My thoughts on why businesses and individuals need to start thinking about switching away from proprietary (and high maintenance) software like Windows, and look at open source and free software instead like GNU/Linux. All articles are based on real world and everyday experiences with Windows and GNU/Linux, for both business and personal use.
I have been a systems administrator of both Windows and Linux systems for over 15 years, in a wide variety of environments ranging from educational institutions to large enterprises. Throughout the years running Linux and Windows side by side, I have seen Linux countless times surpass Windows in performance, reliability, cost savings, and more recently user experience. In 2008 I successfully migrated all of my personal machines from Windows XP to Fedora Linux after seeing Linux succeed for many years for businesses, and have worked with family and friends to help them migrate as well. The experience has been astounding. The power of Linux and open source software is one that cannot be ignored by businesses or individuals, and has been making waves in the world of proprietary software and Microsoft. From multiple frustrations of using Microsoft products and seeing open source products excel over them, I have drawn an interest in writing more and doing research about the two and their vast differences.
It's finally time for me to leave the Gnome Desktop, thanks to Gnome 3. Fortunately for me, the MATE desktop is a continuation of the Gnome 2 Desktop, and as of Fedora 18, is integrated into the Fedora repository; it's also fairly easy to install.
Fedora has listened to its user base, and will be addressing the desktop issues that have plagued recent GNU/Linux distributions.
I am still running Fedora 14 on some machines, and I have been holding off on upgrading to a newer version of Fedora ever since, all because this was the last version of Fedora to have Gnome 2. I've deployed some PCs since, with Fedora 16 and Gnome 3 and have enabled Fallback Mode for those users to retain the familiar menu system and desktop of Gnome 2.
Recently it was announced that Microsoft is going to support Linux on its Azure cloud platform. At first glance, this sounds great, right?
Those of us using GNU/Linux have probably heard about the UEFI Secure Boot scheme and how it demonstrates Microsoft's strong grasp on PC hardware vendors. If you are not quite sure what UEFI Secure Boot is yet, I highly advise reading up on it as new PCs will begin to have this feature enabled by default in the near future to comply with Microsoft's requirements for Windows 8.
One of the most common tasks I face is copying profile data among computers, in both Windows and Linux. And as you would expect, both operating systems handle the profile data very differently.
I've always been skeptical at using Mono and Moonlight. In fact, I've always avoided them if possible.
When the rapid release schedule was first announced for Firefox last year, I was not a fan at all at first. My main reason or complaint was that in the past, each version of Firefox was somewhat "locked" to each distribution of Fedora (and other Linux distributions as well).
I've posted many times about moving users from Windows to GNU/Linux, and of the successful migration experiences with it over the past several years. However my latest migration ended up failing, and I ended up having to return the user back to Windows XP mainly for a game that refused to work in Wine and VirtualBox, and would crash on startup in both scenarios.
Recently I was on the task of getting some scripts together for handling FTP commands to run several time a day to move files around. Unfortunately, the platform that was already in place is a Windows 2008 R2 server.