“You’ll see familiar surroundings if you switch from Windows to
Linux. If you install Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 or the latest Red Hat
Linux, you’ll find most of the familiar things Windows is known for
— windows you drag around, a right mouse click that pops up a
menu, even a ‘Start Menu’ for launching programs.”
“But all versions of Linux are drastically different from
Microsoft Windows in hundreds of ways. Even the stuff that seems
similar is different, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in very
big ways. That’s because Linux was not created using any of the
old-fashioned computer code that Windows is full of. Linux was a
new project, engineered to do things the best way possible. And in
some cases — in a lot of cases, probably — the best way possible
is not the way Windows does things.”
“So switching from Windows to Linux can be an eye-opener. My
first impressions were full of exclamations — ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Wow!’
were just about all I said for the first few hours — and my
experiences in the weeks since the day I installed Linux have done
nothing to change those initial impressions.”