Sell me Linux

[John Jones]

The absolute best reason to switch to linux is also extremely ironic:

Increasingly, it just works.

Linux used to be the demnesne of config file hell. If you wanted your computer to zig instead of zag, you always had to open up /etc/dev/w/e/movement and change line 14 to "direction=zig," and people you'd ask for help online would insult your intelligence instead of actually helping, whereas Windows didn't have that problem because, well, frankly, if it wanted to zag that's all it would do. Yet today, more and more technical problems are as crappy as they ever were on Windows, but on Linux, specifically Linux Mint, they just work.

For example: at my workplace, we have the usual smattering of Macs and various Windows distros. I'm the most prominent Linux user, and I've been saddled with a reputation as The Guy Who Fixes Your External Backup Drives. If they're windows, if they're mac, if they're unformatted, doesn't matter, gparted can see them and I can do whatever needs to be done, whereas both Windows and Macs have their quirks as to what they're willing to recognize and write to, and what they aren't.

What does your company do to earn its living? I love my IT group to death, but they don't know the first thing about the software that runs our lab equipment, and keeps us all employed.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Some comments on your observations, from someone who's been involved with Linux in several forms for over a decade now.

Linux is free - as in beer

It's only free if your time has no value. Windows also has a cost, in time but the actual operating system is likely to have been bundled with the PC you bought. Yes, there's lots of free software you can run on Linux, but quite a lot of it is also available on PCs.

Well, a people spend time and money fixing broken stuff on Windows, too. Often caused by viruses and malware. Or updates that break their systems. Or programs that give mysterious errors that no one knows how to fix. Or a System Repair that totally wiped out the user's home directory and required a complete reinstall to fix (that one happened at my office.) Or a migration from Office 2007 to Office 2010 that wiped out a decade's worth of email (was I ever happy we had a backup!)

Software repositories

This one makes me smile. Each distributor tends to have a software repository. You don't have to use them, but if you do, your life is easier, and if you are not an expert, you are effectively locked i to what the distributor thinks you should want. The same people who extol the virtues of software repos on Linux also often bemoan the alleged lock in from the Mac App store.

The most popular distributions have secondary repositories available with community packaged software. These repos can often be used across distributions that share a common base such as Debian or Red Hat.

Rapid evolution

This is not necessarily a good thing. You just get used to the user interface and, in the next release, they change it. The article jokes about upside down menus, but things like this (but usually less extreme) do happen occasionally with Linux distros. People don't like change for change's sake and why should they?

Agreed! I still hate the latest Amarok (KDE's standard MP3 player) interface. I believe someone has forked the earlier source code and made it available for KDE 4, but I haven't looked for a while.

Linux is free - as in speech.

Undeniably good - if you are a programmer. If you don't know how to write code and don't have the resources to pay somebody to write code, it's hard to see what tangible advantages Linux has over Windows and OS X.

See my comment above about Amarok. Because the source code is freely available, dedicated people can--and have--forked the source code when the original maintainer took it in a direction people didn't like. Prominent examples include:

• LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice due to Oracle's mishandling of OpenOffice
• MariaDB forked from MySQL due to Oracle's mishandling of MySQL
• Jenkins forked from Hudson due to Oracle's mishandling of Hudson
• FOSWiki forked from TWiki when the TWiki maintainer took it commercial

In the closed source world, of which Windows and Apple are the prominent players, if Company A buys your favourite Company B and then kills its product, you're just out of luck.

People and companies can be left stranded if a company that provided the programs and support for a niche product suddenly goes out of business. With Open Source, there's a good possibility you can get the last known good copy of the source code and continue to maintain it yourself. Granted, that's usually an option useful for companies and probably not for individuals, but I'm sure you see the point.

Powerful shell

I believe there is a free powerful shell for Windows too, if you need it. The most common option for a powerful shell for Linux (there are several, which is a Good Thing) turned out to have an itsy bits massive security hole.

I've not used PowerShell, so I can't personally say how good it is. Opinion in the Windows community seems to be mixed.

Independent distributions

Interesting language in this one:
This means "the independent distributors know what's best for you!" Hmmm.

