I started to write a comment, but it grew to the point I decided to just post it here, instead.

1. Because the operating system I use now satisfies me

That is a very good reason, in and of itself, to not switch.  However, on a Windows machine, you had also better be running an anti-virus scanner at a minimum.  Preferably other anti-malware tools, as well.  Probably more of your computing power is being taken up by assorted processes intended to protect you from “nasties” than is being consumed by the processes you are really using.  And that is only because Windows is a malware magnet, by design.  They are aware of many more security holes in their products than they tell you about.  They are perfectly willing to let you/your system be abused, without telling you about it, until they have a patch ready for it.  And, periodically, instead of a free patch, the “fix” is “Give us more money to upgrade your OS.  We fixed the problem there.”

2. Because I do not need know how to ride a car to drive it piece by piece

You don’t need to know more about your computer to use Linux than you do to use Windows.  At least for the basic stuff you mention in your first reason.  Heck, you don’t even need to know how to install it.  You can buy Linux preloaded on a system from Dell, Zareason, System76, and others.  Most peripherals you buy will just plug right in, and work out of the box.  If you own some seriously locked-down peripheral, like an iPod, or worse, a Zune, then, yeah, you will need some help getting it going.  Most Linux users avoid  non-free junk like that.

3. Not to be a freak

Be honest.  How many non-computer geeks talk about their OS, anyway?  And any real geek knows about Linux, even if they don’t like it.  Besides, when all your ‘friends’ are moaning about, “I got hit by virus-X yesterday, and I had to re-install my entire system as a result”, you can just smile and say, “Really?  I haven’t had any problem.”  They might just end up asking you to help them become more secure.

4. Too much, but what about quality?

I haven’t found any application geared for the average home user that is any better quality in Windows than in Linux.  Indeed, the absolute best, bar none, CD/DVD recorder I have ever used is K3B, only available in Linux.  When I used Windows, I paid for and used a number of commercial offerings.  None measured up to what K3B could do for me.

For mail, I prefer web-based mail, so that is the same in all OSes.  But I find KMail works better for me as a local client than Outlook ever did.  My preferred chat, irc, and websurfing apps are all cross-platform, so you might bet a bye on that, except if Open-source didn’t exist, they would never have been written!  For music/video, virtually anything in Linux beats Windows Media Player hands down.

There are, admittedly, some niche markets where a Windows app is better than any competing Linux offering.  For example, for certain esoteric graphic uses, Photoshop is still the king.  Yet many professionals have no trouble working with the Gimp if they don’t need those specific tools.

Most legal and medical software is still written for Windows only.  I don’t know about you, but I still shudder to think that my very LIFE is in the hands of a Windows box.  The other day I was at the dentist, and his system went down.  He was unable to check my X-Rays.  Fortunately, he was just wanting to verify what he was looking at in my mouth, so it wasn’t too serious.  But what happens when the surgeon’s monitor blue-screens in the operating room?

5. The terminal is the antichrist and want to destroy us

So who uses the terminal these days?  Any of the major modern distros these days can do pretty much anything and everything from a point-and-click GUI.  I know I could administer my PCLinuxOS box completely with the GUI tools.  I don’t do that, because I’m a “UNIX neckbeard”, and I find the command line much more useful, informative, and faster.

If you have a problem with your system, and ask for help online, it is not uncommon to be asked to open a terminal and type in some “exotic” strings of characters/commands, and post the resulting output.  Or to enter some particular commands to fix the problem.  This is because the underlying system is well-known, and the folks who know how to diagnose and repair the problems can get a better idea of what is wrong, and what needs to be done from this ‘lower level’.  Besides, it is a lot quicker to say “type in this command, and it will fix your problem,” than it is to say “If you are using toolX, open it, click this button, go to the second tab, enter this string, click that button, etc., or, if you are using toolY, open it, enter this in the first textbox, click the OK button, check the next dialog box to see if…..”

