Over the past few months quite a my friends and associates have been
complaining about the latest windows operating system, Windows Vista.
The complaints range from the fact that they perceive windows vista to be
slow, or certain hardware devices or programs have stopped working since
installing Vista. Some problems have been so hard to overcome some of my
associates have “downgraded†to Windows XP.
People often resent the fact they eventually have to migrate to the newest
Windows operating system if the current one meets their needs. Microsoft
provides a limited life cycle for windows versions. It will stop supporting
versions of Windows as technology evolves and as hardware performance and
capacity increases. They do quite a good job in maintaining all the
different applications and operating systems; however they have to draw the
line at some point. Therefore Windows versions will eventually become
obsolete. To have your computer supported, you should upgrade to a current
supported operating system.
With this in mind, the point of this article is to highlight the fact that
people do have viable alternatives to Windows. As windows has evolved, so
have the alternatives.
The two most popular alternatives to windows are OSX running on Macintosh
computers & Linux. Linux has the advantage that it runs on a wider range of
computers. Linux has improved vastly over the past few years. Linux is a
operating system which has its roots in an operating system called UNIX. It
was mostly used on servers rather than on desktops computers. Over the past
few year’s companies have invested large sums of money into making Linux
function within a desktop environment. Mark Shuttleworth a South African
billionaire who made his fortune because of technology he created using
Linux, has invested large sums of money into Ubuntu Linux. This investment
has created a very stable desktop environment.
So rather than feel forced into a particular direction, lift your head up
and look around. There are alternatives. Examine how you use your computer
and what is important to you, and look around; you will be surprised at
what you may find.