Linux is not a Silver bullet

2005 Jan 27 at 10:43 » Tagged as :

My sister had this really ancient Notebook with factory installed windows. She only uses it for email and writing stories while on the move, so discarding it in favour of a new one is simply not on.

Unfortunatley this machine has been infected by viruses several times and on each occaision I kept on vaxing eloquent about the benefits of installing linux. My main arguments is that linux runs faster on older machines and almost never gets attaked by viruses.

So after the latest attack, I finally managed to persuade my sister to allow me to install linux on it. Unfortunately the only linux distro I had with me when I was visiting with her was Fedora. I found to my great embarrasment that the snipe by debian fans that redhat and fedora are the worst distributions is indeed true.

The installation itself took several hours, in fact it nearly took the whole day just for two CDs. Upgrading RH 9 on my desktop a few months ago wasn't a pleasent experience either. After installing it seem to take ever so long to start up. Windows certainly did start up a lot quicker. The real trouble began when attempting to login, both the KDE and gnome desktops went into a vicious swap cycle. Sad to say windows didn't do the same on this machine with just 64 Mb of RAM.

Starting up Open Office is out of the question. So now I am left with a lot of egg on my face and having to by her a stick of expensive notebook ram.