Béranger moves back to Windows, for good reasons

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Back on December 10th Monsieur Béranger called it quits on Linux and moved back to the comfort and higher productivity of Windows XP. His frustration and motivation are summed up rather nicely towards the middle of his post:
I had enough of struggling with Linux's structural flaws. Despite what the fanboys believe, updating or upgrading a Linux system can break it much more often than applying the official patches to a Windows system. The quality of Linux has severely decreased in the last couple of years, and there is no sign that this is going to improve anytime soon.
While Mr. Béranger is far more critical of Linux than I am, I can't help but agree with his basic premise that the quality of Linux has severely decreased, at least since 2007. The last really good distributions (from my perspective) from openSUSE and Ubuntu were 10.2 and 7.04 respectively. They came out in the spring of 2007. You can go back and click on my Suse and Ubuntu tags to get a pretty good idea of how happy I was with both, and how things began to deteriorate as the distributions "advanced" due to whole-sale changes in major subsystems such as KDE, Gnome, Xorg, the sound system debacle... the list goes on and on, and Beranger does a pretty good job pointing them out at the start of his post.

If I have any disagreements with Monsieur Béranger, it's on the finer points of his criticisms of KDE4 and Vista's UI. I find I actually like how KDE 4.1.3 is beginning to work under openSUSE 11.1 in particular, and I also find I like the way Vista is beggining to work under SP1 (and even more so under SP2). I find myself more tolerant, perhaps more forgiving, than he. If I switch back completely to Windows, it won't be under Windows XP, but Vista SP2 or even Windows 7.

The installation of openSUSE 11.1 when it is officially released will be the litmus test for me. I pre-ordered the boxed set, and I expect to be able to install it and to get my system up and running with the software in the boxed set. Europa isn't the target system so much as a newer system I've speced out on Newegg: centered around a dual-core Athlon X2 running at 3.1 GHz with 8GB of DDR2 and typical (but not overwhelmingly advanced) contemporary hardware, all for the princely sum of USD$1,200. It should be noted that this complete system is half what I paid five years ago for europa. If openSUSE 11.1 can't be installed and configured with the same level of ease that I know from personal experience I can expect from Windows, then openSUSE 11.1 will be the last Linux distribution I ever install or use for personal home use.

Comments

  1. damianDecember 15, 2008

    Give a try to Linux Mint.

    Everything works out of the box. Even if it's a derivative of Ubuntu, most of the bugs are fixed.

    Don't give up on Linux.

    elbeto

    ReplyDelete

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