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The REAL Reason We Use Linux
Vlad Dolezal writes "We tell people we use Linux because it's secure. Or because it's free, because it's customizable, because it has excellent community support... But all of that is just marketing BS. We tell that to non-Linux users because they wouldn't understand the REAL reason." The answer to his question probably won't surprise you.
We use it because it's ours.
David
...in many circles, anyway. I have no desire to tinker. I want it to "just work". I tried using Linux multiple times from when I downloaded my first copy of Red Hat in 1999 or so, through some attempts with Mandrake and SuSe. None of them "just worked" - driver support was missing, programs didn't work as expected (or work at all), etc, etc. So I stuck with Windows. Finally, Ubuntu came about and I saw that someone was taking seriously the notion that people wanted things to "just work" (I would say that Red Hat and SuSe didn't take that notion seriously until recently - they were making OS's for business use, after all, so a trained IT tech would be setting things up and maintaining them - they didn't have to "just work" for your average user, because someone else would be taking care of most of the tough stuff). Even so, the early versions of Ubuntu weren't the best (and there are still many problems with wireless support - ndiswrapper is a poor substitute for a native driver, sad to say). The 6.x series was almost there, and finally I feel like the 7.x series is something I can actually use full time (and indeed I am - I built a new system last November and for the first time didn't bother to install Windows on it). I didn't install Ubuntu because it was fun to tinker. I installed it because it was free, easy to use, and not crippled by DRM. That's it, plain and simple.
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
but I use Linux because I don't want to pay MS for anything. ever. again.
Sure, I pay donations to those software projects that I use, but it's affordable, and upgrades are free of DRM, spyware, and other nasties that I don't want to have to pay for. For me and my family, Linux works just as good if not better than MS products. That is why we use Linux.
Fun? The Internet is fun no matter what OS is on the machine you are using. Paying to use a program seems rather ignorant at the prices MS charges. On Linux I never get a genuine advantage check BS window. Thats fun.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I don't know about all this fun stuff. I use Linux because it does the job I need it to. More to the point though, when something goes wrong it is pretty simple to track it down and fix it. Heck, I have repaired systems that have become seriously mangled where with Windows you wouldn't have much choice but to start over.
;-)
I switched to Linux from UNIX (Irix at that time) and did so because that is the environment I need for my work. These days I use OS X for much the same reason. Whatever MS does to Windows, it is still a very closed system. If closed floats your boat, fine, but don't try and say that closed gets you a more reliable and cost effective system.
Actually, UNIX is fun I guess
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Yes, and I've also had Linux do the same thing. It didn't give an error, but no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
I think a more accurate list (from my view at least) is:
1. Linux gives you complete control
2. Linux is free (as-in-speech)
3. Software install is easy
4. It has less potential problems with web dev for a Linux server
5. No DRM! You own the hardware, you own the software, you own the data.
Oh, and the penguin is more cuddly than some flag or some annoying animated critter
While it was nice to RTFA, which I do actually before posting. (yeah I am a weirdo, people keep telling me)
However, the truth to this story is ---- "But all of that is just marketing BS"
it's a one page, - THIS I BELIEVE page. Other then throw a sudden 30,000 hits on the author's site it will accomplish nothing. it's not anything I can tell a non-linux user that would draw any more of a response then when you tell your dog a joke..
They stripped out the article because its worthless.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
It really makes sense. Don't get me wrong, having the freedom to tinker with the kernel is nice. Having the ability to see the source code to ensure safety is great. But the majority of users don't actually use Linux (or any computer OS) for those purposes... they aren't a means to an end.
I personally use Linux third to Mac OS X (at home), which is second to Windows (at work). I like understanding the different systems, because that's how I can keep up with the extreme pace of the software development industry. But I almost never use Windows at home, and here's why: competition.
I want Microsoft to feel the pressure of competition. They have been feeling it for the past couple of years. And what do you know, it works! Firefox has caused the IE team to push towards open standards compliance. Love or hate OOXML, it's easier to work with than older formats (due to pressure from OOo and iWork). And there are many reasons to hate Vista, but it is more secure than older versions of Windows, it has much more advanced compositing, and a host of new things that are good for the future, even if they hurt now.
