If you've read the Linux Home page, then hopefully you can see that Linux offers, for an
incredible price even if you buy a version, a lot of valuable features.
As a person who's worked as a computer scientist for most of his career, I
can tell you that I see Linux as a superior architecture.
But moving from one operating system to another, even for free, is a
daunting challenge. The first thing most users of Windows suffer is loss of
their favorite utilities and programs.
So what's one to do?
As it happens, there are a number of things you can do, depending upon
your needs and your existing computer assets. In fact, you may find that
you'll be able to make effective use of more than one of the suggestions
that follow.
Solution One, Switch To Native Linux Apps
Most of the time you can migrate to native Linux apps to accomplish
the functions you used to get out of Windows apps. It takes awhile to
find out what they are, but for the most common processes computer users
engage in, Linux likely has a highly functional match.
For example, most Windows users make considerable use of Microsoft
Office and the wide range of utilities therein.
Linux has many products that fulfill all or most of these functions.
What follows is a partial list of the most often used Linux applications that
are similar in function to Microsoft Office:
Popular Linux Office Apps
OpenOffice
Complete office suite with word processing, presentation, database, and
spreadsheet. Can make Microsoft compatible files, also available for
Windows.
Koffice
Complete office suite with word processing, spreadsheet, presenter, flowcharting, and data management. Growing compatibility with Microsoft files. Part of
the KDE project.
abiword
GUI word processor with some Microsoft file compatibility. Part of the
GNOME project.
gnumeric
GUI spreadsheet with some Microsoft file compatibility. Part of the
GNOME project.
Of course, if you're reading this web page, then you are using a browser.
Linux definitely has you covered there, with many popular options. Note that
this list is from from exhaustive, but lists some of the more popular
browsers.
Popular Linux Web Browsers
firefox
Firefox is becoming the most downloaded browser ever. For Licensing
reasons, Debian uses the firefox engine by a different name: iceweasel.
epiphany
A firefox lookalike based on the gecko engine, designed for the GNOME
project.
konqueror
An integrated file manager and browser designed for the KDE project.
galeon
A capable but lighter duty gecko-based browser for the GNOME project.
opera
A freely available, very standards adherent browser that can be
obtained for Linux and Windows.
Another popular software area in Windows is graphics. For that, some use
the supplied paint program, others use more aggressive products such
as those from adobe or paint shop pro.
Linux has you covered. The following chart shows some of the common
graphics utilities available in Linux.
Popular Linux Graphics Apps
xpaint
Easy to use paint program, similar to, but better I think, than Windows
paint. Imports and exports virtually every mainstream graphic file format.
gimp
Full featured graphic and rendering program. Allows users to work in
graphic layers, can use nearly any mainstream graphic file format. Also
freely available, by-the-way, for Windows.
Imagemagick
A package containing many graphic manipulation programs that can work with
over 90 major graphic formats, including: convert, identify, composite,
montage, display, animate, import, and conjure applications.
Of course, a very popular Windows function is multimedia utilities. Believe it or
not, Linux also has respectable support for displaying many of the popular
multimedia formats. Sometimes you need to hunt down a codec for a specific
file type, but generally that's available.
Popular Linux Multimedia Apps
totem
GNOME-desktop movie player
gxine
A GTK/GNOME GUI front end to the xine video player
mplayer
Another movie player for Linux
xcdroast
A full X-based CD-writer program.
k3b
Another GUI based CD burner.
Note that this list is far from all-inclusive. These are some of the more
popular Linux apps for these specific functions. I use the Debian flavor of Linux, the base drawn upon
most for many other distributions, including Mepis, Knoppix, Ubuntu, and
several others.
This impressive list of office, graphics, and multimedia utilities were
all included in my Debian Etch install. All of the browsers except
opera were also included in my Debian distribution.
There are thousands of other Linux packages that cover programming,
mathematics, and other subjects, some of which are covered in other pages
on this site.
But!
