For the longest time, my mantra has been “Open Source over Commercial.” I’m not sure whether it was the geek in me trying to fit in with all the open source geeks, an attempt to fight the man or just my compulsive habit of trying anything different. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.
I played with Linux distributions to replace Windows, only to come back to XP for the convenience and compatibility with my favorite programs. I tried music program after music program, only to return to itunes for the its many features and its well-integrated store. Likewise for Photoshop, Illustrator, MS Office and more.
It’s just a fact that commercial products are better-supported, more regularly updated and usually just of higher quality. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still use Open Source products when they are the best alternative (VLC, Firefox, Notepad++, Launchy to name a few), but I’ve stopped going out of my way to use Open Source products just because they’re Open Source.
So, maybe I’m supporting an evil empire here and there. But what can you do? I guess, sometimes, you have to revert to the old hackneyed expression “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
Just when I convinced my school to download Open Office to the computers as well as office xp! Which works wonderfully. My only complaint is with some documents I lose formating when switching to Microsoft Office file extensions.
J
sell-out
I had Ubuntu (linux) installed on my laptop for a little while - then promptly unistalled when I found out it wouldn’t run any quicker or run half the things that I needed. I switched back to XP.
I do however use Open Office and I love it! It loads so much quicker than Microsoft Office and its free!
I was all about Open Office too, until I tried out office 2007. I got to say, I loves it!
If you’re looking for a lean PDF reader, I would recommend foxit. the whole program is just a few megabytes. It doesn’t look as smooth as acrobat and I don’t think it work through IE or Firefox, but it is super-fast.
I live by Foxit. It opens in freakin’ seconds. And it does work in FF, Jason. Like I said before, when the open source program is better than the alternative, I’ll use it.