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Thoughts About Switching to GNU/Linux for New Users (Updated)

Posted on March 5, 2010 by robbychen


After reading the article “Why Linux still sucks” over ZDNet, I came up with the following thoughts that corresponding to three of the points mentioned in that article on the process to switch to GNU/Linux for new Windows/Mac users:

  • “No gaming support”

I’m not a big fan of games. I only occasionally play one or two games. I think that the games on GNU/Linux are pretty good. One of the 3D programs I used often is Second Life. Fortunately, I got it working under Fedora. Personally, I think playing games are waste of time, other than for entertainment and socialize purposes.

  • “No migration tool”

I think Ubuntu and other Ubuntu-based distros have the options to help Windows users to migrate the files in My Documents folder and other related folders to the new OS during the installation process. Fedora and other Fedora-based distros don’t seem to have this feature yet.

  • “Driver/hardware confusion”

There’s no such thing as a “works with Linux” logo for new hardware means that people who might like to upgrade feel totally in the dark as to what future hardware they could buy.

I agree with this statement. Hardware vendors should classify the availability of hardware drivers on GNU/Linux by any means in order to ease customer selection process, and to decrease their return rate on the hardware sale for the incompatible GNU/Linux devices.

The important factor that I think drives away new Windows users is the device driver availability. Although modern GNU/Linux distributions already have a lot of drivers out of box, there are still a few hardware vendors don’t offer their official Linux drivers. Some of the devices have open source drivers, but many of them don’t work well compare to the official one.

Update: The purpose of open source drivers is to help those who don’t know their device specs to install the generic drivers that give them the ability to use the devices’ full functionality. Some drivers are more stable than the official one. Also note that it is not easy to make driver, especially for developers who write open source drivers. Thanks to openuniverse over identi.ca for this tip.

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