I love Linux, let's get that straight from the start. My introduction to the Penguin occurred more than six years ago when a newly-bought laptop's pre-installed XP kept crashing. One particularly memorable event occurred just one month after the purchase, the mouse just stopped working, even after repeated reboots. Though Dell made it easy to completely restore the installed OS, I wasn't happy, so decided to check out Linux - which I've been using as my main OS ever since. Though in the interest of full disclosure I should say that I also have a VirtualBox'ed XP setup as well.
Come to think of it, this was not my first look at Linux. I bought Suse Linux in the late-nineties for around £30-£40 at Dixons, and had played with it a bit - but seeing as I went back to Windows, I mustn't have been overly impressed. Enter Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 8.04 surprised me. Here was a Linux that installed really fast (compared to Bill's offerings) and damn-near all hardware was detected and enabled. I was impressed! More so by Wine, the Linux software capable of running quite a few native Windows applications - an incredible achievement. But after the novelty had worn off, it soon became apparent that Wine had problems. Over the years, I have been forced to re-install Wine from scratch dozens of times. Still it continues to be actively supported and the improvements are evident. Kudos to its developers.
Ok, fast-forward to today (and the point of this post). Linux has continued to improve over the years, particularly when it comes to supporting hardware. Although I've tried dozens of flavours of Linux, I must be a creature of habit 'cos I'm still using Ubuntu as my main OS. But not the current offerings, oh no. I, like a huge percentage of Linux-land was appalled by the travesty that was released by the Gnome Developers as the 'future' of the Gnome desktop. So I currently am still using the long-ago EOL'ed (end-of-line) 10.04LTS version. I'm still with it 'cos it works. And also (surprisingly) because there are still security updates being produced for it, as well as kernel updates and its repositories are still online. Incidentally, I also have an interesting China-derived version of Linux called Deepin Linux running on another computer. This is based on Ubuntu 13.04 but with it's own cool custom desktop - definitely worth checking out.
After more than six years of use, with at least one computer having run 24/7 throughout that time, I can say positively that Linux's Achilles's heel is Wireless - putting it bluntly, it sucks! Initially my problems were with a Intel wireless card (IWL3945), but similar problems also occur with two other Atheros cards. These aren't trivial problems either. The feed splutters and stops continuously, before often dying completely, forcing a restart of the computer. Fortunately, removing & restarting wireless via 'modprobe' is often enough to get it going again - but not always. And this usually happens every few hours! Which begs the question, why am I still with Linux?
Well, thanks to an application called 'ndiswrapper', wireless is rendered usable again. What this app does is allow Linux to use native Windows wireless drivers, and which for me works great, but which also sucks - after all, Linux users are trying to get away from using Windows code completely. But without doubt, without Ndiswrapper, I would have stopped using Linux years ago.
What I have never understood is why more people aren't' complaining about this. Granted, there are 1000's of posts on various forums (many mine!) about this, but not to the extent I would expect - again Linux Wireless Sucks, so why aren't people more vocal about this? Maybe most "Linux users" just 'play' with it - ie. their main OS is Windows but will boot-up a tiny Linux partition occasionally and for a few hours just for the novelty. The "few hours" part is important - any wireless problems would usually go unnoticed in these short time-frames. Similarly, maybe most 'real' Linux users just run their computer for a few hours so never experience a dropped wireless connection when they come back to using the computer - as they most surely would if the computer was left running 24/7. This silence has always baffled me.
Not that I'm advocating complaining. I've slowly come to realise that it's generally a pretty thankless task writing software for Linux, and its developers really need to be applauded for the incredible job they have done & continue to do. But it doesn't make it any less frustrating either...
Apart from that, Linux is rock-solid, it never crashes. The one exception to this in six years concerned early versions of VirtualBox. That was the only application I have ever used that could cause Linux to crash completely. Everything after v.3.2 worked perfectly though - the version I still use, even though it is now very old. But it's quite a bit faster than the latest releases, especially on my aging laptop, so does quite nicely.
And I have absolutely no intention of ever going back to Windows. In fact until recently, I had never even used Windows 7, but given that it was being EOL'ed by M$, decided to give it a spin on VirtualBox. Must say I was underwhelmed - given the amount of favourable press I had come across over the years, I had expected more. And with Bill's current offering having been slated by critics & supporters alike, I don't expect to ever try using that.
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