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Migrating from Windows to Linux© Copyright Darrell Anderson. Migrating from Windows to Linux is becoming more popular because of the draconian business practices of Microsoft. Whether or not many people realize or even admit, the M$ monopoly (and any other artificial monopoly) is maintained by the illusionary powers of statism. The flawed ideas of statutory copyright and after-sale shrink-wrapped licenses are possible only through the force and coercion and threat of violence of statists. Although unlikely, perhaps the people of Microsoft will change their ways and embrace a new business model, but that remains to be seen. In the mean time, end users are looking for options—options that will not paint users into a corner as have Microsoft philosophies of the past few years. Yet, contact a Linux user or advocate, and the Windows user will be told several things:
I embarked on this migration journey and I affirm the previous statements are true—and very misleading. Although Linux is just as capable as Windows, there still are gaps in the applications software side. However, more importantly, there are huge gaps in helping people migrate from one operating system (OS) to another. The folks on the server side of the industry seem to have better notes about migrating, but the desktop side is woefully empty (although improving). Migration is not impossible and need not be difficult, but do not underestimate what is involved in migrating your desktop. No matter what the pundits tell you, computers today still are user-hostile, not user-friendly. Only those people who have been around computers for many years will try to claim that today’s computers are user-friendly. They are—compared to using computers 20 years ago. Yet, to the new user who never trekked that journey—and to the few honest people who have used computers for a long time, computers still are user-hostile. The claim that Linux is a lean and mean OS is true, but so is MS-DOS. What many long time Linux users fail to explain is that many Linux users tend to not be graphical user folks, they are command line folks. Thus, many Linux users are not point-and-click graphical user interface (GUI) users. Furthermore, for many of the Linux GUI users, many prefer a lean and basic GUI. Many first time users of Linux will be introduced to the KDE and GNOME desktop environments, popular Linux GUIs. The catch is that both KDE and GNOME are just as bloated as Windows and just as crash prone. Therefore, although Linux runs efficiently on old 386 and 486 hardware, don’t expect KDE and GNOME to do so. With those caveats, migrating to Linux is still possible. What follows is a glimpse of my own journey, and I hope that in this process I answer some of your questions—questions I asked. I still am in the process of migrating. I suspect for many serious desktop users that migration takes about two full years. For those people who use computers merely as a pastime and do not see computers as a tool, migration probably happens more quickly. Finis. |
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