Is Linux ready? Who is it ready for? Why would someone want to switch from another OS to Linux?

I think that Linux is ready. This was not always the case for me. I first tried Linux a few years ago and I liked it. I only liked it, I didn’t use it much though until about a year ago. The reason for this is because I always had several problems that I could never get fixed. The main problems that I had were with sound and video. My sound almost never worked, sometimes I could get it to work in one program and not in another. This was very frustrating to someone who was trying to switch from Windows. Eventually I did get the sound to work and then started to try to get my monitor to display a higher than 800×600 resolution. The resolution that I wanted was not available by default in the graphical settings so with some help from various forums I tried to configure my xorg.conf to get the resolution I wanted. After doing this x would fail to start and would drop me to terminal only which is very intimidating to a new user and is still not where I would consider myself and expert even now. So I had no idea what to do, so instead of fixing the problem I would reinstall another distribution of Linux in hopes that I would find one that would like my computer and just work. I have a CD case of about 24 distributions that I have tried including Knoppix, Fedora, Suse, Slackware, and Vector. All of which I could never get set up correctly, even though I could do it now, I am not saying that these are bad distributions. After a long time of just settling for Windows I heard about Ubuntu 7.10, so I decided to try it in hopes that it would not mess with my dual boot of XP and Vista like other distributions had. So I put the live CD in and booted it up installed it rebooted and now I had a triple boot system. There were still a few problems that I had, getting sound to work in FireFox, and most problematic was my wireless card. More on that here.  Now in conclusion Linux is ready for me, but is it ready for you?

Who else is it ready for? I will say that Linux is not ready for everyone, but for a lot of people it is. One group is the less computer savvy and new users that have a very limited need. For example the people that need a compute to check email, browse the Internet, instant message, and work on text documents. You may be wondering why Linux is ready for the new users and less savvy? Wouldn’t they have a hard time with it, especially when there are problems like what I have had? The way that it is ready is if someone installs it and configures it for them, or they buy it preinstalled from someplace like Dell. When a Linux system is installed and ready there is almost nothing that the user needs to do to use it. Almost all the software is already there and if they need more they can easily install from add/or remove programs. Another reason it is very good for new users is because they become completely confused from antivirus program alerts and firewalls asking for permissions. They see these and just ignore them and their antivirus becomes ineffective, sometimes they will even turn it off completely.

One group that I would see as Linux not being ready for are the people that want to get just a little more out of there computer, but not take time to learn how it works or fix it if they mess it up, they like make modifications to make it more to their liking without knowing what they are doing. This brings up another question though, is Windows even ready for them, once you mess something up in Windows it can often bring the whole thing down to the point where it needs to be reinstalled. Linux can be brought down also by making a change to a config, and a new user would still need to reinstall, but there is a large group of people to help Linux users. In my experience it is usually easier to interpret Linux errors than Windows errors, and when you Google the error is has been easier to fix.

Another group that Linux has a hard time getting adopted by are gamers, there just are not as many good games for Linux as there are for Windows, however there are good games for it. My favorite is Tremulous, but I am not much of a gamer so I will not go into too much on this topic of gaming. I know that many games can be ran under wine, but it is not always easy to do.

If you are tired of the instability of Windows, the common crashes, lack of really choosing what you want it to look like, then Linux may be for you. Some Linux gurus will hate me for saying this, but yes some things are harder to do in Linux, and yes they can be harder even if you know what you are doing, but the same can be true for Windows as well. So, is Linux ready? I know that I have said it is not for some people, but I am going to throw all that out, Linux is ready, but the world is not ready for it. What I mean by this is that manufactures have not made support for Linux with their hardware, so Linux is doing great with being able to work with so many things that have no official support. Game companies have not yet started to make games for Linux because they do not see a profit in it just like the hardware manufactures. Times are changing, you used to never be able to buy a computer from a major manufacturer with Linux, now thanks to Dell, Asus, HP, and others you can. It is only a matter of time before the world sees Linux as ready. That time is on its way now.