Nervious wannabe new user asks for advice.

[Scot L. Harris]

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 15:20, jbest at insightbb.com wrote:

> 
> I have had good success maintaining my windows installation in tact and using a cd to 
> boot to linux if required.  I have a full separate HD with the linux installation so
> there is minimal impact on any windows operation on the machine.   I can simply switch
> between the 2 operating systems without much hassle and no changes to my boot loader, etc
> 
> I do see benefit for those interested to do the complete switch to linux, but in my case
> I seem to have found (Gulp) that windows provides better support for the functions I use
> with less effort.   Not saying that linux can't do what I want it to, it's just I do not
> want to spend the time fighting with it (or learning how) ....

For some this may work just fine.  However I have seen thousands
(literally) of messages where people have problems with dual booting for
reason or another.  

I also feel (my opinion only) that by not jumping in completely users
get a sense that linux just can't do certain things.  And as such they
end up spending most of their time in windows because they have not
searched out an equivalent application or just moved their work files
over to the linux partition.  Also this means that the user ends up
spending additional time trying to maintain both OSes (if they even do
that much in Linux).  

In a dual boot scenario what incentive does the user have to actually
move real work over the linux side?  "I need to edit that document so
lets boot windows and start word", "I need to create a logo so lets boot
windows and start MS Paint" instead of using applications like
Openoffice or Abiword to do the document (and save it in DOC format if
needed) or starting up gimp to do the logo work.  Users in my experience
are fairly lazy and don't really want to learn anything new.  

As such I always wonder why people setup systems to dual boot.  It eats
up disk space and one or the other OS will not be used very much.  

Now don't get me wrong, I am not pushing linux just to be using linux. 
Windows has a place too.  (no suggestions please!)  It can be the right
solution in some cases.  But if a user keeps booting into Windows to do
certain things then it will become easier for them to just stay in
Windows all the time.  I realize windows users are used to booting their
systems several times a day ;) but this just increase down time for them
when they want to do something in linux.  

I feel the whole idea of having a computer is to get some task or work
done, not spend time futzing with it and rebooting every hour or two. 
Getting something productive done should be the goal. 

So how much time do you spend in windows and how much in linux?  What
apps do you use in Linux that you don't have in Windows?  


-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

I don't want to bore you, but there's nobody else around for me to bore.