Maybe I should temper that headline a bit by saying Linux isn’t right for most of you. Before those of you who disagree scroll down and kill me in the comments, hear me out.

I’ve played around with Linux off and on for while now. My first foray into the world of Linux was with Gentoo Linux. I’d heard Gentoo was one of the most customizable, streamlined distributions available. I’d also heard it was one of the more difficult versions to get running (Gentoo Linux generally needs to be configured and compiled from the source). Suffice to say, I now recommend you steer clear of Gentoo until you’ve worked with Linux for some time. I fought with it, and fought with it, and fought with it. It took me two weeks to get a basic install running, and even then I couldn’t figure out my wireless card, video card, or X windows. Anything beyond the command line was beyond my reach. After probably three weeks of frustration, I gave it up and wiped the install.

Some time later, I tried Kororaa. Kororaa is based on a live CD. Insert the CD, boot up, and you’re running Linux. Unfortunately installing to the hard drive proved troublesome. Again, I had trouble with my video and wireless cards. I couldn’t for the life of me get them running, even though they worked correctly from the live CD. Burnt out from Gentoo, I threw in the towel.

Months passed, I bought a new laptop, and I thought I’d try again. I played around with an Ubuntu live CD, but finally stumbled into Wubi. Wubi is probably the easiest way to experiment with Linux I’ve ever seen. It uses a Windows-based installer, and instead of partitioning your hard drive (which is normally required if you want to install both Windows and Linux), it just creates a file which Linux treats as a normal hard drive partition.

Now comes the fun part. Sadly, my wireless card still wasn’t functioning properly. Happily, I had learned a fair bit, and was able to get it up and running. I finally had a fully functional Linux install. I started using it whenever I could. I got the Firefox browser tweaked to my preferences, downloaded a bunch of open source games, figured out how to update the system, and so on. Then I tried to play a DVD. Or maybe it was a flash game online. Or possibly I found a cool little .exe I couldn’t live without. Anyway, what I found was that there are certain thing I am accustomed to doing that I couldn’t really do with Linux. So I would boot back into Windows to do what I wanted to do, then back into Linux. And back and forth. And back. And forth. Eventually I found myself using Windows more and more, and Linux less and less.

I found that there were generally ways to make Linux do nearly everything I wanted done, but everything required downloading something, or installing something, or tweaking a configuration file, or stumbling through some command line arcanery. If I really had a problem, there was almost always some forum somewhere where the problem was addressed, but it always took more effort and work. Everything already worked in Windows.

I finally admitted to myself that Linux just wasn’t doing it for me, and tried to analyze why. Here’s what I came up with. Linux works. Linux will do almost anything you could want it to do. Linux has a huge community-based support system. But Linux doesn’t know the details of your particular machine out of the box (figuratively speaking). You’ll have to tweak it and work with it and hack it to get it to work exactly like you want it to.

In all fairness, a fresh Windows install can be the same way if it’s an off-the-shelf flavor of Windows. But the Windows that comes installed on your new computer is already preconfigured by the manufacturer.

And there’s the big difference. HP customized the Windows I’m running now so that it would work perfectly with my hardware configuration. HP did not configure a Linux install to work equally well. I have to do that work.

I think that’s what it comes down to: manufacturer support. Dell is offering computers with Ubuntu installed, and there’s other manufacturers as well. I suspect Dell had made sure the user experience is effortless. They’ve made sure the graphics and video cards are working properly. They’ve done all the fiddly configuring for you. And the Ubuntu machines probably do the job every bit as well as the Windows machines. What’s better, they’ve saved a few buck by not paying for a Windows license. I’m sure they pass some of that savings on to the consumer, and keep some themselves.

In the end, I don’t think a download-and-install Linux distribution is right for the average user, but a manufacturer-supported Linux might be fine. As for me, I’ll stick to Windows (and/or OSX) for now.

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