6. Because it running smoothly is an odyssey

Right.  Like booting my laptop up and having everything work fine is an “odyssey”.  The only problem I’ve had is when my built-in Atheros wifi card died (it wouldn’t work in Windows, either), and I tried replacing it with a brand-new USB wifi adapter.  The new adapter had a bleeding-edge chipset in it, that didn’t have a working Linux driver, yet.  I could have futzed with it and made it work, but it was easier to just pick up a slightly older adapter, and have it work out of the box.  I have more problems with my wife’s Win7 netbook.  Now THAT has been an odyssey….

7. Because if it breaks you no one will help

I started with Mandrake/Mandriva.  The community there was always helpful and supportive.  I switched to PCLinuxOS a few years ago.  I have NEVER seen a single person, who politely asked for help, be turned away or ridiculed for their lack of knowledge.  I have heard that there are places on the internet where “newbies” are told to RTFM, but I won’t be a party to such stupidity.  We were all “newbies” once.

8. Because in my work all the world uses Windows

Right.  And I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’m trying to sell.

Taken at face value, that means you work in one of those esoteric fields where everything is currently Windows-only.  And you actually do the very same stuff at home?

More likely, it is akin to my job.  The “Corporate Desktop” is Windows XP.  It’s what the bosses are familiar with.  Yet, most of the work in the company is done on the hundreds (thousands) of Linux boxes.  The bosses are aware of this.  That’s why, when they recently acquired a new company, they agreed that the first order of business was making they newly-acquired windows-only software work in Linux.

9. For an apple rather than a penguin cool

I can accept that Linux lacks glamor.  So what?  Apple appeals to the “cool crowd”.  Again, so what?  That stuff went out with high school.  The people whose opinions I DO care about either embrace Linux, or at least, don’t object to it.

Besides, have you looked at KDE 4.5.2?  Or e17?  Now THAT is ‘cool”.

10. For taking the opposite

Yep.  If you want to “buck the tide”, and stay locked in to a loser, stick with Windows.

First, let me point out to everyone who doesn’t know me that I’m not some wet-behind-the-ears Linux novice.  (If I were, I’d probably like sudo. )  I’ve been administering *nix systems for over 20 years, since before a young Finn named Torvalds even wrote the first line of code that was to become Linux.  I know su, and I know sudo.  They both have their purposes.

Sudo is very good at what it is designed for.  It is intended to give limited root ability to specific users for specific tasks.  On large multi-user systems, this allows a few select individuals to do certain important tasks without giving them the “keys to the kingdom”, i.e., the root password.  It is supposed to allow certain select individuals the ability to run certain specific commands as another user, usually root.

Su, on the other hand, is also very good at what it is designed for.  It is intended to allow any user who knows the password of another user, to become that user.  Whoa!  That’s powerful!  Why would anyone want to allow that?  The obvious answer, of course, is to switch user to root, and perform system admin functions.  And if only sysadmins have the root password, only sysadmins can use su to become root.

I can hear the objections now: “That’s why you use sudo, so nobody can become root and damage your system.”  To answer that, just open a terminal and type “sudo su -”.  You are now the root user, without even having to know the root password!

As if that weren’t enough, the most common implementation of sudo in Linux is to give the first-defined user all sudo-privileges.  In other words, the first user has access to all parts of the system, knowing only their own password.  Just like in Windows, where the first user is automatically the Administrator, and can access the entire system by knowing only their password.  Using sudo-based distros reminds me of Windows Vista, with its annoying UAC popups.  I don’t need to know anything more than it took to log onto the machine.

With su, at least you need to know two passwords to get access to the system.  And only those who need to access the system can do so.  Sure, if it’s really a single-user PC, it seems like it could be extra hassle, but really, how often do you really need to access system-level things?  And by having a separate, strong root password, I don’t worry about others getting in, even if they discover my user password.

First, I must point out that this is beta.  It is only intended for testing, to help iron out bugs before the final release.  It is not intended for general public use.  For that reason, I will not link to any download sites for it.

