mp3 players than Windows. The
most common is XMMS, is somewhat like
Winamp and just as good – has some
great visualization plugins. Other mp3 players are
Gqmpeg, Freeamp,
Alsaplayer. That's enough
for me. Mpeg1 vcd players are a
bit scarce, MTV is good and available –
hteztp://www.mtvplayer.com/ free for personal
use – a totally free solution is available from lokigames –
http://www.lokigames.com/ There are
more. There are a few mp2 players
movie is good. I' don't have a dvd
player so I don't know but Xmovie should
tackle mpeg2 streams. Most of my
mpeg1 players are GL accelerated
and perhaps my vcd playsback as well as
Windows Media Player. Ripping is a reality
with a lot of options no more ASPI headaches
– most of the Linux apps read digital data directly from
the discs and all the popular codecs are available;
Xing, Fraunhofer but I
use Blade and Lame
– two excellent freeware encoders avalible for all
platforms. There are also a couple of tools for cdwriting. Check some of
the Linux archives.
Again things are really happening here though one wishes there
were a few more browsers other than Netscape
but then Netcape is adequate. There are all
the other stuff you will find for Windows, chat utils, instant
messaging, ftp, downLoaders etc.
The problem area is games, there is a project on to port
popular games to Linux by Lokigames and they have a number of titles
ready –
http://www.lokigames.com/ –
Quake
2&3 are out, System Shock,
Heavygear etc. The thing here is to make
sure you have at least Xfree 4.01 and support
for your video card.
That leaves us with DTP and this is one area
where Linux could pound Windows but the thrust has been missing. Linux could
really be optimized for
DTP. Ghostscript - a
PostScript RIP – already
offers a professional (if you know how) solution for printing and your
printer is probably supported. If you already have a postscript
printer there is no problem to start with. For image editing there is
Gimp. It is nearly as good as
Photoshop – and
that's some compliment –
but for lack of CMYK and colour management support
ruling it out of
serious print work but it can be a good semi-professional solution and
for web work perfect and it's fun to
use. Gimp also has a couple of
good drivers for Epson printers. Ghostscript
has a problem with bitmaps – not all bitmaps but photographs, you
could eventually get some good output but it will take some amount of
tweaking. As far as text and vector graphics is concerned it's good
enough to replace my Epson driver in Windows (it has a Windows
version) GhostScript is available at its
homepage http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
Word processing is already covered. The problem areas are
vector editing and page layout. Framemaker
for Linux is a solution and CorelDraw is
available but they are both commercial offerings. There are
vector editors but all are at a nascent stage.
Sketch,
Killustrator and
Impress are coming along but far away from
professional solutions like
Draw and
Adobe Illustrator. For page layout there is
Tex but those used
to Pagemaker,
Quark or InDesign
are not going to be amused, its tough to
learn and difficult to control and there are way too many issues with
things like fonts and its not wysiwyg – we
can't live without that.
On a last note at the moment the only difference in
productivity for me is in vector graphics, page layout and games. They
are perhaps a year away at which point Linux would have over taken
Windows – at least as far as I'm concerned – and I would
have little reason to dual boot but I think having Windows is in a odd
way comforting as is having Linux, perhaps I will always use them
both.