Independent distributions "scratch an itch," so to speak. Each distribution brings to the table a set of features that the maintainers are interested in. Usually they're built from platforms such as Debian or Red Hat that make it straightforward to add additional packages to fit what you need.

Drivers included

The fact that it is the driver vendors and not Microsoft who write drivers for Windows has no bearing on the fact that more hardware is supported for Windows.

Except when you have hardware for which the last available Windows driver was written for XP, making your device useless under Vista / 7 / 8.1 / 10. Scanners typically fall victim to this.

Runs on any platform

What do you care about that? As long as it runs on your PC.

People do care, because they often have older but still useful hardware with various architectures. Like an older but still viable Sun workstation. Or an Itanium based system that's still running and they want to use it for a file server. Or an Apple Macintosh Powerbook G4.

Or my Raspberry Pi (ARM CPU, not Intel).

No commercial deadlines

Really? Red Hat and Ubuntu don't have commercial deadlines? Hmmm

Those two do, because they are major commercial players in the Linux arena. Lots of other distributions aren't, though, and do adopt a "release when ready" approach.

Community support

Isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes you get good support, sometimes you get a snotty answer like "go read the code". On the other hand, you might have a mate down the street who can fix your Windows problems.

Sadly true: Linux forums can take condescension to whole new levels. I've heard it suggested that you don't ask politely for assistance because all you get is "RTFM!" Instead you slag the product and threaten to dump it and move back to Windows; suddenly all the geeks come out of the woodwork to defend their baby and offer suggestions.

As for getting a mate down the street to help you with your Windows issues: said mate can probably do it because he's curious about computers and probably runs both Windows and Linux. Ordinary people running Windows can be horrendously clueless. I know; I've helped them with doing even basic tasks like printing a document, inserting a license key, and replying to email.

Security

Windows security is not bolted on afterwards. The NT kernel was designed from the ground up with security in mind and its security model is superior to that of Linux. The Linux security model is pretty much the same as the original Unix model which was considered agricultural when it was new. Sure, it's possible to bolt on some modern features like ACLs afterwards...

The kernel may be secure, but the environment isn't Most Windows malware these days doesn't really affect things at the kernel level. They're running in user space, and got there due to insecurities in the user's programs.

There have also been some fairly major security problems in Free Software recently. The recently discovered Shellshock vulnerability, the previous Heartbleed bug. If you want an example of how the Linux distro model can foul things up, look at the Debian SSL bug caused by a distro maintainer making changes to software he didn't understand.

Yeah, between Heartbleed and Shellshock it hasn't been a good year for Linux security. However, there were fixes and patches available almost immediately upon disclosure. The ones who were caught out after that were the ones who were tardy in patching their web facing systems.

Lack of malware

This is true, although, as with OS X it is probably a function of the OS's relative lack of popularity.

Same for Linux. Its small footprint makes it an unfavourable target for the purveyors of malware.

Now, a bug or worm doesn't need root access to cause major damage. You can still do a lot in userspace such as send out spam, collect user data and passwords, and encrypt irreplaceable files beofre demanding a ransom. I wonder just how much more secure things would be if everyone was running a Linux desktop, given that people writing Linux programs can be just as sloppy as those writing for Windows.

What I do know is there aren't many known attacks against Apache httpd, which at one time served up over 80% of the sites on the internet, whereas IIS was getting exploited every other week.

Thousands of programs included

This is true.

Quite. I'm continuously astounded at the scarcity of good tools in Windows. Such as a RAM disk. The feature's built into the Linux kernel. I still haven't found a good open source RAM disk for Windows.

 

[DarthFishy]

The rejuvenation of old hardware is one of my favourite things about Linux. I'm running a media server on an old-(ish) machine which I can stream to a number of different devices, one of which is an old netbook (1Ghz Atom processor with 512mb ram) that's connected to my main TV.

Works really well.

Admittedly the streaming software took some time to setup correctly but that was due to the software, not Linux itself.

I've also setup my Linux Media server to handle my coding workflow (Sublime-Text Editor, Chrome and FileZilla) but seeing as I tend to also use it to view Streaming Media a lot I don't work on it as much as I should.

