RE: Why?!

[(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>]

On 20-Dec-98 Charles Collicutt wrote:
> Hi,
>    Before I start I'd like to make clear that this is *not* a flame or
> a troll, I genuinely want to know the answer to my question as I would
> quite like to continue using linux.
>    Could someone tell me why I'm using linux not Windows 95?
[snip]
> Please help, I really don't want to give up something that is
> apparently so good - but I can't see why it is good for a home user...

Charles -- You make a lot of points which all carry weight. As to your
question "Could someone tell me why I'm using linux not Windows 95?",
I think you have to answer that yourself. You seem, rather, to be looking
for reasons why you _should_ use Linux, and that doesn't have a straight
answer.

"I can't see why it is good for a home user", you say; but it depends
on what you mean by "home user", on what you want to use it for, and also
on taste and principle to some extent. I can only offer you my local
scene, which may or may not have anything to do with yours; maybe you can
tell me whether you think I should be using Win-95/NT instead (but, if you
think I should, then please also discuss comparative costing including
phone bills!).

I'm a mathematician/statistician and also do translations. My wife does
Turkic studies/Turkology/Central Asia. Of four kids, one has graduated
in French, Linguistics etc but is also developing HTML/Webpage skills
with career intentions; one has started an IT course at University;
a third, 15, is working up to exams and is also deeply into graphic
design and music; the fourth isn't into computing much as yet. We're all
heavy Internet users.

At home there are 2 "bolted-down" desktops and a couple of mobile laptops.
There is an ethernet cable from top to bottom of the house.

Between us we make a massive variety of demands on software, for
numerical, scientific, graphing. database, computer programming.
report-writing, article-writing, typography, foreign characters,
bibliographic, web-searching, artistic graphics, image manipulation,
web-creation, music-printing, etc. Some of this software is on one of the
desktops, some on the other.

Whoever is on any of the machines (including the laptops anywhere in the
house) can access any software on any of the others using X, and if any
of us wants to discuss with any of the others it's easy to open a "talk"
window. Or if, for instance, #2 wants to "share" a programming assignment
then we start up "xmx" which creates a mirror-copy of an X-session in
each machine into which both users can input as if they were sharing the
same keyboard, mouse and monitor and each sees exactly the same display:
ideal for teaching! If my wife gets an email with a word-6 attachment
she can telnet to my machine and open up Word-6 in WABI or (as of 2 days
ago) WordPerfect-8 for Linux (which now copes with Office97 documents).
Any of us can cross-mount (NFS) directories from another machine for
direct access by local software, or cross-mount a local directory onto a
remote machine for direct access by remote software (which of course is
being run in a telnet session from the local machine).

Each machine can (and typically does) have dozens of user tasks going at
the same time. Linux is capable of handling all this without blinking.
We have not had a machine crash right out for months, and we leave the
two desktops running permanently. Even if an application crashes, the
operating system almost always cleans it up and keeps going; on the rare
occasion that input freezes on one machine it is usually possible to
telnet in from one of the others and unblock it. Almost the only times we
have lost work have been hardware failures.

If you reckon Win-95 can keep up with all that, please let us know.
Or even Win-NT, come to that.

As to cost: nearly all the software is of the free sort: "octave" instead
of MatLab, "R" instead of S-Plus; GIMP instead of Photoshop, ImageMagick,
XV, POVray; groff and TeX for technical documents, gnuplot & plotmtv
etc for graphing, netscape, XFMail, ... all excellent stuff. And of
course Linux itself.

Dosemu allows the old DOS software we still use heavily (WordPerfect-5.1,
dBASE, some statistical software) to be run in a Linux session.

Much of it is low cost: WABI (20 quid), Mathematica (University site
licence deal), MUP for music (shareware, $25), ...

Some of it is commercial but "free for personal use".

The most expensive thing was the copy of MS-Office to use with WABI
(about 300 quid). Other relatively cheap commercial software includes
Wordperfect-6 (about 30 quid) and some $50 for the full version of WP8
when it comes out (meanwhile the somewhat reduced version cost $5 in
phone-bill and will work forever).

The hardware is all old and trailing-edge: top-of-the-range is a
Pentium-133. Most stuff zips along quite fast on Linux, though
(and I think the Win-3.1 stuff actually runs faster on WABI than
it would on DOS).

I wonder it would cost to set up the equivalent of what we use with
Win-95 and the commercial equivalents of the software? And would it work
equally as well?

As to why I use Linux myself: as an old UNIX user I was waiting for an
affordable UNIX for the PC. Linux came on the scene and I thought it would
do the job. I (we) have been using it for 5-6 years now. Linux has always
done the "UNIX" job very well. The difficulty in the early days was
finding the variety of applications software we needed, and it was an
act of faith that one day it would all become available and Linux would
come of age as an OS For The User. I think that day is dawning now.

Meanwhile, between putting the UNIX tools together to accomplish tasks,
and running the DOS software under Dosemu then later running Win-3.1
software under WABI, we have managed pretty well.

(I'd like to add that when I first tried Windows I was so revolted by
the tacky interface and the bland "kiss it better but don't solve the
problem" MS-Help, that I stuck to DOS as much as possible; even then
I made up my mind to find something different, without quite knowing what
I was looking for).

Anyway, that's my story: one family's Home Use of Linux. I reckon it
works pretty well and I'd need a lot of persuading that it would be worth
shelling out the many hundreds of pounds it would cost to do it the other
way. Or try to do it ...

Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that there is one other desktop in the
house. It runs Windows-98, and it is heavily (almost exclusively) used ...
... for games.

I hope this throws some light.
Best wishes,
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Date: 21-Dec-98                                       Time: 00:08:14
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