I am in love with Ubuntu and GNU/Linux. I have been using it for years now and i am far from being fully satisfied with its performance. But at the same time, i am happier than i have been ever before.
Actually last year i bought a new laptop that shipped with Windows 7 Home Basic. I had no plans to use the basic edition. As we all know Microsoft purposefully slows down the Basic and starter editions so that they perform exceptionally slow. Microsoft charges a lot of money for this crappy edition and also if you wish to upgrade to a better edition you need to pay handsomely. So its kind of a trick to rip people off and to force them to buy extra expensive licenses.
So to save money and be able to play games and all i decided to buy the Universally-Rejected Widows 8 using the
windows upgrade offer. It's common knowledge today that windows 8 super awful.
As of today's time I would say Linux distro's are way more advanced than Windows in many ways and is quickly catching up in the rest of the parameters.
Here is one such case that i noticed recently:
Few days back i tried getting my laptop online with my HTC Android mobile. To achieve this i was required to download HTC sync software. Surely i could have used Wi-fi hot-spot, but i like the freedom of choosing between every possible option.
So i tried the same thing in My Ubuntu 12.10. And it worked brilliantly. No extra driver needed. Just i connected my HTC and selected USB tethering and 2 sec later i was online. This is Linux moving forward in terms of driver support.
In 2008-2010 the scenario was reverse of this. We were forced to go to windows for hardware/driver support and in 2012 the situation has flipped. That's how far Ubuntu has come in 4 years. And widows has come from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Which is a steep fall.
Now the way i see it. In four years Ubuntu will be far far advanced in terms of what it will be capable of doing. And i am pretty sure Windows 9 is going to be awesome. But the rate at which Ubuntu and other Linux distro's are evolving It is soon going to become impossible for Microsoft to catch up.
You might disagree with what i just said, but i have solid grounds to support my statement.
You remember Microsoft prior 2000 Launched a super application called Encarta. It invested a lot of money for its development and paid a lot of professionals to write awesome articles for it. I loved this application back then.
This was all propitiatory and controlled by Microsoft so it had a good run in the beginning. And then came the super awesome Wikipedia and BOOM!.
How did it catch up so fast? How could it take over such an awesome application and today in just 10 years time people don't even remember Encarta that awesome app is trash.
Well this happened mainly because Wikipedia is free and open source and people are self motivated to contribute to it. Money can only take you to a certain level but if you want to go further you need passion. And the passion involved in this things development is great. People love it. From students to kids to teachers to professionals. It adds to our life our freedom our choice.
End of the day its things like this that define us humans contributions to the world. It feels great to be a part of a community that you can say is your's. It's not someone else's decisions from inside a board room meeting. It's ours.
This is why Linux is growing both in force and mass and is gaining momentum. You may argue that Linus controls Linux development and Mark control which direction Ubuntu head's. That is true. But there is a major difference, these people take decisions with the community for the community and not for controlling the community.
Here is another reason that favors Ubuntu greatly:
Windows has a major release in about every 4 years. Now every alternate major release has been awesome till date. But all the even releases have sucked greatly. And there is a reason for that. In 4-5 years of time technology advances greatly and Graphics and hardware all grow up in major ways. So a OS has to catch up to those changes.
Same thing happened in between windows xp and Vista. Vista had major graphic changes. In fact the entire graphic system was moved from Pixel to
Vector Graphics.
What this kind of change need is a change in the core infrastructure. This causes the system to become much more bug prone and for a propitiatory software the 4 years development cycle is simply not enough for all the testing that it needs. Hence the system only properly evolves after 8 years. 2 Version releases.
But the same thing is not true for Ubuntu. Ubuntu's release cycle is 2 times a year. Mostly any new version that comes out does not have too much change between 1 version to the next. It does have a lot of bug fixes and major upgrades in drivers though.
I personally have notices that when i installed Ubuntu 12.04 soon after it was released. I notices lots of issues. But as i kept on updating the system (unlike what i do in windows) I notices those issues getting resolved with subsequent updates. Many gesture support that i was expecting it to have, came within weeks.
Also for any major changes Ubuntu makes you can chose to simple reject them. For example i didn't switch to Unity when it came out at first. I continued using Gnome. Even when they removed Gnome Interface in the default installation, i downloaded its package and continued using it. But since 12.04 i found unity to be better suited and growing faster than Gnome so i switched. This freedom is what makes Linux systems so great to use. I chose what i want to run on my system.
These are just a couple of major reasons out of the countless reasons why Linux is catching up so fast in the desktop environment and once
Ubuntu Touch comes out we will have more Linux share in Tablet market then ever before.
Freedom is in the DNA of all living creatures and we are on all days attracted towards it. So we will push for things that add to our freedom.
PS: If you don't believe in the title just look around you and notice one thing: Android (Linux) caught up to I-OS ages ago. And what we are seeing now is a failing I-OS which is far less-featured in comparison to Android.
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Game on.