The beta release has kernel 2.6.32.8, and KDE 4.4.1.  Installation was smooth as always.  It recognized all my hardware (nothing exotic: a simple Compaq CQ50 laptop, 2.16 GHz Intel Celeron 585 processor, 2 G RAM, Atheros wifi, Intel Mobile 4 video chipset), but that was expected, since Linux Mint demonstrated that earlier.

Once installed, it boots very fast.  It makes me want to pull my hair out when I borrow my wife’s Win7 netbook!  There’s already a slew of updates to the beta.  Tex and company have been working hard to fix the problems people are reporting.

Everything I’ve played with so far has worked beautifully.  I’ve switched from the default Folder View to Desktop View, and put a Folder Widget on the desktop.  I’ve also played with the plasma theme, and the window background.  Lots of widgets are available, of course.

Now, I’m just looking forward to the final release.  It’s going to be glorious.

What made ME happy was when she said I could have her old laptop once I backed up all her documents, music, etc. that she had on it.  Okay, it’s not a state-of-the-art wonder.  It’s a nice, usable Compaq, with a 2.16GHz Celeron processor, and Intel video card, 2G RAM, and a 160G hard drive.  When she bought it a few years ago, it came with Windows Vista Basic.  Between that, and the anti-spyware, anti-virus, and other junk running in the background, it ran like a dog.  She would complain about how slow it was to start up – to get to a *usable* state, and how slow programs would run on it.

She knew what I was going to do with it.  After all, both desktop systems in the house are running up-to-date PCLinuxOS 2009.  She found she prefers a laptop system so she doesn’t have to go down to the computer room to get online; she can just sit down, put her feet up where ever she wants, and connect.  She also knew I would like a laptop, too, if only so I could be in the same room with her (or at least within earshot ).

To make a long story short, I copied all her files to a 250G external hard drive.  She copied her most-commonly used files to her netbook, and everything else is just a usb connection away.  She’s happy as a clam.  Or at least, as happy as a clam who is stuck with Win7 Starter can be!

But now I was faced with a decision.  I wanted to put KDE4 on the laptop.  I knew PCLinuxOS would run, because I’d used the live-CD occasionally over the last few months.  But that would mean installing the 2009.2 iso, then going through hours of updates and changes just to get KDE4 up and running.  I really wanted to put the 2010 iso on, but it hasn’t been released to the public, yet.  So I started checking around.  OpenSuse?  Nah, that one always felt bloated and slow to me.  Kubuntu?  Definitely not.  In my opinion, one of the worst implementation of KDE4 I’ve ever seen.  My experiment with it last year left me very disillusioned.  Fedora? No, too “cutting edge”.  I want a system that “just works”.

Then, Linux Mint caught my eye.  Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition, to be precise.  Just released, with a 2.6.31 kernel, and KDE 4.3.4.  I downloaded the iso, and gave it a spin.  It recognized all my hardware, including the Atheros wifi card.  A very nice implementation of KDE 4.3.4.  I played with it for a couple of hours, and decided to take the plunge.

Installation was as smooth and easy as it should be.  Select the entire windows partition, wipe it clean, and divide it up for Linux.  Answer a few simple questions, and very shortly thereafter, it was telling me to remove the DVD and reboot.  I spent a little time putting up the plasma widgets I like, and in little over half an hour I had my desktop installed and looking like I wanted.  Mint KDE is a very usable system, easy to use (if you like KDE4, like I do), and beautiful to look at.  I turned on a bunch of eye candy I don’t usually, just because I could, and the system hardly noticed.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, which means there are things I don’t like about it.  Chief among these is the use of sudo.  Using sudo on a personal computer is an abomination, in my mind.  But that’s a subject of another post.  Still, I plan to only use this for a relatively short time, until PCLinuxOS 2010 is released, so I can live with the minor irritations.

kernel 2.6.32.4, udev, hal, initscripts, plymouth bootsplash, speedboot, xorg, compiz 3D, nvidia/fglrx drivers, ext 4 default file system, KDE 4.4.

