woooah there, let me finish 
I bought myself a new laptop the other day, a dell studio 1737, rather nice laptop, it comes with Vista Home Premium already installed. I thought i’d give it a whirl and to be honest, i quite like it, the interface is slick, and it’s rather nippy Great, actually no, here’s where things get messy.
With all the crap that dell install as part of the setup build it took me about an hour to uninstall it, i mean who wants a 30 trial version of mcaffee? A trial version? *sigh*
I then thought about all the other applications i’d like to have on it and it hit me, if i wanted to do this legally which i would anyway it could potentially cost me a fortune, microsoft office here yes i know about openoffice photoshop there etc etc, it struck me why? yes why? why would people purchase a laptop with Vista on in and then fork out hundreds of quids on extra software? I suspect because it’s easy and people don’t want to change or more likely they have never heard of any alternatives….well here’s one UBUNTU With the latest UBUNTU live cd you don’t even have to remove Windows, you can either boot off the CD and run it as a live cd, or even better, install it within Windows using it’s own installer WUBI, as it happens i’m using the WUBI install of UBUNTU to type this blog entry. FAB, hay tell you what, are you a windows user? Do you want to try it out? Then as i’m feeling nice drop me a line and i’ll make you a copy of the CD free, that’s right no charge. I will say i’m only going to do 2 or 3 a month so bear that in mind. IF any of the Ubuntu-UK are reading this and fancy adding it to the IDEAS POOL then feel free but mention my name [Paul Mellors (MooDoo)
The Fedora project has a system like this it’s called the Free Media Project, it’s a way of any one requesting a cd, i know there is the the same for Ubuntu called shipit, but what a great way to put something back into the community which UBUNTU is all about…..peace out
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Well I’m not ‘anti’ Linux. As a platform though it just doesn’t have the application support required for the desktop.
Being able the switch to Linux whilst you would’ve been using Photoshop in Windows suggests you didn’t need Photoshop in the first place. I’ve yet to find anything close to the Photoshop/Lightroom combo I use (The nearest equivalent apps being PSP and Aperture – Ironic they run on different platforms eh?).
Don’t forget the costs to business in using free applications as well. Costs? Yes, cost of downtime finding solutions when things go wrong and the cost of training and learning different applications.
I for one will be sticking with Windows with an ever watchful eye on OSX. Linux? Well until Adobe decide it is worth supporting or somebody knocks them off the top spot for the applications I use (mainly Photoshop/Lightroom/Dreamweaver/Flash) then it doesn’t even get a glance