I'm curious why the #2 concern is that the installation takes 20 GB. I bet most users don't have enough files and programs to fill up even a small 256 GB hard drive.
For some power users this might matter, but as far as I can tell most baseline laptops you can get with Windows offer more than enough storage.
My family laptop has Office Suite, 4 games (GTA IV, GTA San Andreas, CoD 4 and World of Tanks IIRC), a couple of accounting software for my family business and data (mostly pictures).
Currently, they have used about 350 gigabytes (out of 500). I wouldn't call them power users at all, but they have used a lot of space. Keeping that in mind, I have concluded that for most of the regular Windows users, 200 GB would be easily filled.
20 GB might not be a lot, but it is 2x higher than my _whole_ Linux installation with all of the programs I have installed. And I would call myself a power user.
> But what about .NET framework? Flash player? Antivirus? Office Suite? DirectX? New browser? (Since you won’t be using IE, that’s for sure.) Mailing client? Pdf reader? Some image editor? WinRAR? Even after you paid for your operating system, you’ll probably end up paying a couple of hundred bucks additionally just to make your system usable.
I personally don't want all of that stuff pre-installed, because I won't use most of it. I have no need for flash anymore. I rarely need an office suite, but when I do, I just use Google Docs. The same goes for a mail client: Gmail.com is fine. I do install Chrome (which handles PDFs, so no need to install Adobe Reader), but Internet Explorer isn't that bad anymore. Also, all of that stuff is free (or has free alternatives), so I don't know where the author came up with the "couple of hundred bucks" figure.
> Even if you are tech-savvy, careful what you install kind of person that doesn’t just blindly install new software (by clicking next->next), you’ll end up with some crap like a new toolbar in your Firefox/Chrome from time to time and you’ll have to scan your system with some antivirus software from time to time. But, keep in mind that installing antiviruses might get you some crapware too, (AVG toolbar, I’m talking about you!) so what will you do then?
Really? Because I consider myself quite tech-savy and have never had a single toolbar installed without my knowledge. As for antivirus software, Microsoft Security Essentials is very good and doesn't install any extra crapware. It's even built-in on Windows 8 and later, so there's another thing you don't have to install yourself.
> You want to play something really old like DOS games? Well, too fucking bad.
DOSBox, which you would also have to install on Linux if you wanted to play old DOS games.
> All I have to do is to download Visual Studio Community edition. After all, it is free and it requires “only” additional 20 fucking gigabytes of disk space! Yay!
You also get what many consider to be the best IDE available. For free. Yay!
> Also, all of that stuff is free (or has free alternatives), so I don't know where the author came up with the "couple of hundred bucks" figure.
I only counted Photoshop + MS Office. The reason for that is because I wrote this article as a response to the latest "Why Linux is not ready for desktop" article I came across (you'll find the link to it in the first paragraph of my article). They have mentioned these programs as Windows advantages, not mentioning their disadvantages at all. I agree with you, most of the regular users don't need them anymore.
> You also get what many consider to be the best IDE available. For free. Yay!
I also consider it to be the best IDE there is, but since I'm not using most of its features (I'm just building some simple Visual Basic apps as a part of my college curriculum), 20 GB is kind of a lot for me.
I have a 10 year old desktop that cost $1,000 to build back then (1.5 GB of RAM, a 74 GB 10k RPM HDD, a 2 GHz 64bit AMD CPU, a 128 MB dedicated video card, Gigabyte motherboard, and Centurion case) that runs Windows 8 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 just fine. As long as you take care of the hardware, it will be useful for a long time. It's people who overtax their CPUs with crapware and let their systems overheat (not dusting, bad air flow, etc) which causes their hardware to degrade. I don't have licenses to run newer software, but I'm betting that desktop could handle it.
Bastard! I was going to write this post! But yes, with almost every Linux is not ready for xxx I think: but Windows has the same and more issues when I use it anyway. And that is pre installed: not like Linux which I manually install.
I mean I am trying to compile a project I am debuggging at the same time and get a locked file error message. I do not get how that is either desktop or server ready. It is more a kind of joke actually in 2015.
Actually, this has been my experience with a two year old laptop with i3 processor, 4 GB of RAM memory, NVidia GeForce 710M and 750 GB of disk space.
I have 300 GB on a Windows partition, and 50 GB on my elementary OS partition. The rest of it is my Data / Home partition. Currently, I have used ~ 190 GB on my Windows partition and ~ 11 GB on my Linux partition. Keep in mind that all of my data is stored on a separate partition.
Wow, that article he was responding to is horrible.
There's not really much point in arguing with people who only take name-brand operating systems and software seriously. They'll always mask their elitism by feigning concern for so-called "ordinary users" or complain about the absence of some specific proprietary software package that they only had access to before by submitting to vendor lock-in.
I don't think there's one magical OS that's for everyone. Or one specific UI implementation or paradigm that is perfect for everyone. Yes, there have been strides in making Linux DEs that are approachable for people familiar with Windows but Linux (and Unix-like OSes as a whole, but particularly Linux) has value beyond being an alternative to any another OS.
When I first started using computers there was no "easy mode".. a large proportion of my early time spent using a computer was spent learning about how that computer worked by exploration. There's still no "easy mode", if you haven't learned how to learn about how systems work.. you won't be able to troubleshoot any problems that may arise nor do anything you haven't already been taught how to do.
"Easy enough for everyone to use." is a slogan about sales volume. I think there are definitely Linux configurations that have those aspirations and are no further away from nor any closer to achieving them than Windows or OSX is. The value of Linux isn't to be a clone or replacement for another OS. The value of Linux is that it is extremely learnable for people who are interested in computing and people who want to make their own choices about their software environment.
The common complaints people make about "I had to use a CLI." or "I didn't want to learn anything." or "There were problems." are pretty irrelevant. In days past you always had to use a CLI, you always had to learn things, and there were always problems.
The cursor in the shell is a question. It's the system asking you what you want it to do. It's not trying to entice you with shiny icons. Every time I read that question, I have to think about it, and sometimes when I'm not working on anything in particular an open terminal window can provide hours of entertainment and education.
Not everyone thinks the same way. (I, for example, cannot keep my computer orderly with a graphical file manager. I just can't. I can reason about a written inventory of what I have but I can't find anything in my closet.) Not everyone is going to do the same things.
I don't know why people would damn a system with a completely different paradigm instead of just saying "It's not for me."
I also don't know why anyone would fire up the most educational operating system that exists (my opinion, but I think it's a big part of the reason that Linux is popular where it's popular.. because at a certain level it is very easy to use (where use overlaps with learning heavily; such as solving hard problems)) if they didn't want to learn anything.
For some power users this might matter, but as far as I can tell most baseline laptops you can get with Windows offer more than enough storage.