Let ESS help you switch to Linux!

What is GNU/Linux?

When you hear the word Linux, you may think of pro­gram­mers with a beard typ­ing obscure code on a black screen. Good news! things have changed.

The Smaller Picture

Linux is an oper­at­ing sys­tem, a large piece of soft­ware that man­ages a com­puter. It is sim­i­lar to Microsoft Win­dows, but it is entirely free. The accu­rate name is GNU/Linux but “Linux” is used more often.

Linux is not one company’s prod­uct, but a num­ber of com­pa­nies and groups of peo­ple con­tribute to it. In fact, the GNU/Linux sys­tem is a core com­po­nent, which is branched off into many dif­fer­ent prod­ucts. They are called distributions.

Dis­tri­b­u­tions change the appear­ance and func­tion of Linux com­pletely. They range from large, fully sup­ported com­plete sys­tems (endorsed by com­pa­nies) to light­weight ones that fit on a USB mem­ory stick or run on old com­put­ers (often devel­oped by vol­un­teers).
A promi­nent, com­plete and friendly dis­tri­b­u­tion to step into GNU/Linux is Ubuntu.

Using Linux

GNU/Linux is no harder to use than Win­dows, and has many more capa­bil­i­ties. It just takes a dozen min­utes to get famil­iar with a dis­tri­b­u­tion like Ubuntu or Fedora, which come in with many pro­grams installed.

If you need commercial-quality soft­ware to work with busi­ness doc­u­ments, Internet/networking, or mul­ti­me­dia and graph­ics, it’s there right out of the box. Want more than that? Linux can do – there are many hun­dreds of free, high qual­ity appli­ca­tions you can find, install and unin­stall neatly and easily.

You shouldn’t assume how­ever, that Linux is a clone of Win­dows. To know what to expect when step­ping into it, we sug­gest you read our Mak­ing the switch page.

The Big­ger Picture

When you get a dis­tri­b­u­tion of GNU/Linux, you also get the free­dom to study, copy, change, and redis­trib­ute it – that’s what makes it truly free software.

  • Most com­pa­nies make a profit by sell­ing sup­port and ser­vices around their GNU/Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion. Cor­po­rate cus­tomers buy guar­an­teed secu­rity updates and assis­tance. Other ser­vices often include train­ing and on-demand improve­ments to software.
  • Some com­pa­nies, such as HP or IBM, con­tribute to Linux because they pre-install it on servers they sell.
  • An extremely wide com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pates in the devel­op­ment and improve­ment of soft­ware, decreas­ing costs and improv­ing efficiency.

In the end, indi­vid­ual end-users often get the soft­ware at zero cost, while cor­po­rate cus­tomers are often happy to pay for more support.

Why not Windows

Win­dows and Office work fine — Why worry about it?

Restric­tions

A legal copy of Win­dows is expen­sive, but what do you get? Win­dows and Office are licensed, not sold.

By using these prod­ucts, we have to agree to a num­ber of harsh restric­tions. For most Win­dows licenses, you can’t keep the soft­ware when you change the hard­ware. You some­times can’t even give your soft­ware away. Who can run the soft­ware? On which com­puter? What can you do with it? The list of restric­tions is long and some items are out­ra­geous.
read our full arti­cle: Restrictions

What about choice?

Soft­ware should come with­out locks in it.

Why are Office doc­u­ments dif­fi­cult to export? Why are the for­mats con­tin­u­ally chang­ing? Why can you not even unin­stall some pro­grams? It might be that if you look for choice, Microsoft prod­ucts aren’t for you.
read our full arti­cle: What about choice?

No source code

The source codes of Win­dows and Office are hid­den, so, no one is allowed to under­stand how these pro­grams work.

If you can’t get a right to inspect source code (the human-readable inner work­ings of a pro­gram), you can’t have some­one cor­rect flaws or eval­u­ate how your pri­vacy is pro­tected for you.

And guess what? On soft­ware that comes with source code, viruses and spy­ware aren’t effec­tive, and secu­rity isn’t bought on extra. The antivirus soft­ware indus­try, in which Microsoft is now a sig­nif­i­cant player, prefers you to use Win­dows.
read our full arti­cle: No source code

Stand for a free society

A free soci­ety requires free soft­ware. Think of “free” as in free­dom, not price: the free­doms to inspect, learn from, mod­ify the soft­ware you use.

