I'm a late adopter of technology. I tend to wait until the bugs have been ironed out before jumping on any bandwagon. That's particularly true when running a business, since the learning curve (and bug-fixing) associated with any new technology has to take second place to business continuity and stability.

I've used Windows for a long time (I have a copy of version 2.03 somewhere), mainly because the places I've worked at have required it. I've also used various incarnations of Linux for over a decade, but - although this site runs on Linux - I've never made it my desktop operating system of choice.

That continues to irk me. While I'm impressed with what Microsoft has achieved, I don't really like proprietary software. I want to be able to see what's going on under the bonnet, tweak and change things if necessary and be sure that there's no malicious code buried away. I'm fed up with regular 'security updates', the requirement for virus checks and the built-in obsolescence of many commercial software products.

And yet I can't quite bring myself to switch over to Linux. I've used many distros, ranging from Caldera to Mandriva, Red Hat to Ubuntu, Debian to Puppy. While the distros themselves are perfectly adequate as a basis for a business operating system, what is really lacking is a selection of core (for me) applications that I've used for many years on Windows and for which I can't find Linux analogues.

For example, I'd like a decent Linux accounting package capable of handling QuickBooks QBW files. I'd like to be able to run my favourite mail/news client natively (Claws Mail is a good substitute, but not quite perfect). I'd like XNView to work as well under Linux as it does under Windows, or find an equivalent. I'd like a decent clone of the PopCorn on-server mail tool. I'd like better multimedia support (can someone please port VirtualDub to Linux?). I'd like a graphical interface to 'grep' that works as well as 'Search and Replace'. And so the list goes on.

I know somebody will say 'use WINE', the interpretation layer that allows some Windows applications to run on Linux. But, meaning no disrespect to the WINE developers, to me that's cheating. And in any event, my experience of running some Windows applications under WINE has revealed all sorts of unexpected behaviour. While the occasional glitch might be fine for an image viewer, it's not acceptable for an accounts package.

I understand the reasons for all of this and I'm not criticising anybody here. I'm merely explaining why I haven't yet shifted everything over to the world of Linux. I'm aware that I could probably overcome some or all of these problems if I spent a few weeks changing my working methods. But I don't want to do that, although I may be forced into it soon. I decided some time ago that XP would be my last Windows operating system, so once support for that dies out, I will have to make the switch.

But I'm not looking forward to it. Recently I was sent a DOC file. OpenOffice.org 3.1 and AbiWord failed to correctly format it, but Microsoft Word 97 (that's 97, not 2007) opened it perfectly. Again, there are good reasons for this, but they delay my migration to an open source OS, and probably many other people's too.

I have consciously not included the Mac in my deliberations, but that's not due to any animosity or neglect. Apple's products are also proprietary (albeit sometimes based on open-source foundations) so for my purposes they fall into the same category as Microsoft's. That's not to say one is better than the other - I neither know nor care which is 'best' - but that for me the choice is between open source and proprietary.

I'd like to choose open source but, like fusion reactors, the technology isn't quite there yet... for me, anyway.

Tags: linux microsoft microsoft windows opensource abiword operating system ubuntu linux distribution