Writing for ZDNet’s AnchorDesk , Executive Editor David Coursey acknowledges that he’s grown to like Linux, not love it in a follow-up to his first “Life with Linux” column.
Essentially Coursey — a long time Windows user — is repeating an experiment he conducted earlier this year with an iMac. But instead of the Mac, he’s spending time with a Wintel-compatible PC running Red Hat Linux 7.3 Personal Edition. Much of Coursey’s article is focused on the intricacies of working with KDE, a desktop environment available for Linux systems.
While his experience with Linux has been stable thus far, Coursey noted that “Linux is as easy to use as any other mainstream operating system. But after that point is passed, the water gets very deep, very quickly.”
Nothing he’s experienced thus far with Red Hat, though, has thrown Coursey for more of a loop than he experienced with Microsoft’s Windows Me operating system a couple of years ago, which he calls “Spawn of the Devil.” After several paragraphs of waxing optimistically about what he plans to do with Linux once he finds the time to understand the “geeky” operating system better — Coursey confesses, “I must say that, so far, if all I wanted was a Unix (or Unix-ish) OS I could actually use, I’d choose Mac OS X.”
“If I were rating operating systems, Mac OS X would win on ease of use, but Windows XP would win overall usability (based solely on greater application support),” said Coursey. “Compared to either of these, and because OS X offers the same Unix benefits as Linux, I’d find desktop Linux hard to recommend except in very special circumstances.”