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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.
I find Linux to be a congenial programming environment, where I can noodle together scripts and programs to get things done. It provides lots of sharp tools that make things easy.
It doesn't get in the way like certain other OSs I could mention. It doesn't squander system resources on non-essentials (ditto), and I can tune it to allocate resources where they are needed. Oh, and did I mention? It just plain works!
...laura
Granted I'm a FreeBSD guy [insert comment about why BSD is dying here] but I think the arguments are basically the same as for Linux. I agree with most of TFA, but I enjoy using FreeBSD and other Free software for another important reason: the people.
Despite the fact commercial products can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, their technical support services nearly always suck: they're slow, obscure, vague, answered by people who don't know what they're talking about or are reading off a sheet of paper that assumes everyone they reply to is an idiot, or at the very worst you don't get an answer at all. Just speaking from my own experience.
Now granted there are plenty of jackarses on forums for Free software and the like, but on the whole I can post a question and generally get a useful response and in a fraction of the time. Plus if it's for a particular piece of ported software, generally I can either contact the port maintainer or the creator of the software directly and get helpful answers. I've NEVER got that from commercial software vendors. That's what makes the difference.
Cheers, ~ Ruben
I can relate to this. Linux not being widely used.
Some years ago, I was in engineering and involved in 'fixing' a system built by our IT department. They had sunk about $300 million into a system that was just barely functional. We (engineering and manufacturing) were supposed to supply them with appropriate requirements so IT could start over (yet again) building another piece of crap.
We convinced our management that we should hammer out requirements by building a functioning prototype. As our IT department maintained a stranglehold over all things Windows, we chose to build on Linux and a few surplus Sun desktops with Perl, Apache and a few COTS packages. Keeping the IT dept. and Windows out of the picture allowed us to get a working demo of the shop floor interface up and running within a few weeks and half a dozen people completed the 'prototype' in about 6 months.
When our system was up and running, it actually outperformed the one running on the Windows backend. When management saw it, they just gave the order to pull the plug on the legacy Windows system and place ours into production.
Part of my job after the project completion (about 10% of my time) was to administrate 6 hosts that made up the new system. When our IT department made a pitch to management to take over administration, they quoted an recurring maintenance cost for their proposal of $50,000 per host per month. Management fell off their chairs laughing and I suggested that they pay me 6 * $50,000 per month.
Have gnu, will travel.
Me too, at work anyway.
Which is why it irks me to no end, when I log in as administrator on a Windows-box and tell it to please terminate a given process, and it does not. Not until you've told it to do that three times and waited for minutes anyway.
Or I tell it to delete a file, and it tells me I "can't" do that, because the file is "open". I don't want to fiddle with that shit. I know what I'm doing, I want the OS to get out of my way and just bloody do what I tell it to do. Which Windows won't.
And yes, I am -fully- aware of the WHY. The underlying reason is a weakness in the "file" metaphor used on Windows, but that's not much of an excuse. (on unix a "file" is a chunk of bytes with zero-or-more names. On Windows a "file" is a chunk of bytes with -precisely- ONE name) (okay, that ignores character and block-devices and fifos, but don't be nitpicky here...)
I want to be able to install a update, yet NOT reboot anytime during the next 4 hours. Yes, I'm fully aware that program FOO may then fail to work properly until I finally do reboot, I STILL don't want to reboot now. And I'd much prefer if the OS could refrain from nagging every 15 minutes about that....
Irrational? Hardly!
The fact that I use Linux more or less exclusively makes people a lot less likely to ask for support on MS/MacOS related problems. Maybe that makes me asocial, but so what? Before I gave up on MS, my time did not belong to me, whereas now it does. If the phone calls in the middle of the night, it won't be one of my brothers having trouble installing a new sound card anymore. It'll be something that does actually matter in the middle of the night!
So I use other software that does the stuff I need, and my OS is also my hobby, and I'm not in the unpaid computer support business anymore - what's irrational about that?
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.