Linux as a Solid Alternative to Windows and Mac
Thursday, March 23, 2023
In the year 2023 I solidly believe that Linux can serve as a solid alternative to Windows in a daily setting*. The asterisk is important. For general use scenario Linux is very usable in a daily setting. For instance, I personally use Linux as a daily driver on my laptop and have it dual booted on my desktop PC. The distribution that one chooses affects the possibility of Linux being a daily driver. On my laptop I like to run a Debian/Ubuntu based distribution and currently have Elementary OS 7 running, since the OS is a clean and stable OS. On my desktop I have multiple SSDs with different OSs running on them. Currently I have Zorin OS Pro alongside Windows 11.
What makes Linux viable as a daily OS nowadays stems from the application support that the operating system is getting. If you are a light user that casually browses the web and writes the occasional document or opens the odd spreadsheet, then Linux is 100% usable for you right now. If you are a gamer seeking to play the latest games Linux also has you covered. Thanks to Valve and Steam, gaming on Linux has never been better. More and more games are natively supporting Linux and again even using Windows games on Linux has never been better. Given the presence of more widespread adoption of Linux, for various uses, the support is only going to grow.
I think that in the future I will target more specific Linux distributions that I find interesting. Delving into how to make these distributions adapt to your needs would help bring even more widespread use to the OS. Of course, I can’t finish an article on Linux without mentioning the opensource community that makes Linux what it is. The various projects that the community is working on help to make to fully realize its potential.