Studying For Comptia A+, Linux As My Primary OS, Bad Idea?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Greetings,

This may seem like a silly topic, but it's an important one for me...

I feel that Microsoft is an evil company. I believe that they do not respect the privacy of their users. I believe - like Richard Stallman - that there are backdoors in Microsoft's software, and that the NSA probably has a backdoor. Because of this, I have long relegated Windows to being a secondary OS. An OS I just use for gaming, online poker & netflix. For everything else, I use Linux.

Now however, I find myself wondering if NOT having Windows as a primary OS is going to hurt my ability to learn the material. I'm thinking that since I'm spending so little time in Windows, I'm not really being forced to learn it. I'm not navigating to different locations. I'm not having to hunt down and solve problems as much. I'm not as well acquainted with Windows as I used to be. (Back when I ran 98 + XP as my primary OS's)

Yes, I do plan to learn Linux eventually. Yes, I do want to take Linux+ eventually, because I believe Linux has a brighter future than Microsoft. But that's a while down the road. I'm pretty sure that A+ is a necessary prerequisite to Linux+. Also, I once was trained to offer technical support for Windows 95 through to XP, so I have a decent bit of knowledge already that I want to legitimize by becoming A+ certified.

Anyway, I'm hoping for some opinions on this topic. Should I switch to Windows as my primary OS for the experience, at least until I'm fully educated in Windows? Or should I keep running Linux as my primary OS - with Windows as a secondary OS - and trust that I can make it through all the various Windows certifications I may want to take in the future? (Maybe: Network+, Security+, etc..)

All sincere attempts to help are appreciated!

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

If you want to stay linux-based, you could always install Windows XP/7/whatever on Virtualbox and mount a Windows image in that. I believe there is a Windows 7 part in the A+ now, so you definitely will need to look at it.

Just depends how liberal you are with the definition of open source.

The A+ is hardware based, with a touch of OS, so is not a proper pre-requisite for Linux+, but if you are going to support users in the future, it will definitely help. If you work in IT support, you WILL need to learn Windows properly, as there isn't a huge uptake for Linux to end-users, it's mainly more for people who run the infrastructure.

 

There really is not so much to learn on a Windows client OS, if you know XP well you can probably blag your way through the A+, its mostly an end user commodity hardware exam.

 

Thanks for the responses. Thanks especially that I didn't get flamed for the way I feel.

I'll proceed with running Kubuntu as my primary OS. I'll just ensure that I spend plenty of time navigating Windows as I study.