So, I care more about the future of the computing world... the future of my career, a future of openness by major corporations that enables someone little like me to start and run a business. And I'm doing my part to make sure that happens.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I use linux because, in certain instances, it's the right tool for the job. I'm busy. I don't have time to play around tinkering anymore ( and yes, I do have grey hair, thank you very much ). So when I want something that'll "just work", I analyse all the tools at my disposal, and choose one based on merits.
Quite often that's linux. Sometimes that's windows. But regardless of the choice, the end result is hopefully the same: A system that just works without me needing to constantly hold it's hand.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Boss: Why should we switch to Linux?
Me: Because it's fun!
Boss: Thanks for your input. You can go now.
Boss (to the secretary): Please get me HR on the line. I think we're over-paying some staff.
This is possibly the lamest story I've ever seen on slashdot. The article then lists THREE other reasons - plural with an 's' - (not one) why the author uses Linux. By 'we' I think he's referring to himself, his blow up sex doll and his imaginary friends.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
One of my favorite things about Free software in general is that the programmers and the people who write the documentation don't feel like they have to keep this "professional" face on their work.
For example, you'll never find George W. Bush's face for the "unsharp filter" icon (Cinelerra) in a closed source program. That would indicate that the programmers were having fun, and that obviously makes the program of lower quality.
Personally, I think that if the developers are having fun, and are in a positive frame of mind, they'll make better software.
In a lot of people's experience (including mine), it's reality. Linux does have it's professional uses, but using it as a workstation is not viable for most people. Most people who pass on the opportunity to use Microsoft's software usually have an irrational hate for Microsoft itself and put that above what would be the best tool for the job.
Maybe Microsoft does use stooges to spread their marketing online, but I doubt they'd bother to do it on Slashdot (it's a lost cause), and even if they did, so what? You have no evidence, so stop throwing around accusations because someone has a difference of opinion.
Imagine Linux with all the tools which say "you should never have to use the command line." Such a distro would be pretty bad for most of us who currently use Linux because a command-line is fundamentally superior to a GUI for a lot of tasks we use it for. I always have at least three terminal windows open in addition to any GUI apps.
Similarly, I find that OS X (which is almost but not entirely unlike BSD) has a number of shortcomigns that make Linux and BSD better choices for me. My sister uses OSX however because it matches what she needs.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Hmmmm. Not sure I agree with you there. I'd agree it has familiarity on it's side, but it is a myth that Windows is somehow inherently easier to use!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
I not only have a real job but own a company, and I use Linux on the desktop because it saves me time and money. I don't have to have a seperate protocol for sharing files and remote desktop. I can drag a remote file onto an editor and save from the editor, and it'll save the remote copy. I have N desktops to spread my work over, and I'm a very visual person: I need that space.
.NET work done within two questions I have it boiled down to "someone told me it had to be done in .NET and I believed them."
My experience with windows is that it constantly needs attention, and I don't want to waste my time on that. The only reason Windows would be lower maintenance is Windows-only 3rd party applications, and for a software firm I don't need those. Any time someone thinks they need
Let's say you're running a webserver (apache) which connects to a postgre database. Do you check all the code in apache+mods? filesystems? DNS? NIS? FibreChannel drivers?
How is trusting Redhat/Debian/Suse to make sure their distribution is safe any different from trusting AIX or HPUX? I don't want to have to be the one at my company that audit's 1m lines of linux code to 'make sure it's safe' we just trust our distribution.
Powerful - I'm not big on benchmarks in general, but power does not necessarily mean speed. I would consider the fact that I can open up a 4GB text file on Linux with out-of-the-box tools as more powerful - but then again, that only matters to those of us who have the need to open a 4GB text file. I would consider that their is more free (quality) software available for Linux as more powerful, but somebody might point out all the shareware-junk that is out their for windows. Regardless, there are countless things I can do in linux faster than I can do in windows, and their are countless things I can do in Linux that I can't do in windows. Windows does have the edge in some market segments, but those areas are much less important to me for what I do most of the time.
Stable: Are you kidding me? You have to be kidding. Either you really don't know how to work with Linux and you have made some fundamental mistakes that cause crashes frequently (though I can't for the life of me think of any that would be that bad), or you really don't throw much at your windows installations (or maybe you are just plain lucky with your peripheral purchases and the software that you use). BSODs are less frequent than they used to be. They are WAY more frequent in my experience than crashes in any *nix environment.
Simple: Personally, I'd never call any OS simple. Linux is less complex to install than any other OS, but that's about it.
