I just upgraded from SuSE 10.0 to 10.2. It’s quite a big difference despite the small increment in version number. Linux is getting more user-friendly by the day, and in my opinion, is a wonderful alternative to Micro$ Windoze.

Contrary to popular beliefs, there are lots of stable alternatives to popular Windoze applications on the Linux platform. For example, OpenOffice offers a full suite of office productivity applications (exactly the same stuff that you can find in MS Office). You can even work with MS Office file formats from OpenOffice. For image editing, there is GIMP – a lightweight yet powerful app that is comparable to Adobe Photoshop. For instant messaging, there are half a dozen apps out there that can combine your MSN, AOL, Yahoo, etc IM accounts into one single window.
The best part of Linux is – everything’s free. Why buy MS Office for a few hundred bucks when you can get OpenOffice for free? Why pay thousands of dollars for a web publishing suite when you can get them all on Linux for nothing? And it’s all perfectly legal, as Linux is an open-source platform. Furthermore, you get only 1 CD worth of crap for Windoze while for any Linux distributions out there you can easily get more than 5 or 6 CDs worth of goodness.
More reasons to give up on Micro$ and switch to Linux:

1. Better security – being open source, this means that any potential security lapses in the applications can be discovered and rectified faster. Compare this to Windoze XP that’s been around for years and still have ongoing security concerns.
2. Better flexibility – with Linux, you can control how you want your operating system to behave (and not the other way round). The possibilites are limitless, especially if you can do your own programming. With Windoze, you pay $$$ for an OS that limits what you can do.
3. No nag screens – One thing I hate about software on Micro$ platform – nag screens. Install any free/trial/shareware applications and you are bound to get nag screens asking you to register/purchase/click something. And guess what. The geniuses at Micro$ now treats all of us as potential criminals – If you do not register your Windoze within XX days of purchase, you will not get software updates… even though you’ve already paid them the $$$. On top of that they’ll serve you with free nag screens and friendly messages on how software piracy is a crime.
4. Lots of software updates – SuSE 10.2 has a ZEN updater program that will check for software updates for all the applications currently installed on your system daily. I love the idea of having a system with software that’s up to date with the latest available software. Compare this to the long turnaround time for application updates on Micro$ platform.
5. Practically no viruses – Since Linux is a lot less prevalent, virus creators don’t usually want to bother creating viruses for Linux. Why bother attacking less than 5% of the population? Micro$ is the perfect target with over 95％ of computer users on it.
6. Better performance – Your Windoze OS comes with loads of things that you probably never use/want (like your nag screens) – and they all take up space and memory usage. And you can’t remove them cos they don’t give you a choice to. With Linux you choose what you want and the application footprints (the amount of memory space required) is usually not as high.

With all these reasons and many more, it wasn’t hard to make the decision to switch.

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