Slashdot Mirror
OMGUbuntu: 'Why Use Linux?' Answered in 3 Short Words (omgubuntu.co.uk)
Linux-focused blog OMGUbuntu's Joey-Elijah Sneddon shared a post today in which he is trying to explain why people should Linux. He stumbled upon the question when he typed "Why use" and Google suggested Linux as one of the most frequent questions. From the article: The question posed is not one that I sincerely ask myself very often. The answer has, over the years, become complicated. It's grown into a bloated ball of elastic bands, each reason stretched around and now reliant on another. But I wanted to answer. Helpfully, my brain began to spit out all the predictable nouns: "Why use Linux? Because of security! Because of control! Because of privacy, community, and a general sense of purpose! Because it's fast! Because it's virus free! Because I'm dang-well used to it now! Because, heck, I can shape it to look like pretty much anything I want it to using themes and widgets and CSS and extensions and blingy little desktop trinkets!"
Nuff said.
* it has bash plus coreutils and all the other command line toolset
* its software is free as in beer (this is what made me try out linux)
* its software is free as in software (this is what made me stay on linux for so long)
* all the things I do with computers can be done with it, and when there is a case I can't do it on linux, I can always fire up the windows VM (happens very very rarely)
* it has working package management. updating software is no nightmare. Windows has to force its customers to update it, because its a nightmare.
* most support issues are talked about and you find something you can instantly do not where you have to download this little exe then execute it (and god knows what it may contain). Maybe this will get worse if/when linux adoption reaches the non technical people, its very hard to find such things for android for example.
many other things I have forgotten, but I will surely miss when I have to use windows or mac.
Really, Slashdot? Clickbait? "Because it's better". Would that have been so difficult to throw into the Summary? I'm ashamed.
2016 and if I upgrade my kernel to 4.7, no wifi...again. Fucking Linux still sucks.
No. Vendor. Lockin.
said no one ever
So that your nerdy friend will stop bugging you to use a *real* operating system, and start bugging you to read the fine manual! :D
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
No wait that's wrong...
Apart from the ignorance that linux is even an option for most people and the fear of change i'd say gaming is one of the biggest factors keeping people away from it.
If i could run all my games natively without having to fight with a VM or wine or suffer massive performance hit i'd switch over in a heartbeat. Everything i run on this machine has a linux alternative except the games; hell half the stuff i run is a port from linux anyway.
Until then i'm stuck with windows because it'd be far too much work having to reboot any time i want to just play a game if i dual booted.
It's not Windows.
It's not spyware.
It's not Microsoft.
It respects you.
It's your computer!
Try it today!
That is all ...
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
I love the the post talks Siri, which macOS has, which is a competitor to Windows' Cortana. It opens with talking about how his friend/sister/whatever uses Siri on their phone. But Linux is unequivocally better, despite missing this feature.
Yes, not everyone loves it, it's easy to see as a gimmick but it's really hard to claim Linux is 100% better when it's missing this feature discussed in the article itself. Someone out there thinks it's important, too -- over a year ago it was answering a billion questions a week, just for iPhone users (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-08/siri-how-many-questions-do-you-answer-per-minute-). Surely Android + Windows + iPhone + Mac is way more than that now.
for servers at least. Sorry, but I'll stick with Windows and OSX for desktop usage for wider software support and both are good enough these days.
No one is under the age old "Mac" ideology that the linux is not vulnerable to OS virus's, just that at this stage there is a lot less attacking it.
As with anything this will rise as linux gains traction, as did with mac's.
It is about not being railroaded into some companies business plan and being able to make your own decision about how to use your own hardware!.
Microsoft want to nickel and dime you and everyone, they are just setting up the infrastructure for it now, very soon EVERYTHING will be a UWP and will only be distributed via the Microsoft store.
I want to call it the ApplSoft model.
""Keeps your secrets" vs "Do no privacy"
"National Security Agency"
"Secret Intelligence Service"
Who wants code by private sector teams that allowed 5 eye nations to get all the plain text for years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You have a very narrow definition of phishing, it commonly includes sending people files pretending to be a trusted source.
... "I love systemd"? I bet that's what they are.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
Sounds like a new dance craze.
