Since December, I have used Ubuntu Desktop. Aside from the fact that I have no virus warnings, no malware and no bots downloading themselves, it has been business as usual. I use Open Office and have no problems with reading and writing MS Office documents. My old Windows Me PC would not let me do that with a new version of MS Office, and of course that meant upgrading to XP as a prerequisite before installing Office. Total cost would have been about $300.

My wife has an older HP notebook running Windows XP Media Center. I chuckle as she reboots each time she gets an update or adds and removes programs. I have been running nonstop with only one required restart for a patch to the Linux kernel.

I read all of these horror stories about Vista on the blogs and comments on many sites about the same. I also see many intentionally derogatory messages posted by Windows users on the open source sites. According to them, Linux is for geeks; “normal” people don’t need to constantly tweak settings and such, as Windows is “automated.” This means that all of Windows software installs without much intervention.

In an honest comparison, it is true that Linux would greatly benefit from an Install Shield application that would make software installs and removal ubiquitous.

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