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I’m writing this in w.bloggar, posting this to my Wordpress blog and viewing it in Firefox. I edit my pictures in Paint.NET, write my documents in Open Office and upload files to my site with Filezilla. How much did I pay for this? Nothing! (well technically not nothing, electricity and bandwidth was involved which I pay for). I’m shamed to admit it but I only started using Firefox full time a week ago. In work I always had firefox installed but had become accustomed to using IE over the years, IE just “worked” so I thought “why change?”

The last year, however, has been slowly whittling away at my comfort level with IE and most other pay for software. It feels like the internet as a whole is turning on Microsoft and closed source, paid for software. Whenever I had a problem with MS Office I’d post it on a forum and be met with a cacophony of users replying “USE OPEN OFFICE f00!”, so eventually I caved and installed it, and, funnily enough, haven’t experienced a problem since. Then for photo editing I used to use Photoshop, I started to get irritated by how bloated it was and how slow it was to start, until someone recommended Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a breath of fresh air in comparison, it might not be as feature full as Photoshop but it has everything your average photo editor would want. Since then I’ve started replacing nearly all of the software I use frequently with its free alternative, 7-Zip instead of WinRAR, Thunderbird instead of Outlook… etc, the list goes on and the more I change the less problems I have with my PC.

The more I use the more I understand why Open Source just runs so much better. It comes down to something that is rarely applied to a paid for piece of software and that is community. If I have a problem with an Open Source program you can be guaranteed someone a lot smarter than me has read the code and patched a fix for it already. The speed at which software gets updated and patched in Open Source is phenomenal, and this is mainly due to the community that aplha and beta tests every revision released, reporting bugs and trying to fix them. The end result is a piece of software that is efficient, nearly bug free (well you can’t catch them all) and is the result of hundreds of free man hours of testing and development. Personally i’ve become an avid Beta tester myself. If I have the option of getting the latest stable version of a piece of software or getting the Beta I will always choose the Beta which leads me onto why I finally killed off Internet Explorer.

Recently in work and at home i’ve been having speed issues with IE. Loading forums and pictures was getting slower, also if I left IE open in work overnight when I came back in it would freeze while trying to refresh all my tabs. So I upgraded my home DSL from 3Mb/s to 8Mb/s and found that the added speed didn’t seem to be getting used by IE. I also use some free software in work and at home that has a Web GUI frontend (i.e. SABnzbd, utorrent, pfsense…etc) and I found that none of these seemed properly optimized for IE 7. I griped about this but still held fast to IE for a while. Posting my discontent about this on forums I was now receiving the plethora of replies saying “USE FIREFOX f00!”… it was only when someone said “USE FIREFOX BETA f00!” did things change. The current beta of Firefox, Firefox 3 Beta 5, is simply amazing. The speed at which it loads pages and refreshes tabs leaves IE 7 in the dust. Since making the move to firefox i’ve started getting used to the better bookmarking facilities, and the plethora of add-ons that allow you to completely customize the browser. I use Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks syncd between PC’s, greasemonkey to make all my favourite sites look better, chatzilla for an easy IRC interface, and of course stumbleupon for that web 2.0 experience.  Unfortunately, as its a beta there are still a lot of addons that are not yet compatible, but still, thus far my Firefox experience has exceeded IE 7 in every possible way.

The only piece of software left to change now is Windows. I work a lot in bash and am on a Linux machine at least once a day. Over time i’m starting to see why Linux is just better than Windows. As trends change so does it, as I change I can change the OS with me. The rigidity of Windows is starting to whittle away at my comfort with it. My problem is that I don’t only use my PC for media and browsing, I also use it for games and MS pretty much has a strangle hold over what standard developers use. For my next format I’ll be installing Ubuntu as the primary OS and then having Vista as the secondary OS purely for loading DirectX games. My hope then will be that either MS will port their graphics engine to linux (fat chance) or that a new/different standard (OpenGL?) is used that all game developers will adopt that is compatible with Linux. If this happens I will be saying goodbye to Windows forever.

I hope if you are reading this in IE on a Windows machine with all that paid for software installed that you can take something from this. If I can cause one person reading this to uninstall their boughten software and get its free alternative then i’ve succeeded a little at least.

To get you started, visit the site at the following link and type in the name of the software you use, then click on it to find the free alternative. Try at least one change a week and soon enough you’ll be using Linux and will have saved yourself 100’s on bloated software with features that you will never use.

http://www.osalt.com/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Software, Thought.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.