Why use Linux? Because of security! Because of control! Because of privacy, community, and a general sense of purpose! Because it’s fast! Because it’s virus free! Because i’m dang-well used to it now! Because, heck, I can shape it to look like pretty much anything I want it to using themes and widgets and CSS and extensions and blingy little desktop trinkets!
Security - unless you screw up one of a million subtle things. Control? Not only does it allow you control, it _requires_ that you understand how to control every damned thing (90% of the time it just works, then the other time everything is broken). Fast? Unless you configure something wrong. Virus free? Granted. Can make it look any way you want to? Well, yes and no - you can make it look many different ways, but you end up swearing at whoever forbade the particular combination you actually wanted, and every few years and upgrade screws everything up because new-GNOME has no relationship to old-GNOME.
because it’s better
Well ... I was dedicated to having a Linux desktop for over a decade, then one day I realized that those hours and days of things being broken every time I pulled the upgrade trigger were avoidable. Now I have various Linux devices around as infrastructure, but my desktop machines are pretty vanilla OSX. Which maybe was more expensive in dollars, but my desktop hasn't been comprehensively busted for years, now. Minor bustage, of course, but not xkcd "being circled by sharks" levels of bustage.
Unfortunately, now that my desktop is set, I get cranky about my infrastructure services breaking every six months when I do an upgrade. Unfortunately, there isn't an alternative that I think will beat Linux for what I want to do. But at that point we're well into nerdville, so if you want to get into a heated discussion about Linux versus FreeBSD, great, but that isn't going to drive installs for normal users.
TFS title says the answer is three words. TFS gives 12 sentences without the 3 words.
From TFA:
Because it's better
... it's an efficient server platform and offers a *nix environment with an easy-to-grok underpinning that a human can eventually understand, until systemd entendrils itself everywhere because non-determinism is cool now.
Ohhhh... You mean "Why do I use Linux on the Desktop?"
I don't. I use a Mac laptop and a Win10 PC desktop. I want to get work done and/or play games, not fiddle with crap.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I have been a hard-core LInux user for over 15 years, running it on desktops, laptops, everything, completely eschewing the WIndows ecosystem (except for some occasional Wine use). Then I moved to an employer that is 100% OSX based. Running Linux on a bare metal Macbook was not an option due to the necessity of running security software mandated by their compliance department (along with a security token for MFA that doesn't work with Linux).
So I switched to OSX and run Linux in a VM, ssh'ing to it as needed.
I was reluctant to make the switch at first, but now am quite happy with OSX as my main OS -- everything works, the laptop sleeps and wakes up as it should, the integrated touchpad and camera work flawlessly, it switches from a single monitor to my double desktop monitors without a problem, then switches back to the laptop display when I unplug. Presentation mode works well when I plug in the projector.
While running running Linux on my thinkpad, I've experienced lots of problems -- sometimes the laptop would fail to suspend -- I'd pull it out of my backpack and it'd be hot with a nearly dead battery after continuing to run while the lid was closed, sometimes it would fail to wake up and I'd have to power cycle it. Sound was a recurring problem, I'd have to restart the sound daemon at least once a week, and plugging in an external monitor was always an exercise in finding out where my windows scattered to and hoping that it found the right resolution for my monitor.
On the server side, I'm a big fan of Linux, but on the desktop, I'm become a fan of OSX.
Anyone who can use a GUI can use a terminal. Many people don't want to because it is not sexy (I understand them) but it is actually more straightforward than a GUI. Think of it as giving orders to your computer.
Anyway, now, most Linux distributions can be used without a terminal, just like Windows and OSX. The terminal is still there for power users, but then again, just like Windows and OSX.
I still think that Linux on the desktop has many shortcomings but the terminal is not one of them.
Compiling. Networking. CUDA.
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Yeah, since the command line interpreter on Windows was so unimportant that Microsoft wrote a completely new one (PowerShell).
>get rid of Terminal
Get rid of yourself.
--
BMO
FTFY
and now a haiku.
Linux is better,
Microsoft ruined Windows,
Liberated user!