It really depends on what you want to do.

For most kinds of coding and development Linux is excellent (C# development or game development on Linux is not that great though). For a lot of Media-related activites (e.g. Streaming Videos/Music) it's also pretty good.

For playing old-school games it can be pretty decent (if you are willing to spend some time getting WINE to work).

Other activities you need to do depends on if the software you need to use works on Linux or if there is an appropriate Linux alternative (Photoshop/GIMP being a prime example of a possible problem).

I also agree with the "just works" aspect of Linux being part of its appeal. With my 3g dongle, I need to install a really buggy 3rd-party app on Windows. With Ubuntu it was literally plug and play.

This doesn't obviously always happen, but it happens more and more.

 

[TheL8Elvis]

One advantage is that it's very rare that Linux needs to restart to install upgrades - Windows seems to do that all the time - sometimes multiple restarts for a 'single' upgrade.

Unless you are running a server that needs uptime, I don't really see this as much of an advantage.

 

[TheL8Elvis]

One good reason to know *nix is h how much of the "Internet of Things" is *nix based.

*nix based firmware for routers, NAS's, raspberry pi, etc are great to either add functionality or extend life.

And while you sometimes just needed to follow instructions, having an understanding of what you are doing is pretty useful.

 

[Bram Kaandorp]

Unless you are running a server that needs uptime, I don't really see this as much of an advantage.

It's more about having less annoyance than about a big advantage.

At least that was what it did for me.

 

[Donn]

How's our sale going Squeegee? I'd imagine you're reaching slowly for a Win8 DVD.. If so, the plan is working perfectly...

Carry on.

 

[elgarak]

Unless you are running a server that needs uptime, I don't really see this as much of an advantage.

Well, for me, updating Windows very often felt like a chore that would occupy the machine in question for a few hours, which is really irksome when it's the only machine available.

By contrast, updating Linux or Mac OS X can be done in the background, with no hassle except a single restart that may take minutes instead of seconds.

(And Windows tried to tell me very often that updating could be done in the background, but it was lying.)

 

[Beelzebuddy]

What does your company do to earn its living? I love my IT group to death, but they don't know the first thing about the software that runs our lab equipment, and keeps us all employed.

Biology, so we have much the same problem regarding our equipment. For example, microscopes which can only interface with computers running Windows 95, which themselves can only transfer data via LAN to Windows XP, which can then talk to modern systems. IT does not like this.

Unfortunately, I do not share your enthusiasm for my IT group. We've got the old-school arrangement, ironically also a relic of the 90s, where a bearded guru sits in meditation somewhere upon a pile of security alerts, endlessly chanting a stream of Update Policies which are scribbled down by lackeys and handed to sub-lackeys to disseminate. Or so I assume. The only people we actually meet are the sub-sub-under-neophytes of the order, who are trusted with (and just about capable of) reimaging the entire system when a problem they can't diagnose (that is, any problem) arises.

Hence the need for external backup disks which we maintain ourselves, kept carefully out of their capable hands.

 

[xtifr]

Go away! We don't want you! Linux is for me, not you pathetic losers!

Ok, I'm going to mention something that will probably make no sense to you, but is a big reason I refuse to use Win or Mac: focus-follows-mouse + no-autoraise. That means that the window I'm typing into doesn't have to be on top. It may sound really strange to you, but to me, it is one of the key differences between a good GUI and a bad one. It's an optional feature, but if you're a touch typist, once you get used to it, you'll never ever want to use a system that doesn't have it.

But seriously, if you want to try Linux, just try it. It's free for the download, and you can run it directly off the CD or set it up as a virtual machine or dual-boot. Try several. The different flavors are often quite different, as are the various desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, my favorite XFCE, Enlightenment, LXDE, Windowmaker, etc., etc.). What it lacks in mainstream acceptance, it makes up for in incredible flexibility.

 

[Louigi Verona]

I also question some of the points - for example it says that the key reason for lack of malware on Linux is that the software repositories mean that all software is vetted first. But doesn't that rather assume that the main vector of infection is downloaded software? I don't think that's a safe assumption.

