[Discuss] Last Night's VLUG Meeting

[Alan W. Irwin]

This whole thread has been most interesting from the POV of the best way to
run multiple OS's if you _absolutely must_.

However, I want to sound a note of caution; you potentially lose a lot if
you spread your attention over multiple OS's rather than concentrating on
one.  Computers are not toasters; each OS keeps adding lots of useful
features (and some which are not useful of course for any particular
individual, but those and the useful features all take time to evaluate). So
getting absolutely the most out of a single OS is essentially impossible;
nobody could keep up. For example, I keep learning new things about Linux
all the time which I have previously missed, and I know I keep falling
further and further behind.  The serious computer user ends up doing as much
self-education about their OS that is possible, but it is never enough.  If
you spread that effort over two or more OS's your efficiency on all OS's
suffers.  That doesn't mean you are prohibited from changing OS's, but when
you do so, you should try to leave that old OS behind as quickly as possible.

So if, for example, you have mostly converted to Linux but there are one or
two windows apps which you feel you must absolutely run, I would advise you
think carefully about the above point about spreading your OS attentions too
thin.  Also you should look closely at the costs of that residual windows
habit, e.g., the initial time/effort required to figure out the best way to
run multiple OS's (as in this thread), the on-going time/effort required to
keep the windows OS secure and up to date, etc.  Of course, the costs are
not all on one side.  There is an initial cost to changing from commercial
to open-source alternative applications, and there may be some on-going
costs as well (such as the open-source alternative may not be quite as
convenient to run). OTOH, if you give an alternative an honest try, you may
find your concept of what is convenient was simply dominated by old habits
rather than real convenience, and you are likely to find some features in
the open-source alternative that you really like.

Sites to help you find good alternatives to windows apps are
http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html and
http://www.osalt.com/.  The first is simply an extensive table of
alternatives with no annotation.  The latter annotates both the commercial
applications and their open-source alternatives.  The annotation emphasizes
the positive aspects of all commericial and open-source applications rather
than being negative about any.  That is fundamentally sound
salesmanship/advocacy which I really like.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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