Thanks

Glen

v-glferg@microsoft.com

1. It was mentioned in the above comment, the original post is aimed at nontechnical people who will download a lot of software off of random sites. Many Linux distributions have a central package management system that makes it easy to find free trusted programs and a lot harder to mess up your system with.

On number 2. As far as desktops go Linux has a very small market share, but it has a large portion of servers. I also do not believe we can make assumptions about what would happen if Linux had a larger user base, due to its open source nature. For patching package management once again makes it trivial for the average user to update their system to the latest and greatest and close security holes quickly.

This applies to many of the points. As Linux is more commonly used on servers it has less need to support shiny new web cams or the latest technology. If more people used Linux more hardware would be supported either by the users or the manufacturers themselves.

In truth, there are many users who should remain on Windows. Most of the time Windows will ‘just work’.

On the other hand it is simply amazing what has been done with Linux. Just the fact that we are comparing it to an operating system that is backed with billions of dollars is huge. The contributors deserve a lot of credit.

If I sounded too critical of your article I really didn’t mean to be. Actually I take that back: I started writing my response half annoyed by the amount of Windows bashing that seemed to be taking place, but as I cooled down I couldn’t help but admit to myself (and to you and anyone reading) that Linux does have it’s strengths. As I wrote my response I was critical, but I did try to be fair. Linux has a lot of good things going for it, I just don’t think that being “an operating system for nontechnical people” is necessarily one of them. There is a lot of false information and half-truths that get thrown around from both the Microsoft and Linux camps, and I think its a good thing to get a critical dialog like this one going between them. I think it benefits everyone if we simply lay out the facts, weight real strengths and real weaknesses of each OS, and go from there. Arguing from the heart for either side won’t get us anywhere.

You’re right, I did go above the heads of the target audience for your article. I got way too technical, but sometimes you just can’t cut through the misinformation that’s out there without getting your hands a little dirty. And I think that’s the biggest problem with Windows: it’s target audience often doesn’t want to learn, and doesn’t want to get their hands dirty. And that’s how viruses spread

Thanks again for the response, and for the link to my blog. I’m glad to see both our posts resulting in a positive dialog.

Brian

One of the points that was missed by a lot of people is that this article was targeted at users that do not only have little or no knowledge of Linux but also not a lot of technical knowledge in general, so I purposefully made a LOT of simplifications.

The people I wanted to reach trough the article were the one that have a Windows PC with a problem and would like to install Linux alongside Windows in the hope of solving that problem. As I explained in the introduction of the post some of these reasons are not actually good reasons to move to Linux.

For the slowdowns for example, I explain that reinstalling Windows afresh can also solve the problem, so that Linux is certainly not the only solution. For the hardware I do warn the user that they will first need to check if their hardware is compatible and that if not Linux is again not a good solution.

Yes, in some cases staying on Windows is the better choice (something I also explain in the blog introduction). It is not the objective of the blog to be too much pro-Linux, but to help people find the best solution for them. As explained in the conclusion of the article I will also post next week an article on the disadvantages of Linux that raises some goods points against Linux.

In the case of point 2 (less viruses) it is true that there are some Linux viruses and that one of the reasons that there are less viruses is because Linux has a smaller market share, but that was not the point. The real question was: As a non technical user I have a Windows computer that gets constantly infected, would it be less infected if I ran Linux? The answer is yes. This is not a judgment of the operating system value, just the statement that installing Linux can be a solution to this problem.

On the whole I think that the problem with the article is that a lot of people have taken it outside of the context of the blog, which was to try to explain Linux in a very non technical way. In many cases I agree with your points, only I can’t explain the difference in disk fragmentations between NTFS and ext3 to a target audience that do not know (and probably do not want to know) what a filesystem is.