Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux and desperately want it to succeed. After years of monopolistic and predatory behavior by Microsoft, I still fear each update. Upon installing an app on Windows, the anxiety that Windows has easily allowed some corporation to take over my laptop sets in. As an extremely frugal guy, I know each continued day of Windows usage brings me one step closer to lock in and complete assimilation by the Borg.

Even Macs, regardless of the hype, Unix underpinnings of the OS, and great usability leave me concerned. As a developer and one who whose most important tool is a laptop, I’ll never be comfortable trusting my means of living to a US corporation beholden to endless growth, higher profits, and corporate strategy.

Thus, I’ve been desperately rooting for Linux and open source software from the beginning. Unfortunately, after years of steady improvements, Linux on the desktop still hasn’t lived up to the hype. Ugly fonts, a dozen mediocre sound APIs, a thousand different apps for each main function, not a single once as good as the best Windows alternative (e.g. music players, word processors, graphics apps, <strong>browser</strong>, etc.) leave a lot to be desired.

My biggest complaint, however, is the browser. Honestly, the browser is easily the most important app an average user will need these days. Firefox on Windows is pretty good – it’s fast, stable, and, with a few plug-ins, an extremely functional tool for web browsing.

Unfortunately, the version of Firefox for Linux, at least in my trials, has never compared to its Windows and Mac counterparts. The fonts are ugly, even with hours of tweaking. Flash never seems to work correctly. Pages often render strange. The browser itself has a nasty habit of locking up, sending my CPU into a tailspin, before finally crashing completely, taking down the multiple tabs I had open. I don’t know if the problems are the fault of Firefox, GTK, or the Linux kernel/apis itself. Really, I don’t have time these days to care. Windows XP works so much better than any of the Linux distros I’ve tried, I simply can’t bring myself to get excited upon each new release of Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. like I used to.

That said, it the Google developers can get Chrome to work as well on Linux as it already does on Windows, Linux would be that much more feasible as my day-to-day OS. I don’t use it on Windows as Firefox is already good enough, but it could really go a long way towards bringing Linux forward. If anyone can do it, it is the development team at Google. And with a huge pile of cash waiting to be freed from Microsoft’s annual earnings (based mostly on Windows and Office licenses), the incentive is there.