So your advice is to throw away $200 to $300 - American? Plus many, if
not all of the special programs he has accumulated over the years.
Plus the fact that he will have to "transition" to Ubuntu (how long
have you been doing that now? By your own statements a couple of
months). That's real productive!
I too have been pondering the thoughts of some Linux distribution.
And that is the question...what about my software. And the I think about
what I do with my PC. Do I do a lot of things that I can't find a Linux
equivalent of. For the past year, not really.
The most Windows specific thing I do is some hobbyist programming stuff.
Other than that, maybe a sprinkle of work at home, which would most
likely be schematic capture or PCB design, of which, the s/w I use I know
does not come in a *nix flavor.
Either of those, would run adequately in a VM. Parallels seems to be
becoming popular for the Linux crowd. So if the 2 to $300's 'thrown
away' for was only $50 for Parallels instead and your existing XP
license, assuming it's retail, that's not a bad deal.
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/
To further that, there is the Wine project, a Windows compatible API for
Linux that allows you to run many Windows applications natively.
http://www.winehq.org
Wine can also use the Windows DLL's when available. Of course, every
Windows program will not work, probably the older the app the better. So
many of those apps that were acquired 'over the years' would work.....an
assumption.
There's also WinLIb, which can take Windows source code and compile it
for Linux. My guess is it would be used mainly for open-source Windows
apps. Again, not fool proof.
But I agree, for the average user, Linux is not the answer, right now,
and maybe not for years to come, or ever, but it is a viable alternative
for some people.
Unfortunately, *usually* not for the average user that comes here looking
for help.
As a tech person myself, it seems interesting, and doable. I just haven't
taken the plunge yet. When I finally do, I'm HOPING it can be the whole
deal or nothing. What's the sense of HAVING to dual-boot Linux and
Windows.
And while it's true that MS dominates the OS market, we all know that was
because of the early OEM deals that force Windows upon everyone, not
necessarily that it is the best.
Now what if big OEM deals were cut with IBM instead of MS ? We could have
all been here slamming IBM instead of MS. Things may have turned out
totally different. The big difference there was IBM had a stake in the
hardware side too, not just the s/w side. If OS2 was THE desktop OS now,
it might have been more like apple, and be much more of a closed
architecture (If it wasn't to late after the IBM clone deals made back in
the day.)
OS2 Warp was in many ways better than Windows95, but Windows won out.
(And yes I know OS2 Warp originally came from a MS/IBM joint venture that
went sour.) It just didn't take off.
VHS vs BetaMax, as we all know the only reason VHS won was because you
had twice the recording time on a standard tape. BetaMax was superior in
picture quality over VHS.
