J_K9 @ Linux

PC Advisor: Mac, PC or Linux?

May 12, 2007 on 6:12 pm | In Linux |

When I go on my monthly visit to the local WHSmith’s, I pick up the usual magazines - Linux Format, Linux Magazine and a certain less technology-related magazine. However, I also keep an eye out for any other magazines which may have feature stories on Linux, and this month’s edition of PC Advisor (shown above right) caught my attention so I grabbed a copy, paid and left.

It’s always good to see Linux on the front cover of another magazine, particularly a magazine which focusses primarily on Windows users and is thus more likely to be read by people from this background. Remember the phrase “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”? I think that applies - whether the reviews of Linux are good or bad they will at least educate the public that there is a free alternative and, when they later see this Operating System in action in front of their own eyes, they will sincerely regret having spent £200 on that copy of Windows Vista, or £500+ on a new computer which brings and has hardware powerful enough to run it.

This is why, even after reading PC Advisor’s cover story, I was still smiling. That’s not to say that it’s a bad review - it sheds quite a good light on Linux, but I am left feeling that the author is either naive or biased. The reviewer states that some distributions, such as SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu are “going a long way to change Linux’s reputation for being difficult…to install and use,” and encourages users to try Linux to see whether it suits them and whether “Linux will like [their] PC” by running Ubuntu’s bootable Desktop live CD. The author mentions the “hundreds of free programs” available for installation at the click of a button, the “frequent bug fixes and automatic updates” and the “steadily evolving” interfaces of Gnome and KDE. He also highlights Linux’s “minimal hardware requirements” and “solid security,” concluding that Linux is “more than capable of serving as a bullet-proof primary operating system.”

So, what’s the problem? Why am I not praising the author? Well, there are several things about this article that touched a raw nerve.

Linux offers all the core applications, but you may find your productivity drops.

This is somewhat of a contradiction, as the author previously mentioned the “hundreds of free programs…including productivity…and development tools.” However, it’s the generalisation of this criticism that annoys me rather than this contradiction.

Who exactly is this “Universal You” whose productivity will drop if they switch to Linux? A web developer? A designer? A secretary? A home user, this magazine’s target?

Linux has obvious advantages and disadvantages for these different types of user. Consider a home user who browses the internet, downloads pictures from their camera to their computer for organisation and storage, checks their email, listens to music and works on the odd text document or spreadsheet. How is Linux any less capable of matching these needs than Windows? The software is, after all, just as powerful as the software they are probably used to and costs absolutely nothing.

Web developer? There are plenty of tools to satisfy their needs. There is a broad selection of WYSIWYG and text editors suitable for web programming in Ubuntu’s software repository, such as Quanta Plus, Nvu, Bluefish and many others which provide powerful code completion, code folding and other facilities to aid web development in a variety of programming languages. The Apache HTTP server can be installed to view your website as it is developed (and support for scripting languages such as PHP and Perl can easily be added), and Database Management Systems such as MySQL are also readily available if they are required to provide dynamic backends for website. In short, all of the tools required for the fast development of a website are available for free and I have no doubt that web developers will be just as if not more productive working on Linux than they were on Windows.

I have only analysed two types of users, but switching to Linux would not result in a decrease in productivity for either of these. The type of users who would primarily be at a disadvantage if they switched to Linux are audio, graphic (designers) and video editors. Audio, graphics and video creation and manipulation tools on Linux are unfortunately not as powerful or as feature-rich as their Windows and Mac OS X alternatives, and so switching to Linux would result in a decrease in productivity and in the quality of output from this type of user. However, this is the only technological demographic which I believe would be at a disadvantage if they switched to free software, partly because of the lack of support of the professional, proprietary tools for Linux and also because of the immature but improving equivalent Open Source software. To say that, “if you need to get things done, get back to your PC” is simply unfair considering the stability and wide range of software available for Linux today.

Support for newer hardware often lags behind that of Windows and OS X

To be fair to the author, there is a limited amount of space in a magazine and so explanations are often concise or left out altogether, but to state the above without qualification is to imply something that is untrue. The only reason that support for newer hardware lags behind in Linux is because most hardware manufacturers do not recognise the Linux userbase as a significant number of users to cater for, preferring to spend their money developing drivers for the much larger userbase of Windows. So, it is usually left to Open Source developers to reverse engineer the hardware calls made by unsatisfactory proprietary drivers on Linux or by analysing the architecture of the hardware however possible so as to create an Open Source driver which is as compatible as they can make it with what little they have been able to discover. This is why Linux’s support for cutting-edge hardware is so poor.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is comparable to Windows Vista’s hardware support. I have a T-Mobile 3G data card which used to work perfectly with Windows XP, but for which T-Mobile has created no Linux driver. What about Vista? It has been out for months now and there’s still no support for Microsoft’s “latest and greatest” Operating System. And what do T-Mobile have to say about this? “It will be a few months before a Windows Vista driver will be made available.” A few months. My subscription will be over by then. My laptop has an nVidia GeForce Go 7400 graphics card - on Windows Vista Home Edition, which came with the laptop, the unfinished official driver causes black flashes, blue blurs when waking from sleep and even drives some games to crash. On Ubuntu 7.04, my card is well supported and I have run Beryl with hardware acceleration without a problem. Of course, these are only examples, but they show that some of the more advanced hardware devices are as badly supported on the Linux “underdog” as they are on Windows Vista, which had a $100 million marketing campaign promoting its launch.

Mac OS X has excellent support for the latest hardware, but considering that OS X users are locked into their hardware selection by Apple it is not much of a problem for Apple to choose hardware which OS X supports well and whose manufacturers will be interested in a partnership to further improve support in return for increased profits.

I have a few more bones to pick with this article, but I think I have already written too much and expressed my displeasure with it sufficiently. For those of you who still want to read this article, it’s available online on PC Advisor’s website - read it if you dare!