OS Wars and Plugin Woes

Personally, I'm a fan of Linux/Unix. I have to use Windows at work, because that's what they give me. Otherwise, I'd be using Linux as most anything I do on the job I can do just as well with Linux.

I do use Linux at home, but even there I am still sometimes forced to use Windows even though it is more vulnerable to virus attack and it boots slower (at least on my computers). The latter is in part because of all the extra anti-virus and anti-spamware software I have to run under Windows. I have found that because I have multiple people using my computers and home, including for game use, I get a lot of malware. I have to have multiple scanners installed and occasionally do a registry clean in order to keep them running fairly well.

One reason I am forced to retain Windows at home is because the majority of PC games work only in Windows. There is other software that also only works in Windows, but for the most part it can be avoided by using open source alternatives. Games are different. Every game is unique, and most game developers don't develop for Linux.

Another reason I have recently been forced to run Windows is that I couldn't figure out how to get HDMI output working under Linux. This could be my own ignorance and deserves more research as I see other people on the internet who claim to have gotten this to work just fine.

However, increasingly the reason I am forced into using Windows is because of browser plugins. There are two important browser plugins that are not available under Linux. One is Shockwave and the other is Microsoft's Silverlight.

Personally, I could live without Shockwave, but my kids play games that use it. However, I recently became a Netflix user, and I've found that their "Watch Now" feature requires a browser with the Silverlight plugin.

In addition, I have found that the Linux version of Flash seems to be slower than the Windows version. So, I can watch Hulu videos under Linux, but the quality of the experience suffers.

Some day I may switch to Macintosh. With Apple's computers you get a Unix-like OS, better support from software developers and hardware vendors, and it's not a difficult sell to all the iPod fans who are already familiar with Apple. Of course, the downside to the Mac has always been that it's more expensive.

Linux, by contrast, is free and runs well even on older machines. I recently installed it on an old machine that had been gathering dust. I plan to use this as an experimental web server running Tomcat. I used Xubuntu Linux, and was able to easily install Tomcat. It seems to work fine.

Games and Netflix are certainly not important to everybody. If you want to get up and running on the internet just to stay connected with your friends and surf the web on a limited budget, an older machine running Linux will work quite nicely. I recommend some flavor of Ubuntu Linux for all Linux installs (I have tried several Linux distros and find Ubuntu to be the easiest to install and maintain). Personally, I like Kubuntu (which runs the KDE desktop, Linux Torvald's favorite desktop) for newer machines and Xubuntu (which runs the XFCE desktop) for older machines with less memory.