Because of the complexity and and heavy user intervention necessary to do a straight upgrade, this release will require a clean install, like 2007 did three years ago.  There will be no ‘Big Update’.

Since KDE 4.4 is scheduled to be released the week of 8 February, that means we could see PCLOS 2010 by the end of the month!  Of course, the official line is always “it will be ready when it’s ready”, so if they run into some significant show-stoppers, it could be delayed.  But Tex and the Gang have been running with the new stuff for several weeks, now, so I’m crossing my fingers that the showstoppers have already been scrubbed out.

UPDATE (4 March 2010): Tex indicated on the forums that a public release might be seen by this weekend!

That sums it all up in a single statement.  Need I say anything more?

Back in November, Cory Doctorow (you don’t know Cory Doctorow? For shame) delivered a speech to librarians, authors, publishers, educators, and students as part of Canada’s National Reading Summit.The text of the speech has been reprinted by The Varsity, and can be found in a two part article here.

If you care about where copyright law is headed, I urge you to read this article.

My review is here.

“Checking C:\WINNT\System\….”

The files were whizzing by so fast I couldn’t follow them.  After a minute, it gave me the bad news:  I had 19 viruses infecting my file system and over a hundred malicious entries in my Registry!  What to do? What to do !?

Wait!  I have no Registry.  I have no “C:” drive.  I’m running Linux, KDE4 desktop, with Ozone windows decorations.  If it looks like a Vista window, it can’t possibly be really on my system.  I was actually chuckling from the moment it popped up on my screen.  When it finished, and told me to click ->Here<- to download an updated “anti-virus” product, I just clicked the little X in the corner.  Bye-bye little malware.  I hope you had fun trying to infect a totally alien system!

To be fair, Ubuntu and its brethren aren’t the only distros that I see with these articles, but they probably have 80 – 90 percent of them.  The reason, I’m sure, is that Ubuntu is the most popular distro among Windows-refugees, fueled in large part by the perception they have that Linux = Ubuntu.  Kind of a self-perpetuating cycle.

But, back to the point at hand.  Why do users need all the “How To Install…” articles?  Do they simply not comprehend how package managers work?  Are the articles simply catering to the common Windows perception that software must be obtained from random places on the internet, and installed separately?  Do major distro developers not know how to package updated versions for their current users?  Is the “fixed-point release” methodology of major distros to blame?

Almost none of the articles are simple “Open Synaptic, find the package, select for installing, and click apply”.  Sometimes they do point to a specific “ppa” repository, but it’s still followed up by a lot of command-line configuring to get it right.  Usually, it’s “go to this website and grab the tarball….”  I could understand if these were obscure, niche programs, but they’re almost invariably popular applications that I am sure exist in the primary repositories.

I know Windows users are used to installing software from random locations on the web.  I used to do it, too.  Maybe this just scratches that itch, to go searching the web for the software to install.  Maybe it makes them feel better about themselves, because they can do this “difficult Linux thing”.  You know, “Linux is different from Windows.  It must be hard.  See, look at how much work it takes to get a fully functional system.”

The distros themselves bear some of the responsibility, to be sure.  With fixed-point releases, new versions of software tend to go into the testing area for the next release point, just a few months away.  They rarely seem to get backported to older releases that people are still running (except maybe to Long-Term Support releases).  When people ask for newer versions of their software, they are told to simply upgrade their systems.  Never mind that release “Y” broke some functionality from release “X” that the user needs, and is why they never upgraded in the first place.

I’ll just stick with a rolling-release distro.  As new versions of applications are made, they get packaged and tested against the current system, and are made available for all users to install.  My nearly three-year-old install of PCLinuxOS2007, through the “magic” of periodic updates, is running exactly the same software as does a system that just had a 2009.2 install.

Maybe I’m just getting to old to understand.