I run Linux on my Netbook, and find that it works perfectly well in that application. On my netbook I primarily need a web browser and email, along with the ability to view media and PDFs, and run Skype and ICQ. I don’t think there’s any reason to pay anything for Windows on a Netbook.<\/p>\n
But I don’t run it on my main computer. My main complaint about Linux is the difficulty I find installing new programs. There are lots of free programs for Linux; almost anything you can do in Windows, there is a roughly equivalent program for Linux. But installing those programs is such a chore that I usually just don’t want to bother.<\/p>\n
Linux enthusiasts are going to tell me it’s easy. If your particular brand of Linux supports RPM, just find an RPM packaged version of the program (if it exists), open a shell window and type, <\/p>\n
rpm \u00e2\u20ac\u201civh packagename<\/p>\n
If you’re lucky, your version of Linux may even have a GUI-based RPM interface, but you still have to figure out how to use it.<\/p>\n
Or, if it’s not RPM and you get it in a “tar”, just open a shell window and type:<\/p>\n
tar \u00e2\u20ac\u201cxvzf Apackage.tar.gz
\ncd Apackage
\n.\/configure
\nmake
\nmake install <\/p>\n
Oh, yeah — before you start this you should log in as root, otherwise you will probably get errors about insufficient rights.<\/p>\n