Replacing Windows With Linux

I was having a discussion the other day with someone who had kept using as his excuse for not trying Linux the "fact" that there were no non-programmer apps available that were comparable to what Windows has. Personally, I suspect he's one of those people that would be lost without something (Windows, in this case) to complain about and is afraid that if he switched to Linux he wouldn't be able to complain about how his system is always crashing or getting virii etc etc.

A few minutes research turned up the following applications that encompass all that the average computer user (e.g. someone with no programming or IT background at all: there are a lot more of them than there are of us).

• Word processor: Star Office, Open Office, KWord
• Money management: GnuCash, Kapital, Moneydance
• Email client/Contact management: Evolution, KMail
• Web browser: Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, Galeon, and of course Lynx
• Photo/Graphics Editor: Gimp, skencil, inkscape
• spreadsheet program: Star Office, Open Office, KSpread, Gnumeric
• Presentation maker: Star Office, Open Office
• web editor: Bluefish, Quanta
• newsreader: Netscape, Pan, KNode
• ftp client: igloo, gftp
• media player: Real Player, VLC
• mp3 player: There are literally hundreds of these, just check freshmeat/sourceforge. The universal favorite, however, is xmms
• cd ripper: Most MP3 players now include this.
• cd burner: Most distros come with the ubiquitous cdripper command line app, and there are literally hundreds of front-end apps that will help you use it.
• Flowchart app (Visio): Dia, Kivio
• IM clients (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, icq): Gaim, Yahoo, Jabber
• Development IDE: Komodo, Eclipse, KDE Studio, KDevelop, Black Adder, JBuilder, Kylix, NetBeans
• Sound Recorder: grecord, audacity, protux
• CD player: xmms, cdplayer
• Backup tool: BRU, Arkeia, Amanda.
• Adobe Acrobat: xpdf, Adobe Acrobat
• Access replacement: MySQL, Star Office
• Video conferencing: Gnomemeeting
• Video editing: Cinelerra

There is quite clearly no lack of sufficient applications for Linux. Note that I don't address games because I don't really play games very much, but from what I understand there are plenty of games available for Linux. The two commercial games I play on occasion, Quake and Unreal, both run on Linux and there are dozens and dozens of games that come with most distros (I like pingus and TuxRacer !). Other things to look at in terms of why you would choose to use Linux:

scalability - ability of a system to handle increased workload by adding resources in a predictable manner, or the ability to increase performance nearly linearly as resources are added.

reliability - ability of a system to continuously perform, standard measurement being Mean Time Between Failures

availability - A system that is resistant to a single point of failure. A component failure will slow the system, but not stop it.

fault tolerance - A system that has hardware that will allow failure that doesn't impact software

manageability - ease of use and administration

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