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
You haven't worked with normal users much, have you? It can be a shock how little most people understand their computers and how they work. They simply memorize the actions needed to accomplish specific tasks, and that's good enough for them. The big blue E icon on their desktop means "the internet", until it drives someone they know who's a bit more knowledgeable insane, and they replace it with a Fox or round primary icon, and then THAT becomes "the internet" for them.
I'll put it bluntly. No, normal users should stay away from the terminal, nor should they *need* to use it for daily operations. If they're interested in learning how to work at a command prompt, that just means they're probably on the verge of becoming a power user. That's not a bad thing, of course, but it's not what most people want to spend their time doing.
Figuring out how to use a terminal requires a non-trivial learning curve. That's because there's no intuitive method of command / feature discovery, unlike with a menu, toolbars with tooltips, and dialog boxes that show you all the options in a visual, hierarchical format. There's a reason GUIs are ubiquitous in nearly all computing platforms today, with the possible exception of headless servers, embedded systems, and other specialized systems.
I'm a programmer, so yes, I'm comfortable with various shells, but I think some people seem to overly fetishize it, like it's a badge of their geekdom or a symbol of their arcane power over a computer. The command line is just power and flexibility at the expense of user friendliness. Once learned, it's a very handy tool in your arsenal, and can be more efficient for some type of operations. Don't pretend it's anything but that, or you're just fooling yourself.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It is not ok to reboot my laptop in the middle of the night. I don't care what security canard you dangle in front of me, do not reboot my laptop unless you ask, and I say OK. Waking up to a rebooted laptop is pure and simple bullshit. I'm pretty sure I saw it come out of the bull and hit the ground, it's bullshit.
Spying on your users is bad. You really should not be spying on your users. Yeah, I can turn the spying off. But you turning it back on everytime I get an "update"? Fuck you.
Remind me again why my figuring out how to restart a dead Explorer every 3 days or so makes your uptime impressive. Except for those times you decide to toss a mandatory update my way at 2 AM, when I'm asleep and I assume my laptop is also.
Why do I stay with you? Games. I sincerely hope Steam kicks your ever loving ass off to government TLA's or you go the way of buggy whip makers.
Cuz fuck you and the horse you rode in on, I fucking hate Win 10.
1998 called and wants their argument back. The driver thing WAS true in 1998.
Pick any version of Windows from the last 6 years and any enterprise Linux and you'll find the Linux supports more hardware, and more often does so out of the box, with no driver disk/download.
The workaround for Restricted Boot, which I define as UEFI Secure Boot that a PC's owner cannot reconfigure, is to buy a different make and model PC without Restricted Boot. But that fails if all close substitutes also have Restricted Boot. So which PC form factors are more likely to have Restricted Boot? Is it mostly, say, laptops smaller than 12 inches or with a detachable keyboard?
The average person the street gave up on all the windows drama and just got a Xbox or Playstation [...] People are fed up with microsoft
If "[p]eople are fed up with [M]icrosoft", then why did they buy an Xbox 360 instead of a PlayStation 3 or an Xbox One instead of a PlayStation 4?
I thought both macOS and X11/Linux used CUPS for printing, and CUPS supported all PostScript printers, and laser printers were more likely to support PostScript. In addition, HP explicitly supports CUPS on Linux through HPLIP. Or are 11x17 color lasers the exception? Or what else am I missing?
for all those who need "themes and widgets and CSS and extensions and blingy little desktop trinkets".
for those that need excel. not so much...
What can't be done with Regedit can be done with a custom app that I can build myself.
Unless it requires something at the driver level. Windows 10 64-bit can no longer normally run drivers developed by individuals. Instead, it requires drivers to have been digitally signed with an EV certificate, and I'm told EV certificates are available only to established corporations and LLCs.
And as long as Win32 exists, so does non-UWP development.
Not if the executable loader offers no access to the underlying Win32 subsystem to apps that aren't first-party. That's what happened with Windows RT. If Windows RT allowed Win32 access, developers could flip the switch in Visual Studio from Win32/x86 to Win32/ARM, recompile, and ship. But instead, Microsoft chose to lock down access to Win32 in Windows RT and allow only what are now called UWP apps.
