Five months of Linux

Back in April earlier this year, I made a decision to switch over from Windows to Linux. And now it's September - probably a good time to write about it.

It was my work Laptop that I decided to migrate to Linux. I use it all day at office for my regular job, and in that sense, it was probably a pretty risky decision.

Nevertheless, IBM, where I work, has good IT support for employees wanting to switch over to Linux. I got a custom Linux distro DVD from them (based on Red Hat), with a good lot of IBM software pre-installed. The installation went pretty smoothly, and I was up and running in a few hours.  


Do I miss Windows? Sometimes yes.

But only occasionally.

1. Look and feel

The Windows look and feel is certainly addictive - for someone who has used Windows for years together, it's natural to feel a bit uncomfortable in Linux - and I had anticipated this. Five months down the road, I feel quite happy with the Linux (GNOME) look and feel now.

2. Power management

Windows does a few other things better too - and the one that I realized a little late is its good power management capability. There's a little feature that goes by the name of "switchable graphics" that I got into trouble with when I moved over to Linux.

Basically if your motherboard has an in-built graphics controller and you also have a more feature-rich, but power-hungry discrete graphics controller attached, Windows makes a choice for your as to which one of these graphics controllers to use. If you're watching a movie or playing a game, probably you'd need the discrete controller, and for normal use, the in-built one is good enough.

My Linux, however, just kept using the discrete one all the time - draining out power quickly and heating up like a stove within a few hours of use. The fan control wasn't good either and I was very worried about it in the first few days of my Linux use. Thankfully, there was a way out in the BIOS setting of the motherboard that I could use to turn off the discrete controller altogether, and I sailed out of the problem.

3. Support for hardware devices

More generally, Windows seems to have better support for hardware devices.
  - My home printer, a Canon PIXMA, wouldn't work in Linux (there's no driver)
  - My phone, a Nokia, can't be connected to Linux (there's no PC suite for Linux)

With Linux, I always need to be ready for trouble every time I attach any hardware - be it a modem, or an internet data card, a camera or whatever. But for me, hardware support is not a very big deal. This is my work PC - I don't "need" to attach any phone, camera or portable printer to it per-se, I just "want" to, at times, and I can adjust to not being able to do so.

And why won't I switch back to Windows?

Well, to be honest, inertia is certainly one of the factors - I don't want to do all the backup/install/restore/get-accustomed-to business all over again. But that's neither the only factor nor the strongest one.

The way I instinctively feel that Windows looks good, and the way I feel that it works with any hardware I might plug in, I "feel" certain things about Linux too. I feel that my Linux is rock solid - I feel that it won't crash. I feel that Linux gives me the power to make my computer work for me.

Windows makes me feel that my computer is a friend of mine. Linux makes me feel that I'm the boss commanding my computer to do what I want.


Now to the details:

•  I have SELinux enabled.I have full disk encryption LUKS, as well as an Antivirus suite.

• I really adore ssh, scp, sftp, gzip, split and other wonderful utilities now. They are far better, faster, and natively integrated here in Linux than PuTTY and other clones that I had to use back there in Windows.

• Software installation and upgrades are a breeze. I found almost anything I needed in the GNOME package manager - from Octave (for data analysis) to Calibre (e-book reader), KColorPaint (much better than the Windows Paint) and many more.

• When building from source, it's almost impossible in Windows - I'd need to struggle with Cygwin and stuff like that. It's a trivial affair now in Linux.

• And I've really got used to the little widgets on my desktop panels - GNote, the GNOME Calc, the system monitor and so on.

• IBM software too work well and feel pretty robust in Linux (I have many of them installed to do my job - Rational Software Architect, WebSphere App Server, DB2, Lotus Symphony, Notes, Sametime, and others).

• I never need to worry about stuff like disk de-fragmentation, long file names, or accidentally deleting something in C:\Windows - (only on a handful of times have I had to switch over to root). Backups are easy too. I just tell Deja Dup to backup up my home folder and I can be sure there's nothing else scattered around all over the place.

And to conclude, at least for now..

Do I like Linux? Well, not the way I'd adore a beautiful sky with a bright sun and a rainbow on the other side. But I do like Linux the way I'd like the cockpit of a supersonic aircraft at thousand miles above the ground, with me inside.