Exorcising the Beast


elflord@panix.com


Replacing Win95: can it be done?

The short answer to this is that I don't advocate deleting Windows unless you wish to make a political statement, or unless your hard drive is on the small side. 1 G is enough to fit a good Windows and a good linux installation. There are some things that windows does quite well. In terms of GUI applications like word-processors, linux is catching up to windows, almost there, but I still say catching up... I'd say that windows has a wider choice of quality commercial packages, though the difference is becoming increaingly marginal. Linux can-not replace windows in the market place- as I said, it's part of the free-ware internet culture, and as such, it will become popular, but not entirely mainstream. But some users will install linux and discover that they just don't use windows any more. My feeling is that it is best to make the switch gradually, start off with the fvwm95 window manager which looks like win95 and you can change it later if you get sick of it. And if you decide one day that windows is useless, just delete it. The main obstacle to doing this is hardware incompatibility, I currently need windows so that I can move my linux documents to windows and print them out in windows. This would be very annoying- if I didn't use the printer as sparingly as I do. Basically, hardware incompatibilities are a problem. There is a comprehensive selection of hardware that runs under linux (for example, HP printers/scanners) , however, there are a lot of hardware vendors that do not support linux.