Forgive the "jumping off a cliff argument", but if all my friends are playing games not ported to X11/Linux, how should I go about finding new friends with whom to play X11/Linux-compatible games online?
N/T
1. It suits me
2. Tux is cute
3. Microsoft Windows Sucks
4. Macs cost loads
5. Tux is cute
John_Chalisque
Actually, no I don't and that's why I don't use any *nix anymore. After years of dealing with BSD and others, I like a system where I don't have to build or configure every last item that I need to do my job. Linux is great for servers and all kinds of backends, but as a desktop day to day usage OS I hate it and having to maintain it.
Free, Functional, & Secure. Oh wait...
The main reason for using Linux is security; and control! The two main reasons are security and control; and privacy! The three main reasons ... no, amongst the reasons are such items as ...
Sorry to any Monty Python fans...
You don't 'use' OS; you use whatever software you need to do whatever you do.
If a Linux distro does it for you, great - it's cheaper and often easier to keep operating acceptably than Windows.
If it doesn't, well, tough luck.
To this day, it mostly doesn't.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
Because of the Terminal.....You want Linux to become more mainstream? Get rid of the Terminal
You do know that Windows has a terminal? And Windows power users use it.
You have a very narrow definition of phishing, it commonly includes sending people files pretending to be a trusted source.
So? Such files are generally malware that will only run on Windows.
If I switched to Linux today, and refused to buy games that won't run on it..... ....I won't get to play those games. ...... The last thing I am going to do is build my life around duties imposed by some random person on the Internet.
When you got to "some random person on the internet" I immediately thought of Satya Nadella. I guess you did not mean me to think him or similar control freaks cases in the mould of Cook, Gates, Balmer and Jobs. However I am not sure what person or "duties" you are referring to.
Invented on Linux's crappy UI and still the most awsome and useful UI paradigm invented since the UI. The only problem with it is it has been dumbed down since 2009 for no reason I can tell other than to make it easier for Windows, then finally Mac users to use.
I know people who start using Linux see the default Linux UI experience as not much. But it used to be a lot more configurable. I liked customizing my own UI experience because I wasn't building a comptuer for everyone else, I was building it for me. So, I was building it to impress myself. When my friends saw it it blew them away.
I prefer the power paradigm of Linux. That's what I like about Linux, it forces you to get better. I want every single scrap of CPU cycle I can get out of my machine.
lean. powerful.configurable.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You should have stopped at "because of community". Where is the ethos, there is the best place to develop. You get to benefit from the cumulative creativity of many of smart people.
I have(had) been a user of Linux since 2004(Fedora 2 was the first distribution I tried). It sucked relearning everything I knew on Windows but with more experience I got adept at Linux, even worked as a part time sysadmin for a while and was much more productive on it than windows. But now Linux is incorporating the same things that I hated in Windows, yes I mean systemd. Not only the monolithic design but having to relearn everything I've known about managing it. I hardly use the GUI except for a browser(which is why I'm on fluxbox), it just baffled me how much effort it took to modify udevd to automount a USB stick(creating a simple udevd rule leads to a race condition because of systemd) and that is when I decided to move to FreeBSD, I know it is going to work the same way in 5 years. All the software I use is already available for FreeBSD with the exception of android-studio, but I can get used to eclipse for android work which is rare, vim suffices for most of my development needs(python, php, erlang). As long as Lennart Poettering is calling the shots I won't have anything to do with Linux, but I suspect by the time he leaves it will be too late.
I'm a programmer, so yes, I'm comfortable with various shells, but I think some people seem to overly fetishize it, like it's a badge of their geekdom or a symbol of their arcane power over a computer. The command line is just power and flexibility at the expense of user friendliness. Once learned, it's a very handy tool in your arsenal, and can be more efficient for some type of operations. Don't pretend it's anything but that, or you're just fooling yourself.
Personally, I'm with Doug Englebart on this one. Why do people ride bicycles instead of tricycles? Tricycles are easier to learn and harder to fall off right?