Inexpensive: you don't get less expensive than free. If you consider the total cost of ownership, Linux wins any reasonable analysis. Linux means training. Windows means paying not just for the OS repeatedly and going through forced upgrades with great frequency (upgrades = rollouts = licensing + project planning and execution cost), but also paying for a great many things that are free in a linux environment. When 80% of your end user base uses Word as a typewriter, E-mail, and Calendaring as their only computer tasks, it makes you wonder why you spend upwards of $700 on software alone per end user when you could have it all for free. Besides, show me an environment where end users don't need training on how to use their PC's and I'll show you an environment where end users are not properly trained.
Linux kernel is stable. However, from the user's poing of view, X crashing is the same as if the whole machine had gone. It takes all their applications with it because the default is to quit when connection to X is lost, and can happen quite often especially in a heavily stressed machine.
X and the graphical system in general is clearly the weakest point of modern-day Linux. It is an userland program, yet it has the same stability requirement than a kernel, and fails to live up to them. This is on top of various annoyances, like being apparently unable to switch the bit depth of the screen at runtime (affects at least Wine) and having to play around with modelines in config files to set up display modes.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to get fixed, because it only affects the desktop users and not the Important Server Guys.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Ummm, I don't know where to start with this post... I'll just sum it up in a thought; you need to run Slackware once or twice to understand why *nix is *nix. I'm not just saying that because I'm a Slackware fanboy, but rather, because you seem to miss the elegance and simplicity of text files for configs.
/etc/ that can be edited over SSH, and has a man 5 page, is superior to any other kind of scheme. There are a million reasons why a GUI interface for maintenance is a nightmare (and how would you like to set it up without a command line?) as compared to SSH. If you want to know why I say this, you'll first have to understand why *nix is *nix.
There are a million reasons why a single text file in
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Paranoia implies that the reasons for mistrust are without basis. I have basis for mistrust.
They include and exclude usability for the purpose of supporting the business models and interests they want to support, not those of the user or consumer. DRM is not there to serve the interests of the consumer. A wide variety of inclusions and exclusions of technologies are set that way for reasons other than for the use or benefit of the user. Not only do I dislike what they have done, but I distrust their motives. Other industries have done this; some successful, others not. The automotive industry had attempted to lock in maintenance of automobiles by restricting diagnostic codes, for example. This didn't work out so well in court. Big Content has had some failures and successes in influencing various Big Media providers to do their bidding. The creation of DRM was a big win for them where Microsoft and Apple complied. You may recall discussions about the FCC and the "Broadcast Flag." The intent was to prevent the recording of digital broadcasts through required implementation of the protocols surrounding the implementation of the broadcast flag. I forget where the discussion left off or if the issue is currently on hold, forgotten or if it's simply dead. (I doubt it's dead though... I expect it to return just as the end of 2009 approaches.)
All of this stuff is very anti-consumer and I prefer to remain free and unencumbered. I cannot trust Microsoft or Apple with my freedoms. Can you?
This isn't paranoia, or unfounded fear or mistrust. It is very well founded through numerous examples of user and consumer betrayal.
Fair enough. No offense intended. The reason I asked is that many people who complain about installation on Linux haven't tried the XP install.
And, it seems to me, your issues weren't with the install per se, but with codec installation. Agreed, that can be a bitch, depending on your distro, as you found out.
Me, I blame the idiots who patented math and those who allowed them to do so.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The idea is not that you check every single line of code ran by your company. The idea is that SOMEONE does. There's plenty of people reviewing the Linux kernel. There's plenty of people reviewing X. There's plenty reviewing GNOME (or KDE). There's plenty of people reviewing Apache, Postgres, etc. So you hire someone to write some webapp, that's the only code you *have* to review- because all the other stuff is reviewed by someone. But if it's entirely closed, you would have to trust the company. This is the case with Microsoft. They can do whatever they want because nobody can review it.
Care about privacy? Read this!
A service provider who consistently provides poor service, overcharges, commits fraud, and lies about competitors is not intrinsically neutral.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The only reasonable explanation to this logic is that they already had their conclusion (that Linux is inferior to Windows), and their "reasons" are merely to give an impression that they weren't biased.
Don't quote me on this.
Well, I only came in to clear up your misconception about DOS being anything like a unix shell.
Not to draw you over to linux or anything.