What if you just can't get what you need from a native Linux application?
Happily, there are options. These options depend upon your needs,
preferences, and computer assets.
If you can an older system:
Consider the old reliable Dual Boot!
One sure way to be certain you can run those Windows applications that
you still need is to set up a dual boot system. Linux has a couple of
boot loaders that make it easy to support multiple operating systems on
a single computer. At boot time, these loaders give the user the option to
select any of the installed operating systems.
Each operating system must be installed on a separate partition of a
sizable disk drive, or even on different disk drives.
One comment. Since Windows NT, Microsoft has made their operating systems
rather unfriendly about being installed in multi-boot systems. The best way
to go about the process is to install the Windows derivative first, then
add the Linux system later.
The advantage of this approach is that a full
Windows OS is running when booted, so all programs will work properly, and
Windows will have access to all hardware.
The disadvantage of this approach is the inconvenience
of having to exit Linux to boot to Windows, then exit Windows to reboot to
Linux.
If you have a newer computer, one that runs in the gigahertz and has
a gigabyte or more of memory, consider running your Windows in a Linux
window with a virtual machine.
There are a number of them around, but two quality ones (freely
available) that I'm familiar with are VMware and VirtualBox.
VMware is primarily commercial, but does make a version of their
server available for free.
VirtualBox is an open-source virtual machine.
Both of these products are mature and work very well. How do they work?
Virtual machines create an environment within a host operating system where
another operating system can run as a guest. The guest sees an apparent
hardware environment where the processor itself is actually simulated.
Certainly a simulated processor runs slower than a real one, but on
gigahertz machines this is often barely noticeable.
The virtual machine allows the user to specify the amount of disk space
and memory is to be available for the guest OS, then a virtual disk space
is allocated and the guest OS installed. Other hardware can be selectively
made available to the guest, such as Internet connection, USB support,
additional disk partitions, etc.
To enter the guest OS, activate the virtual machine and select the guest
OS you want to boot (you can have several). Then while in the virtual machine
window you are communicating with the guest OS as if you'd booted it in the
first place. You can install software, run programs, etc.
You can move from the virtual machine window to be back in the host OS,
and re-enter the guest OS window at will.
This can be done either way, with a Windows OS as the host and Linux
running in a virtual machine, or with Linux as host and Windows as the guest.
I recommend Linux as the host. Why? Because it is amazingly robust and
resilient compared to Windows.
The Advantages of the virtual machine approach is that
except for some programs that require certain extensive hardware control,
your Windows applications are very likely to run quite nicely. You'll be
able to move directly from the virtual machine to Linux applications without
re-booting. You can even share the clipboard between the host and guest OS.
You're not limited to a single guest OS. I have 2 versions of Windows and
freedos, each in their own virtual machine setup.
The disadvantages of the virtual machine approach are
that you must boot the guest OS to use applications in it, and it takes some
considerable resource to do that. Also, a virtual machine is definitely
slower than a real machine. Finally, some types of hardware connections
are not supported. For example, games that require 3D video card support can't
currently be ran in virtual machines.
Can you run Windows apps directly in Linux?
The honest answer to that is Maybe.
There is an open-source product (included in Debian and many other
Linux versions) called wine.
Wine is a package that consists of many support modules designed to
perform the necessary support for Windows applications. Using wine, and
user can launch a Windows app directly, like: wine notepad.exe.
There are reportedly thousands of Windows applications that run well in
wine. But these are generally the most commonly used applications. If you have,
as I do, some tailored Windows applications that talk to a calculator, PDA, or
some other apparatus, then in all likelihood your application will not
function properly.
Sometimes by messing with wine parameters you can get wine tuned to run
a specific application. If you like to do this kind of work, then have at
it.
You can check out the wine applications database at
winehq to see if the applications you
wish to run have been successfully used with wine.
There is a commercial version of wine available at Codeweavers. You'll likely have more luck with this
commercial version if you wish to reliably run Windows applications directly
in Linux.
