Bryan Russell here, wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.
New years resolutions seem to be an interesting practice for some. We make a commitment to ourselves and then we either keep it or break it. If we keep it, we usually end up highly satisfied with the results. If we break it, well, that’s a whole different story which would probably be more appropriately filed under “psychiatry” rather than computer science and technology.
I made a commitment a very long time ago to embrace the power of open source software (especially Linux) and attempt to use it as my primary operating system for everything. If the software did not natively support Linux, I used WINE if possible and loaded Windows (usually running in a virtual machine on Linux) only when absolutely necessary and after exhausting all other options first.
It was only in the remaining few months of last year that I firmly concluded that I no longer needed Windows[TM] for ANYTHING… It was just last night at about 11:59pm EST that I realized the rest of the World can finally same the same thing!
Until recently, Microsoft(R) Windows[TM] was required for certain tasks, most notably computer gaming, audio/video/image editing, certain unique company-specific software and various other applications. Probably the most significant move that will catalyze Linux gaming support was in 2012 when Valve released a private (now public) beta of Steam for Linux. Valve subsequently announced that Linux has everything it needs for gaming and that it demonstrated significantly MORE potential than Windows[TM] (including the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) outperforming DirectX on both Windows and Linux).
While these are big claims, I can personally attest to them as I am a hands-on eye witness. I compiled a Linux From Scratch environment (following the LFS 7.2 book using Linux kernel 3.5.4 and GNU gcc 4.7.1) with all parameters tuned for the destination hardware and optimizations for gaming AND real-time applications enabled. These tests produced remarkable results.
I have concluded, without even the slightest shadow of a doubt, that Linux is the most advanced operating system on the planet as of this writing. It not only outperforms Windows[TM] on one single application (in many cases even through WINE (remember, Wine Is Not an Emulator, meaning the hand-built-from-the-foundation open source libraries contain unique and authentic open source code which, in many cases, outperforms Microsoft(R)’s commercially-developed code)) but it will run multiple heavy applications (such as games) all at the same time; responsively and reliably.
Yours truly,
Bryan A. Russell
P.S.: I have recorded this demonstration video for you to see. Any software which lacks native Linux support is being run using WINE 1.5.20. The system hardware specifications are Intel Core 2 Duo “E4500″ @ 2.20GHz CPU, 2gb DDR-2 @ 667mhz RAM, ATI HD 6400 PCIe-x16 graphics card on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard:
http://www.linuxsolutions.com/video/games/preliminary_test.avi
Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.
Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.
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