Of late, Linux and open source applications have started to rise in popularity. The most noteworthy have been Ubuntu and of course Mozilla Firefox. Both are superb products that many people, even those not entirely familiar with open source have taken up using. Firefox even more since those glued to Windows can still use it in lieu of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. There are many advantages to using open source software and here are a few examples of individual apps and/or OS' that add to that.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox has started to really cut into Internet Explorer's market share over the past year or two, particularly in Europe. While IE still is the highest used browser, Firefox's market share has been steadily increasing. According to marketshare.hitslink.com, Firefox accounted for 16.98% of the market share, with IE accounting for approximately 75.47% of hits in January 2008. While this does show that Firefox is still WELL behind IE, going back to January 2007, Firefox only accounted for less than 14% of browser market share.

Firefox brings a lot to the table. Despite some memory issues, Firefox has on average a lower memory footprint than IE. Right now, for me, with 6 tabs open, Firefox is using ~35MB of memory compared to ~65MB with one tab open in IE. Firefox also tends to be more secure than IE as well. Yes, Firefox still has its vulnerabilities, but Mozilla tends to be much better and faster at getting fixes out than does Microsoft. Firefox also has what seems like an endless supply of add-ons as well. Themes and extensions allow users to customize their browser as they want including appearance, improved RSS readers, UI additions, performance improvements, even a nice plugin to block those annoying ads that are seen on so many pages.

Ubuntu (and Linux in general)

Ubuntu is a popular distribution of Linux today that offers ease of installation and use that was relatively unheard of say 5-10 years ago for Linux. I have to credit Ubuntu for helping make open source more of a possibility for more people than before. It's installation program as well as what it offers and the general use of it make it relatively easy to use after using Windows for so long. But as I've said before, Linux is not Ubuntu, there are many other distributions out there that are great alternatives to Windows as well (Slackware, SUSE, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, to name a few).

Despite what Microsoft wants to say, I still believe that Ubuntu works more "out of the box" than Windows. Take my desktop for example. When I installed Windows, almost every component needed drivers to be installed. With Ubuntu, all that needed to be done was to install nVidia's official drivers, but in all reality, the VESA drivers that are enabled by default would work just fine for the general user. While Linux does have some disadvantages with GUIs to configure settings compared to Windows, saying that it doesn't just work out of the box is an outright lie.

Linux in my opinion is more poweful than Windows for an experienced user, and even for someone with basic skills. The terminal, while very basic and not as pretty as say some user interfaces is the heart of a Linux system. You can do so much with the terminal that you wouldn't even need a user interface to begin with. In fact, a lot of Linux servers don't even have a graphical system installed, they're run purely from the terminal.

Linux is also much more customizeable than is Windows. You can make the user interface look however you want. You want to emulate the OS X desktop look, go ahead, Windows XP look? Yup, its got that too. For an experienced user, you can even customize the kernel to best run on your hardware setup, so it goes much deeper than just the user interface.

Another bonus is that of course, Linux is free. That's right, it doesn't cost a penny to download. Compared to the outrageous prices Microsoft is asking for Vista, this has got to be an added bonus. Oh yeah, and all features are available on one version of Linux, not the 10,000 different versions Microsoft has with Windows Vista.

With the exception of gaming, I have not found anything I can do in Windows that I can't do in Linux.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a full fledged office suite very similar to Microsoft Office. It can read and write in .doc files and in the upcoming OpenOffice 3.0 release, should be able to open and save .docx (Office 2007) files too. Instead of paying who knows how much for Microsoft Office, you can download OpenOffice for free. It has most of the features Office 2003 has and is available on Linux, Windows, and OS X (although with the current version, it runs through X11 and not natively).

Pidgin (GAIM)

Pidgin is an open source alternative to AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo IM, and many more, all from one client, meaning fewer system resources being needed, as well as fewer programs needing to be open. Pidgin allows you to set up multiple accounts easily under one program, so you can talk to buddies on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, whichever they and you use. The only limitation seems to be that if you need/want to use video or audio, you're pretty much out of luck, as of now anyway. Pidgin is available on Linux and Windows. On OS X, you can use Adium which utilizes the same library that Pidgin uses.

GIMP

GIMP is an open source image manipulation program similar to Adobe Photoshop. While arguably not quite as powerful, GIMP does provide many of the same functionality that Photoshop provides and at oh, I don't know, 100% off the price of Photoshop (aka Free). Despite it not being quite as powerful as Photoshop, it is quite powerful in its own right allowing you to do most of the same work you'd do in photoshop. It is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X.

While these only touch on a very small fraction of the advantages Linux and Open Source provide, it goes to show that in all reality, using Linux and open source applications can give you many alternatives, and advantages that Windows and other software just can't provide. Anyone have any other big examples of advantages of using open source and Linux?

Additional Thoughts: Someone on digg pointed out to me that while open-source software might be free, free software can be the proper term to use as it refers to much more than the price, but also the freedom to use, run, modify, and distribute the software as you so choose, and he made a very good point. Proprietary software can't give you that freedom by any stretch of the imagination, and definitely not legally as free software can.

Tags: linux, opensource, thoughts, ubuntu, firefox, gimp, openoffice, pidgin