Windows or Linux

I was browsing through my stats on Blogger.com and realised that the majority of viewers are browsing this blog post using a windows machine.

The shares are heavily for Windows with >70% of visitors on Windows machines, and only 11% on a Linux machine.

So I had a thought of whether some of links to my old posts were still hanging around somewhere - during the times when I was mainly on Windows. Or whether some of the visitors are considering move from Windows to Linux.

If you are a Windows user considering a move to Linux, then my advice to you is to - Do It. My experience with the shift to Linux has been gradual - over 10 years in fact. I was using linux in the Wild  West days where everything had to compiled and you had to work out some cryptic dependency. For some of these reasons I would often give up and move back to Windows - where everything for the most part just worked.

Some of the most trivial things in Linux was pain staking effort - for example sound and graphics. The distributions that are out these days are nothing like what you may have experienced in the past. In my last effort I was trying to get Parallels or VMware to work, but no matter what I did I kept on getting an error. I remember posting on their official forum for help and I didn't hear anything from them. So I ditched Linux and went back to Windows.

I still feel that although there is a lot of effort put into providing distributions, to applications etc... some of which seems a little less polished than Windows or a proprietary software - I guess there's more money in getting it to be polished. But, if you look past the vanilla install and see the potential then you would be in for a treat.

I also feel that the MacBook Pro with OSX helped me get over Windows -  for the sheer fact that OSX was feature less than Windows  yet just as polished as Windows - when I say feature less what I mean is the applications that are available etc... please don't send me hate mail. Secondly, Google with Google docs and Google Mail was also partly responsible to help me get off Windows.

For most of the software that is available in Windows there will be equally or better software available in Linux - the best part is that most Linux software are free. If you would like to see a list of equivalent software check out this link : http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20070701111340544/Equivalents.html, granted that it is a little old but you get the jist ?

However, there are some software that I cannot be without. For example - I'm a .NET programmer living in a world of shame Linux, I need my VisualStudio goodness. I'm also an armature photographer, so I like Photoshop - although there is GIMP but I feel more comfortable in Adobes proprietary goodness. When I have a need for Windows, I launch up VirtualBox and run a Virtual Machine instance of Windows (instead of the other way round - most of the time).

Either way, thanks for visiting and I hope you are getting something out of my posts.