The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
MS will always exist, because it is perceived as "the standard" (and really, it is). Those of us old enough be be computing pre-Windows are astonished to see the price of hardware to have fallen this much, and the cost of an operating system to have risen this much. While there have been big peaks and valleys in the quality of Windows, overall the world is paying to beta test the latest version. After they get a service pack or two under it's belt, Windows is usually much more usable.
MS will always exist in the business world, because it has been successful in convincing the world that 'business needs MS'. It gets glossed over that they are convicted monopolists, and openly try to crush competition. Despite the ads, MS neither innovates nor invents very much at all. What they are good at, is being able to afford to throw billions of dollars at a product, and hire some of the best minds in the world to give it a fairly uniform appearance.
Linus Torvalds in retrospect was very wise in making Linux open source. It cannot be owned by anyone, so it is immune to MS' big tactic of buying competitors and absorbing or crushing them. MS now can only
try to discredit Linux.
Lest this lean too far towards an anti-MS rant, they have done wonderful things for computing in general. The best thing, was to be the biggest force in standardized X86 Intel hardware. Windows was instrumental in getting hardware standardized (much to the joy of Intel, much to the chagrin of all others), and only then did hardware become cheap. Really cheap. Those of you that started computing on VIC-20s, or TI-99 or TRS-80 remember the time when every single part of a computer was unique to it. A floppy drive could cost over a hundred dollars, a megabyte of ram could cost as much as a new car. Hard drives were rare at the hobbyist level, because few could afford the USD $5,000 that a 20 MEGABYTE hard drive cost.
Cheap hardware is what has made the internet pervasive, and I am very sure that hundreds of years in the future, the internet will be counted right up there with movable type and the telephone. I am an extremist, and personally think it's up there with the invention of the wheel. I will always salute Bill Gates for his drive and business acumen and being a big part of making computing and the internet much more available to the world. I will always curse Bill Gates for limiting the spread of innovation, and making business decisions over technical decisions. I'm more of a techie than a business guy, so that's easy for me to say.
</rant off>
It boils down to what you want to do (good points, Modly). If you want enterprise level computing, get good hardware and use
Centos. If you want rock-solid servers, use
Debian Stable. If you want to watch movies, and use Windows Multimedia, use
Linux Mint. If you want latest security tools,
Backtrack is hard to beat right now. If you want latest bleeding edge apps and long-term reliablity,
Sidux is great.
Ubuntu offers great hardware detection, and a very active support community. If you are interested in professional recording and editing,
64 Studio is a Debian variant, with all the hard to install stuff already done for you.
Linux wlll always remain fragmented compared to Windows, because you can find so many more specialized distros. Pick one and dive in!
For anyone who is interested, with the help that Modly gave me, and a little experimenting I have written tutorial on how to set up a CF28 touchscreen on PCLinuxOS.
I Imagine that the principles are the same no matter which Linux you use, the only thing that may be different is the location where you have to put the driver files.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