Not really. There are many reasons why Linux is unlikely to ever have large amounts of viruses.

1. Software is typically in repositories, which are maintained by the community. Even "downloaded" software has its own repo. Most of the downloaded software you'll install will be from big companies, that offer drivers or Skype or smth like that.

2. Architecture of different distros might be so dofferent, a virus author has to write a really sophisticated virus to handle all of it.

3. The amount of Linux users on the desktop is small, compared to other OSes, like Windows or OsX.

Viruses happen, but extremely rare and it is quickly sniffed out by the community.

In other words, as malware and viruses are concerned, Linux is rather safe.

 

[elgarak]

Go away! We don't want you! Linux is for me, not you pathetic losers!

Ok, I'm going to mention something that will probably make no sense to you, but is a big reason I refuse to use Win or Mac: focus-follows-mouse + no-autoraise. That means that the window I'm typing into doesn't have to be on top. It may sound really strange to you, but to me, it is one of the key differences between a good GUI and a bad one. It's an optional feature, but if you're a touch typist, once you get used to it, you'll never ever want to use a system that doesn't have it.

But seriously, if you want to try Linux, just try it. It's free for the download, and you can run it directly off the CD or set it up as a virtual machine or dual-boot. Try several. The different flavors are often quite different, as are the various desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, my favorite XFCE, Enlightenment, LXDE, Windowmaker, etc., etc.). What it lacks in mainstream acceptance, it makes up for in incredible flexibility.

Frankly, I disagree with you on the highlighted part. A good UI should properly communicate between the machine and the human where the focus lies. Allowing to type into an background window makes it ambiguous, however.

(What drives me nuts, though, which no GUI I used does, is keeping a window I type in as foreground. I frequently launch programs I know take their sweet time to get up and running, and try to bridge the time by working in another program, only to be yanked away by some stupid splash screen, or other nonsense. Why or why can't programs just launch in the background and wait for me to get back to them?)

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

How's our sale going Squeegee? I'd imagine you're reaching slowly for a Win8 DVD.. If so, the plan is working perfectly...

Carry on.

I've not had time to pursue this as I want to recently, but my current thinking is this - as the programs that I need Windows for are the CPU intensive ones, what I might do is run Linux in a virtual machine and use that for things like browsing the internet, and use Windows for the projects that I work on.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Ok, I'm going to mention something that will probably make no sense to you, but is a big reason I refuse to use Win or Mac: focus-follows-mouse + no-autoraise. That means that the window I'm typing into doesn't have to be on top. It may sound really strange to you, but to me, it is one of the key differences between a good GUI and a bad one. It's an optional feature, but if you're a touch typist, once you get used to it, you'll never ever want to use a system that doesn't have it.

I can see the advantage of that. Whether I'd want to use it more often than I'd want to not use it is something I'm not sure of, however.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Not really. There are many reasons why Linux is unlikely to ever have large amounts of viruses.

1. Software is typically in repositories, which are maintained by the community. Even "downloaded" software has its own repo. Most of the downloaded software you'll install will be from big companies, that offer drivers or Skype or smth like that.

2. Architecture of different distros might be so dofferent, a virus author has to write a really sophisticated virus to handle all of it.

3. The amount of Linux users on the desktop is small, compared to other OSes, like Windows or OsX.

Viruses happen, but extremely rare and it is quickly sniffed out by the community.

In other words, as malware and viruses are concerned, Linux is rather safe.

Your first point is the same point that they made, and the other two are completely different points. I'll quote the article directly:

17. Lack of malware

Malware is virtually unheard of on Linux. This is mainly down to the open source nature of the software. If you install from your distro's repositories, you know the software has been checked by them.

If the lack of malware is mainly down to people downloading software from the repositories, then that necessarily implies that the main vector for malware is people installing programs that aren't sourced from repositories. I don't think that's true. While it's true that you can get malware that way, I'd say that things like malicious scripts on websites would be a more common vector.

Your other points may be correct, but they are not the point that the article made, and I am yet to be convinced that the point that the article made is sound.

