A World Without Microsoft

A few weeks ago, i was hijacked. No, it had nothing to do with planes,
trains, or automobiles. My personal computer was invaded by a rogue program
called Home Search that took control of my Internet Explorer browser, afflicted
me with a plague of pop-up ads, made itself nearly impossible to remove, and
finally brought my computer to a grinding halt. It took me seven hours on the
phone with a Microsoft technical-support person to get rid of this menace.

I was fed up and decided to see if I could survive in a world without
Microsoft. In fact, I would abandon the commercial software realm altogether and
use so-called open-source programs, which seem to be less prone to viruses and
spyware, for everything from my operating system to my browser to my desktop
applications. While some open-source software is available commercially,
thousands of programs are free on the Web.

Weakest: Linux

Using open-source programs would turn out to be no Sunday afternoon stroll.
While open-source programmers have tried to make their products easy to use, and
several that I tried were as good or better than their Microsoft counterparts,
others literally gave me a headache.

Getting the Linux operating system loaded on a PC was the thorniest part. The
first stop on my quest was leading Linux distributor Red Hat (redhat.com). But
to install its free version, I would have to repartition my hard drive to make
space for it. Fortunately, I found Mandrakelinux (mandrakelinux.com), with a
partitioning program built in. Still, it took six hours to download, and,
because I had trouble figuring out how to configure the system, I had to install
it twice.

Then, more frustration. Mandrake came with the GNOME user interface,
comparable with Windows' icons and menus. It was familiar and easy to
navigate, but I had trouble finding and opening a couple of programs that I had
downloaded from the Internet. Things just weren't as simple as with Windows.

Once I got beyond Linux, things got fun. It took under a minute to download
and install the Firefox browser from mozilla.org. Firefox worked fast and has a
nifty feature called tab browsing: You can open multiple Web sites at once and
switch quickly between them.

Firefox is wildly popular. More than five million people have downloaded the
preview version since mid-September because it isn't affected by all the
viruses aimed at Internet Explorer. I had no problems with viruses or spyware,
even though I searched for half an hour looking for "free stuff,"
trying to trigger an attack.

I also installed an alternative to Microsoft's Office suite, OpenOffice (openoffice.org).
While others have warned of compatibility glitches, I found none. The OpenOffice
applications had all the capabilities I needed to type this story and perform
other routine tasks.

Experiment over. I've largely returned to the Windows world, but because
many open-source programs run on Windows as well as Linux, I've made the
switch to Firefox, and I'll never buy Microsoft Office again. Who knows, if I
run into a few more glitches with Windows, I may even give Linux another shot.

Review by Steve Hamm
in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2004 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc