tuxtoday

To be honest, there isn’t a discussion to be had over which os is better between the major Linux distros or Vista. It’s so obvious that you have a lot more functionality in, say Ubuntu or Suse. I tried Vista out yesterday, trying to clean all the crap of my girlfriends mothers brand new laptop. And it was just so slow, it wasn’t even usable.

I still haven’t used a Mac, but to be honest, I don’t see why I would either. Even if Mac OS were to be a bit more stable, or contain a bit more functionality than Ubuntu (or another free OS) it wouldn’t matter. I trust free software, and I don’t trust Apple, but more importantly: Linux is good enough, and that’s the key.

Everywhere I turn I seem to stumble into discussions about what office suite is better, what graphics program is better etc.. But this discussion is only relevant to a very small portion of users. Openoffice will continue to be just as good as MS Office for the majority of people, and the Gimp is absolutely an alternative to Photoshop to most people. There are some functionality that isn’t available for the free options out there yet, but the actual portion of people that need that specific funtionality is so small.

There is so much stuff that could be added to Openoffice that are available in MS Office, but it wouldn’t make much of a difference, because the most major thing about both Openoffice and The Gimp, is something else than the actual functionality. It’s about the fact that the free alternatives doesn’t look exactly like the proprietary, and the fact that they are free, which convinces most people it can’t be any good.

That’s the kind of narrow thinking that causes the most problems. Of that I am certain.