It’s in your home computer, your workplace, at school, at the internet cafe.Am talking about windows operating system. It’s great and most of us love Windows. If you don’t, at least you have to give it credit for turning a once “mystical” and highly technical machine into something that most people can easily use to surf the web, communicate, write reports, play music, watch videos and work with.
However, that sort of simplicity comes with a price tag. First, it’s not free and you’ve to let go of some dollars to pay off some license fees and that is in thousand of dollars for enterprise or business users. But that’s okay if only the system just worked since your return on investment is obvious. But, windows is notoriously vulnerable to spyware, malware and viruses which forces PC owners and business owners to senselessly spend thousand of dollars annually in anti virus software and other related tools to keep their data safe and computers from crashing. As such, in a long run PC owners and businesses spend more money on maintenance than they did buying windows in the first place. This obviously does not make business sense.
This is where Linux saves the day. Not just because I’ve been a long time supporter of Linux and open source software, but because of the stability, security and Open source nature of Linux system. Upon a successful installation of any Linux distro of your choice (I recommend Ubuntu ), you’ll soon realize you won’t need a software maintenance budget as you did with windows. To your surprise, you’ll discover tonnes of software to get your daily tasks done. Ubuntu comes with Firefox for your web browsing, evolution email client for your email needs, libre office as an alternative to MS office suit, and other productivity tools.
Now don’t think that the costs of switching over are too high. Frankly speaking, You’ll be amazed at how fast your staff copes up with your newly installed Linux system because of its ease of use. Forget the popular misconceived view out that Linux is hard to use. You are probably already using a Linux based system right in your arms if you happen to own or use an android powered phone or tablet. That should be a shock to some of you.
I’ve experienced first hand Linux work flawlessly with a local company I used to work with and it continues to reap the benefits I have listed above to this day. There’re some local organizations that will help you with support like this local Ubuntu community https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UgandaTeam/ or coss.ug (Center for Open Source Software) which provides support and training in most Linux flavors.
Image: writingforward.com