What Os to Choose

What Os to Choose

Everyday another person gets a new computer. It could be an HP or a Gateway or a Sony or a Dell but what they all have in common is one thing, the operating system. Of course I’m talking about Microsoft Windows. Who hasn’t heard of this great OS, specially the new one that came out a couple of months ago, Windows Vista? But just how great can this OS be? Should we just trust our new computers on a system which has just recently been published for the world?

Most people might think that in the great world or computers their only true choice is either a Mac or a PC. Chances are that they’ll be a part of the PC users and will always go for a Windows computer. With about 90% of the world’s population using windows you have to wonder that if they really knew what Microsoft products were all about, they would think twice before getting one.

Maybe not a lot of people know this but there have been over 100 bugs identified in the Windows Vista operating system since its release on January 30, 2007. Of course this is not a new thing for people who have been using Windows OS for a while. Most expert computer user knows that when the first operating system designed by Microsoft came out it was completely full of bugs. Why? Well the story is pretty simple, and it goes back to the 80’s with a young man called Bill Gates.

Bill Gates had made a deal with Apple where his company, Microsoft, would create programs for Apple's new OS. However when Bill Gates got his hand on their operating system he reversed engineered it (which basically means opening it up and seeing what’s inside), named it Windows, and released it to the public before Apple even found out. This was how it all started and even though he released it first and his product was completely full of bugs, he was the one considered a genius and, thanks to Apple, he is now a multimillionaire.

Even though after Apple realized what had happened, suing them proved to be pretty useless, because when you reverse engineer electronics the source code is not exactly the same as the original one which was copyrighted, so this was perfectly legal. So by this we know that Apple always had the better hand from the start. But there was something even better out there which I'm sure most people haven’t even heard of. I’m talking about Linux.

Linux is a Unix-based operating system developed right here in Berkeley, CA. It was first created in 1987 but was released to the public in 1991. Not only is this operating system preferred by most expert computer users but it also beats Windows operating systems in everyway. There is of course one problem. Since this OS is open source, meaning that you could get it for free and modify it to your specifications, it doesn’t have a troubleshooting operator service where we can call if the system crashes.

Most people could argue that Linux is not only good because its free, but being open source makes it better to work with because instead of people hired to write the code for it, anyone can rewrite the code and make it better. So instead of having one thousand programmers fixing just one bug on windows you would have ten times more programmers making Linux better than it already is.

It is still implied in everything about Linux that if you compare the latest Windows operating system to the first Linux OS, Linux would easily be considered better than Windows. The only real problem with Linux is that since not a lot of people use it, companies don’t waste time on making more and more programs for this. Instead they just let whoever wants to write a program do it and publish it online with no financial profit whatsoever.

Another great thing about Linux is that it’s free. You can download it anywhere you want and install it on your computer. You could customize it and change it and share it. Windows on the other hand not only costs an obscene amount of money, but you are pretty much stuck with whatever they thought would look best and the most customization you could do in Windows would probably be to change the desktop wallpaper and the screensaver.

Although Windows does have quite some disadvantages, there are also the good things that come with it. I'm not really talking about the OS itself, but the programs you could get for it. Pretty much every game, every program and every piece of hardware is compatible with windows so in that case you can get whatever you want and would all