TO LOSE one hard drive during a busy week may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. Both had been churning away, day in day out, for years—one in an elderly Windows workhorse, the other in an equally old Linux machine. Having two hard drives fail within days of one another seemed more than coincidence. Ambient temperatures were higher than usual that week, which may have hastened their demise. The fact remains, however, that hard drives tend to die either in infancy or in grand old age, usually as a result of something mechanical wearing out or breaking internally. One of the geriatric drives in question actually gave a few rasping gasps before giving up the ghost. The other passed away silently in the night. Coincidence or whatever, it appears their time had simply come.

A more interesting question, though, concerned not why they had failed, but how best to get the two computers up and running again. Above all, your correspondent was keen to see how the installation of the two respective operating systems would compare—and which was, when everything was taken into account, the better of the two. One machine would have Windows XP Pro with its SP3 service pack re-installed; the other would get the latest Linux Mint 9 distribution instead of the much earlier version of the free desktop operating system used before.

Regular readers may recall that your correspondent sees no reason—at least, not for the time being—to upgrade the Windows XP operating systems running on his various work-a-day office machines to Windows 7 (see “Heading for the clouds”, June 17th, 2010). Provided XP is kept up to date with the latest bug fixes and security patches—and has all its unnecessary eye-candy turned off—it is remarkably stable and nimble on its feet, and capable of running rings around even the highly regarded Windows 7.

As for Linux, he has tried most of the popular distributions over the years, and has settled, for the time being, on Ubuntu to dish out files over the network, and Linux Mint as a desktop client for testing software. In the six years since it was introduced by Canonical in Britain, Ubuntu has become the most popular member of the Linux family, accounting for half of all such installations today. Its success stems from focusing on the desktop rather than the server, and on novice users rather than IT professionals.

For its part, Linux Mint is a direct descendant of Ubuntu, but with a friendlier disposition still. Being based on Ubuntu, a new version of Mint likewise comes out every six months. Each release is supported with updates and bug fixes for 18 months—except for Long-Term Support versions, which get three years of updates and technical support. Your correspondent has stayed with Mint 6 since it was released in December 2008. But support for that version ceased last April. It was high time to upgrade to a later release anyway. The failed hard drive merely precipitated events.

Compared with Ubuntu, Mint is an even better Linux for beginners. The 674 megabyte download includes a wider selection of popular applications along with a number of proprietary software packages (normally a big no-no in Linuxland), such as the MP3 decoder for playing music and Adobe's Flash plug-in for video. Mint's aim is to provide newbies and other ordinary folk with the best possible experience for the least number of hassles. Ubuntu is more concerned with being true to the open-source ideal.

A lot of nonsense is talked about Linux, having conquered the server market, taking the desktop fight to Microsoft and even Apple, thanks to user-friendly distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Unfortunately, the facts speak otherwise. As of October 2010, Windows accounted for 91% of the market (and rising slightly), Apple's OS X for 5% (and falling steadily), while all the various Linux distributions combined added up to less than 1% (and going nowhere). Despite the launch of Windows 7 more than a year ago, XP still accounts for nearly 60% of all Windows computers in the world.

True believers claim that Linux—apart from being free—is faster, uses computer resources more efficiently, does not need cutting-edge hardware, and is a good deal more stable and secure than Windows. No question that it boots up and shuts down a lot faster than Windows XP—a result of its much smaller “kernel” and the more efficient way it uses memory. It can even breeze along on humble computers that make XP feel as though it is wading through treacle.

From the figures, Linux would appear to be vastly more secure than Windows. At the last count, fewer than 1,000 pieces of malware aimed at Linux had been discovered in the wild, compared with more than 2m for Windows. It is not as though Linux has no vulnerabilities to exploit. Indeed, it has a gaping hole caused by leaving its “telnet port” open for all and sundry to enter. Fortunately for Linux, black-hat programmers find it simply not worth their time to design viruses and other malware for attacking such a minuscule slice of computerdom. As a result, most Linux users do not even bother to install anti-virus software, though there are several perfectly competent tools to do the job. Your correspondent uses ClamAV, mainly for filtering e-mail from Windows users.

As for stability, he believes Linux got its reputation for being rock solid from its widespread adoption for servers maintained by IT professionals. His experience of desktop versions of Linux—which are more likely to be used by ordinary people who fiddle with settings, download dodgy software, and turn their machines on and off repeatedly—is that Ubuntu and Mint are no more stable than Windows XP. If anything, he has had more “Kernel Panics”—equivalent to the dreaded “Blue Screen Of Death” when Windows crashes—while tinkering with Linux machines. Bullet-proof they are not.

But when it comes to installing a modern Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Mint, Windows XP gets left in the dust. It took less than half an hour to get Mint 9 up and running, but more than double that to install Windows XP plus its SP3 service pack, and various hardware drivers on separate discs. When finished and logged onto the internet, the Linux machine had close on 100 applications and utilities loaded and ready to go to work. The Windows computer still needed to have Microsoft Office installed plus a host of other applications and tools required to do the job.

The catch? Both computers used popular versions of their components and peripherals—including the mouse, keyboard, CD drive, network card, audio system, video adapter, monitor and printer. Linux has the drivers for all such commonly available devices built into its kernel. Windows has to load most of them separately from discs supplied by the peripheral makers. But if any of those hardware components had been special in some way, odds are there would have been no driver in Linux for it, and no third-party one available from the manufacturer either. Makers of printers and other peripherals include drivers for all versions of Windows, often for Macintosh OS X as well, but rarely for Linux.

Drivers are the Linux operating system's Achilles heel. Even Windows Vista, an operating system introduced in early 2007 that was supposed to replace Windows XP, never recovered from its initial lack of third-party drivers. Compared with Linux, though, Vista had a veritable cornucopia of them. By contrast, the venerable Windows XP has the most comprehensive set of third-party drivers imaginable. That is why, after nine years of service, it is still the most popular operating system in the world—and why it remains, despite its many drawbacks compared with Linux, a far better real-world choice for all those who simply need to get the job done.