The whole hardware-support story is an old hat. It basically boils down to: If you want to use linux
then buy hardware that's supported by linux. Which, for the majority of peripherals, is not hard anymore.
Google for "$name_of_my_gadget linux" in advance and in 90% of cases you'll learn that it runs without
problems.
Furthermore it's also an old hat that the driver-situation in windows is not flawless either.
Yes, you get a pretty GUI, but if the pretty installer fails then you're SOL.
Even if you wanted to tinker - there is no ndiswrapper to try, no kernel options to tweak
and usually no alternative source for drivers either. If your old $whatever is not supported
in vista - tough luck. Not even an uber-user can help you there.
So, finally, to each it's own. You prefer the GUI, so stick with what you like.
But don't label yourself as the prototype of an "end-user". I know quite a few "end-users",
especially of the technically clueless type, who have quite happily switched to linux
recently. If really all you want to do is browse the web and do a bit of office work (without
touching a command line) then an ubuntu box can serve you well and in fact *save* you quite
a bit of trouble with regard to "tweaking the personal firewall", re-installing after trojan infections,
re-installing after a windows update screwed up your drivers or re-installing after your office
began to behave wierd for no obvious reason.
why would I, an end user, WANT to bother learning the CLI?
1. I have a folder with all types of files in it, say 1000 or so, which is common for me. I only want to move the *.gif and/or *.jpg files to another place. In the CLI, it takes 2 seconds. With a GUI, it is a nightmare.
2. I want to compare two file versions. Diff vs. what?
3. My internet connection appears to not work. I hop in a shell and ping www.yahoo.com. If that doesn't work, I ping a known good IP address. That works? Then DNS is the problem. Now, do that in a GUI.
4. I want to download a file fast to ANOTHER computer (usually to the server so everyone can access it). I find the file in Explorer using the GUI, then I SSH into the server, use WGET to download the file automatically to the right shared place on my Linux server. You can do that with a GUI, but it takes longer.
5. I see a domain name and want to know who owns it. I can either use Explorer, click to a few pages, to find out in 1-2 minutes, or switch to my SSH shell and do a simple "whois somedomain.com" and know in about 3 seconds.
6. Traceroute, dig, nslookup, and even nmap functions are very difficult or too time consuming to do in a GUI when compared to a CLI.
7. I need to take a comma delimited database, change the order of the fields, delete a few fields, and assign a unique ID number to each record. I can't even tell you how to do it in a GUI, but I can write about 20 lines of Perl in two minutes, and convert a 100 mb database over in one more minute.
I could go on an on. Although I use a GUI 80%-90% of my computing time, the other 10%+ in a command line are either impossible to do in a GUI, or insanely time consuming. There really ARE reasons to use a CLI for those of us that do more than run ONE program all day in a GUI. If you spend all day doing a singular task, then maybe no. The rest of us that fill a dozen shoes every day (particularly IT work) find it much, much easier to use the CLI.
It isn't like learning a few easy commands is going to hurt you.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Linux is a solid competent and in many ways superior Operating System. 99% of what 90% of the people do can easily be handled by Linux and they wouldn't know the difference if they had never seen an OS before. Definitely there are issues with it, but there are issues with all OSes. One has to ask themselves: if my mother or father had never used an OS before and I set up linux for them (to do their mail, chat with friends, browse the web, order products on line, etc.) would they know any different or would they not be able to do these tasks? A rational human being would say that 99% of what they want to do in that respect they can do.
So, why would anyone say that Linux is not able or unstable? It is because they have a beef with it. They don't like having to learn something new. They are set in their way (can't teach old dogs new tricks). They are a zealot for what they are used to (keep in mind I'm not disrespecting zealots--there are those that love a certain kind of car, or a brand of TV, or a favorite dish, etc.) It is those that actively seek to harm the others that make for a bad zealot. No, I'm not talking about those that are zealots that trying to bring an honest choice out and to balance the choices by giving others a choice. I'm talking about the irrational attack on an OS just because it is different.
Linux is ready for the desktop. The Linux market share is much greater than you can imagine. When the world is using 90% Windows and the rest is divided up by the other OSes, even small percentages in growth lead to millions of users. So, I really wish people would stop reacting like Linux has no users. It is estimated that world wide, across all distributions there are approximately 50 million Linux users. This is no small number. So, stop trying to belittle it. There was a time when DOS didn't have 50 million users and there was a time when Windows didn't even come close to the number of users that Linux has.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.