Windows 7 vs Linux – Two Perspectives

Considering Window 7 is still in Beta and Ubuntu (my Linux Distro of Choice) is an ever evolving and improving system, I find it amusing that so many people are making so many emphatic statements and predictions about the future of the Desktop OS world.

A couple days ago this came out over at TheInquirer.net:

Windows 7 is enough to kill Linux on the desktop

FOR THE PAST three years I have been a Linux fan-boy using Ubuntu most of the time and Windows XP when I needed to play games or run CS desktop lay out stuff.

In a bid to focus my bile on something other than Apple for a bit I decided to play with the new Windows 7 beta. I was disappointed. It was pretty good and, if I am right, could result in the move away from Voleware to Linux and OSX being stopped in in its tracks….

And then that was addressed on a ZDNet.com blog:

7 reasons why Windows 7 will not wreck Ubuntu

One of our competitors has a review of the Windows 7 beta which claims that desktop Linux is doomed — doomed!

Not exactly. Not even approximately.

First let’s understand what 7’s target is. It’s not so much desktop Linux as a particular Linux distro — Ubuntu — that targets the desktop…

The smart money is on those who understand that this really only applies to the class of PC users who actually give a damn about which OS is running on their system.  Sadly, at present, thats a tiny fraction of users.  People use what they are given or what they used in school or at the office.  Those of us who shuttle back and forth between multiple OS’s or even multiple incarnations of the same OS will continue to do what we always have and select the best tool for the job.

If I want to use Dreamweaver, I load a Windows XP virtual machine on my Ubuntu Desktop and use it since, in my opinion, XP is the best platform for using Dreamweaver for me – personally.  If I could run OSX in a VM and use Dreamweaver there, my opinion could change.

If I was constrained through my employer to only use Windows as my primary desktop, I would stll have Ubuntu running in a virtual machine for those times when I need a robust shell like bash to do what needs to be done.

With current PC’s shipping with lots of RAM and big hard drives there is no longer any good reason to limit yourself to a single operating system.