That’s great if all you do is surf the web.
Not so good if you need to use professional software.
yeah all I do is surfing, multimedia, and social networking so it is perfect!
I had my hard drive partitioned. Windows on one side, LINUX on the other. I have full capability without the BS.
IMO the perfect middle ground is MacOS X. Plenty of first-tier commercial software is available, and if you really need to run a Windows app the VMs are now quite good.
As the old saying goes, “Linux is free if your time is worth nothing.”
(That said I do like Linux and intend to set up a Linux box again as a server...)
> Not so good if you need to use professional software.
If your system hardware has the horsepower, install Linux and create a virtual machine running Windows as a guest OS. You will have all the benefits of being virtually virus-free, doing all your surfing and social networking from the Linux host, and pusruing your professional software activites on the Windows guest.
Absolute best of both worlds.
2 GHz CPU with 4 GB memory ought to be good enough for starters.
Of course, more is better.
:)
Well, I use both Linux and Windows heavily. Some of the best apps that I used at my last job were open source ported for Windows. Gimp 2.2, ImageMagic, ghostscript, PDFtk, Scibus, Gnumeric, and Grep for Windows.
I honestly like Gimp 2.2 better than Photoshop & Illustrator from CS2. I used it every day for many years.
I used ImageMagic to batch process images for the company website. It is an amazing app. Command line, but very very fast. At one point I created over 80,000 images with it plus the matching thumbnails. It worked flawlessly.
I used Grep (for Windows) to extract sequence intelligence from previous work. Used PDFtk to unzip the .pdf of the previous work and opened it in Notepad++ editor and did a little pre-conditioning and used Grep to extract the sequencing information from the last publishing. (the catalog I maintained was 3,000 pages long, excluding the indexes)
Gnumeric spreadsheet will do RegEx find/replace and is one of the most powerful spreadsheets I have used. It also will make excellent HTML tables directly from the spreadsheet. It will not do everything Excel will do, but there are things that Excel will not do that Gnumeric will. I needed both.
Don't look down your nose on Open Source software and Linux. I have used Linux for over 10 years and truly love it.