Com­put­ers are used to share ideas, cul­ture and infor­ma­tion. With­out these free­doms over soft­ware, we risk los­ing con­trol over what we share.

This is hap­pen­ing today. From plain annoy­ing tech­nolo­gies such as Dig­i­tal Restric­tions Man­age­ment (DRM) to down­right fright­en­ing ones like Trusted Com­put­ing, everyone’s abil­ity to par­tic­i­pate in cul­ture is threatened.

If you have to give up your free­doms to use soft­ware, maybe you should not be happy with it.
read our full arti­cle: Stand for a free society

Many peo­ple find that Win­dows, an oth­er­wise decent piece of soft­ware, with­draws so many rights from them, that it is not worth them using it. Mac OS is not much bet­ter, either.

If you find free soft­ware attrac­tive, you might want to give Linux a try.

Soft­ware lib­erty refers to the free­dom to con­trol your own com­put­ing. Because it empow­ers the user to work, study and com­mu­ni­cate, free soft­ware is impor­tant for any­one.

Free soft­ware is rel­e­vant just as free speech is. Soft­ware is run every­where in our soci­ety today, gov­ern­ing most of what we can read and do. Unless the user has some fun­da­men­tal free­doms over it, she/he has no knowl­edge or author­ity over what is hap­pen­ing inside it.

Free soft­ware is enabled by the avail­abil­ity of source code, the “recipe” for the soft­ware. You should always be able to access and inspect this source code. It does not mat­ter if you do not have the knowl­edge or time to read and mod­ify code: what mat­ters is your free­dom to do so or have some­one do it for you.

Free soft­ware can be copied at no cost. You may pay, how­ever, for it to be writ­ten, adapted and updated – this is how free soft­ware com­pa­nies gen­er­ate rev­enue. You may always use free soft­ware for any pur­pose, includ­ing com­mer­cial; on the con­di­tion that it remains free if you redis­trib­ute it.

Free soft­ware is easy to use and tech­ni­cally often supe­rior to pro­pri­etary (non-free) soft­ware. Some famous exam­ples, often merely called “open-source“1 , include the Fire­fox browser and the Linux oper­at­ing system.

Here are a few of the appli­ca­tions we sup­port and use daily.

Mozilla Fire­fox

The pre­mier free, open-source browser. Tabs, pop-up block­ing, themes, and exten­sions. Con­sid­ered by many to be the world’s best browser.
Down­load Page

OpenOffice.org

Big, full fea­tured suite of tools for word pro­cess­ing and spread­sheets. Com­pat­i­ble with and a free replace­ment for Microsoft Word doc­u­ments. Also sup­ports Open­Doc­u­ment For­mat.
Down­load Page

Word­Press

Word­Press is a CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem) blog­ging tool, kind of like a diary. You can use it to post sto­ries, pic­tures links to cool stuff. You can visit WordPress’s web­site for more details and to see exam­ples of it being used. http://wordpress.org/

phpBB

phpBB is a forum pro­gram which will allow you to cre­ate a space on your web­site that will allow you to have mem­bers that can talk about dif­fer­ent sub­jects and ideas or what­ever your heart fan­cies. You can visit phpBB’s web­site for more details and to see exam­ples of it being used. http://www.phpbb.com/

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a shop­ping cart based on the old oscom­merce engine but it offers tons of more fea­tures and has an active sup­port com­mu­nity. You can use this to sell items over the inter­net*. You can visit Zen Cart’s web­site for more details and to see exam­ples of it being used. http://www.zen-cart.com/ .

You will still need to make arrange­ments for receiv­ing and pro­cess­ing pay­ments in a secure manner

Joomla!

Joomla! is a CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem). It’s basi­cally a pre-built web­site that you can input your own infor­ma­tion into, and used cor­rectly it can be a pow­er­ful tool. You can visit Joomla’s web­site for more details and to see exam­ples of it being used. http://www.joomla.org/

Gallery

Gallery is a full blown photo gallery. It’s one of the best that you can get on the inter­net today for free and thanks to us its also easy to set up. Gallery has too many fea­tures to men­tion but you can visit Gallery’s web­site for more details and to see exam­ples of it being used. http://gallery.menalto.com/

Pligg

Pligg is an open source CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem) designed to mimic the func­tion­al­ity of Digg using Web 2.0–style tech­niques. Pligg’s web­site fea­tures a blog, a forum and online doc­u­men­ta­tion for where you can get more details about theap­pli­ca­tion. http://www.pligg.com/