Lunch at the Labs

Windows versus Linux Desktop Reviews.

The first visual editor I used was vi in the late 1970's. (I even ported it to AT&T's 3B20 computer in the early 80's when AT&T was trying to get into the computer business and I was working in Unix Development and the only editor available was ed.) Several years later I learned emacs and became fairly proficient using it, even writing my own elisp macros. In terms of capabilities emacs appeared to me to be the better editor, but it was always my "second language" and I always thought more clearly using vi commands. (Now vi clones like vim have closed the feature gap, but that's beside the point.)

I'm reminded of this whenever I read a review by a Windows user comparing a Linux desktop distribution to Windows. They usually mention things like "the fonts are ugly" or "it did not display my word document as Word does on Windows". However they never mention things that are better on Linux or things that do not even exist under Windows. The problem is their first language is Windows and they are not even aware of things available in Linux that don't have counterparts under Windows.

For example, Microsoft's support for Postscript is notoriously bad (Adobe is a competitor) but you never hear Windows users complain about it because they are totally unaware of its existence, much less its advantages. Similarly for writing some things (usually small) a WYSIWYG word processor is just fine, but for others (usually large documents) a formatting language like LaTex is preferable. Why do you never hear complaints about not being able to read or write LaTex documents under Windows? (I know you can install LaTex under windows but it's not there by default and thus generally not available.) And of course there's the command line versus menus. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but if you've never used a command line interface or written a shell script you don't even know what you are missing.

I think when a Windows user tries a Linux desktop distribution that is trying to emulate Windows, it's a bit like me using vi mode in emacs to emulate vi. It's like being in a foreign land where you are struggling with the native language and you say my native language is better.

Posted by mjm at July 22, 2002 01:53 PM