Every January, assorted pundits claim, “This is the year Linux will conquer the desktop!” Every year, they are proved wrong, and Windows continues to power 95% of desktop PCs (web servers are another matter; a very sizable majority of those run some flavour of Unix).

Well, my experience so far suggests that Linux is ready for the desktop — kind of. Using Xandros for everyday tasks is barely distinguishable from using Windows, and many mainstream PC users would be quite happy with it. I had no trouble at all finding replacements for mainstream Windows applications; Xandros comes with pretty much everything you need out of the box. For someone who makes fairly basic use of an office suite, as I do, the free Open Office is a more than adequate replacement for Microsoft Office, and it will save in Microsoft formats, so you can continue to exchange documents with MS Office users.

As for web browsers, you are spoilt for choice — the only unavailable choice, of course, being Microsoft’s very own Internet Explorer! I carried on using Opera, just as I did on Windows, but I could have chosen Firefox or Konqueror. Email was slightly more difficult, since Eudora, the indispensable email client I’ve been using since 1996, is only available for Windows and Mac. I tried Thunderbird, the companion email program to Firefox, didn’t like it, and ended up using Opera’s built-in email facility. It’s idiosyncratic but it has some interesting features, including threading and excellent search and filtering capabilities. For those wedded to Outlook, Evolution is said to be a good alternative.

I’ve already covered text editors in a previous post — Quanta Plus is simply the best editor I’ve ever used, on any platform. Linux has a built-in firewall, and as for anti-virus — I don’t bother!

All of those cover about 90% of my daily work. But what I find I really miss from Windows is the selection of handy little utilities I’d accumulated over the years, that chugged unobtrusively away in the background, helping me manage my workload. It’s turned out to be very hard to find good open-source replacements for these. Of course I could run them using Windows emulation software, but this seems to me to defeat the object of switching. Coming up next: my review of utilities I’ve discovered so far.