 

[commandlinegamer]

Frankly, I disagree with you on the highlighted part. A good UI should properly communicate between the machine and the human where the focus lies. Allowing to type into an background window makes it ambiguous, however.

No.

A window, partially hidden, can still retain focus. (FVWM, my window manager of choice, has different colours by default for the titlebar and borders of a focused window and an unfocused one, so it's easy to see where the focus is. Most window managers have different colours for the titlebar at least.)

The previous poster mentioned autoraise, which moves the window into which the pointer has been moved, to the top.

If you don't enable autoraise, the stacking order of windows doesn't change regardless of where you put the mouse. (As an experiment I just turned it off in FVWM. The focus still changes as you move the pointer between windows, but they don't raise unless you click the titlebar.) Useful perhaps if you're reading content from one window and writing into another, and you don't want to have to flit between the two.

 

[elgarak]

No.

A window, partially hidden, can still retain focus. (FVWM, my window manager of choice, has different colours by default for the titlebar and borders of a focused window and an unfocused one, so it's easy to see where the focus is. Most window managers have different colours for the titlebar at least.)

The previous poster mentioned autoraise, which moves the window into which the pointer has been moved, to the top.

If you don't enable autoraise, the stacking order of windows doesn't change regardless of where you put the mouse. (As an experiment I just turned it off in FVWM. The focus still changes as you move the pointer between windows, but they don't raise unless you click the titlebar.) Useful perhaps if you're reading content from one window and writing into another, and you don't want to have to flit between the two.

Ah. I missed that there was an indicator of the focus other than "Window in foreground".

The way you describe auto raise, it seems that it's enough to move the mouse to raise a windows to the foreground. I can't see that making sense in general. Neither Windows nor Mac OS X does that -- you have to click to move the window under the mouse to the foreground (the click goes through to whatever control field may be beneath it in Windows, while in Mac OS X a single click usually just puts the window in foreground -- except for some apps. Annoying.) Are you speaking of focus or "Window in foreground"?

 

[commandlinegamer]

The way you describe auto raise, it seems that it's enough to move the mouse to raise a windows to the foreground.

That's generally what happens, yes. You can adjust the time it takes to raise - I set it at 750ms.

I can't see that making sense in general. Neither Windows nor Mac OS X does that...

But it does to me because it's what I'm used to.

Are you speaking of focus or "Window in foreground"?

Well focus comes first, then the raise to foreground.

 

[xtifr]

Ah. I missed that there was an indicator of the focus other than "Window in foreground".

The way you describe auto raise, it seems that it's enough to move the mouse to raise a windows to the foreground. I can't see that making sense in general.

Autoraise is orthogonal to the focus mechanism. Win & Mac combine click-to-focus (CTF) with autoraise as the only option. You're probably not even used to thinking of them as separate things. Most Linux window managers, though, allow either CTF or focus-follows-mouse (FFM), and separately allow you to choose whether to have autoraise or not.

FFM+autoraise works fine; it saves you a lot of clicking when switching windows. (And it's fun, when you have a half a dozen windows or so open, to swirl the mouse around and watch them all pop up to the top, one after the other.) Not to my tastes, but no worse that the default behavior on Win/Mac.

Some Linux window managers don't even allow overlapping windows, which removes the whole issue of raising, and simply leaves you with focus to deal with. Again, not my cup of tea, but these "tiling" window managers have devout fans who scorn anything else.

ETA: Most Linux window managers, including the tiling ones, also provide multiple virtual desktops you can switch between with a single click or keypress.

 

[Modified]

Ok, I'm going to mention something that will probably make no sense to you, but is a big reason I refuse to use Win or Mac: focus-follows-mouse + no-autoraise.

This is why I implemented an FFM system for Java virtual desktops, used in an application that I develop and constantly use. I wasn't able to overcome click-to-raise, but at least you can type into and scroll a window without raising it.

The loss of FFM was a huge productivity killer in the days of small screens, but it is somewhat mitigated these days with a big screen or multiple screens.

There are some third party solutions for Windows, but I've never tried any of them.