People ride bicycles because there's a perceived benefit to doing so, and so are willing to put in the effort to learn. People tend learn a few of the more advanced tricks in Excel for the same reason, or touchtyping. Sure discoverability and smooth learning curve helps things, but ultimately people need to see how learning a particular skill will be useful to them, and I think we programmers do a fairly bad job at showing this to people
I just refurbished a 7 year old laptop that originally had Windows 7 Home on it and thought I'd see how it ran with the latest Ubuntu LTS version. I made a live usb stick and booted from it. Everything looked good, until I pressed return at the "Try Ubuntu" menu item. The screen then went black and stayed that way. After some googling I discovered there was an old bug (allegedly fixed) that caused the backlight in some laptops to turn off. The instructions for getting around this were so convoluted, requiring you to first somehow install Ubuntu blind, that I gave up and installed Win 10, which has worked great for everything I want to do with the laptop. I even got it to record over-the-air digital tv using a cheap usb tuner stick connected to an old rooftop antenna. I doubt that I'd be able to do that in Linux, and certainly not as easily!
Windows just works fine for everything I need.
"because it's better" are four words.
Terminal
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
I buy printers at Best Buy or wherever. I have no doubt that you had some problem with some printer, I haven't so much. I once noticed that HP's printer driver for Linux was more up to date than their Windows driver. Mostly I buy HP and Lexmark, maybe some other brands are different, or maybe you installed the wrong driver or something, I don't know. Most of the time, the latest version of Windows is supported by the the newest consumer-grade stuff at Best Buy, though, sure. It's the older and more professional stuff that's weak im recent Windows.
What I DO know is that because of the huge difference in support for older hardware, by the numbers Linux supports far more pieces of hardware. For me, I often buy hardware like RAID cards that cost $1,400 a few years ago; I find them for $85 on eBay. I have the equalivent of a $12,000 workstation or server cluster from few years ago, for about $1,000. A lot of that hardware isn't supported by Windows 10.
Most people seem to have cellular internet access nowadays.
And for the rest of people, do you expect them to subscribe (or to renew a subscription that has lapsed) before buying a laptop or peripheral? Besides, how should they find a compatible cellular modem to get cellular Internet access on their laptops in the first place?
The industry I'm in requires 7-10 years of future supply availability for things we design/validate... so, we tend to stay away from the EBay bargains - sure, they work great, but we've got to supply 1000 copies a year for the coming X years, and make multiple departments confident that we will be able to do that.
The last driver nightmare I had was on a video capture card - we needed "HD video capture" and the selection in Linux was down to 2 potential vendors, whereas Windows had a dozen or more to choose from. That situation may be improving today, but 2 years back, it was pretty annoying.
The current system I'm working on is a hybrid, Linux and Windows under a hypervisor - lots of reasons for that, some of them good.
* its software is free as in beer (this is what made me try out linux)
For almost all practical purposes so is Windows and you can get all the good Linux software on Windows and Mac too.
NO, it is not. Mac OS is not either. Free as in beer means free as in beer - no cost. You cannot LEGALLY get Windows for free. Which leads to the OTHER free, which is free as in freedom - which clearly the other two are not either. You can get all the good Linux software on Windows and Mac? Hold that thought.
* its software is free as in software (this is what made me stay on linux for so long)
Like it or not, users in the vast majority don't care about that and it won't draw them to Linux. As far as the software is concerned that same free software like Blender, Gimp and LibreOffice are available on Windows and Mac too. No exclusivity to Linux.
Again... hold that thought.
* it has working package management. updating software is no nightmare. Windows has to force its customers to update it, because its a nightmare.
yep! But remember Windows has Chocolatey and Mac has Homebrew, this covers many of the free software options and for proprietary software you most often need to go through their updaters whether you're on Windows, Mac or Linux anyway.
It's great that it does what you need but you have to remember that above anything else a computer is a tool to run the programs a user needs and while Windows and Mac run pretty much anything Linux does the same cannot be said the other way around and most standard applications in industry support Windows & Mac but not Linux. It might be more secure and/or more stable and free of charge and open source but none of those things matter if it doesn't run the applications I need.
So it's a chicken and egg problem, if you want people to use it they need their applications to support it and to do that you need users. So what you need to offer is some disruptive innovation, some great feature that draws people to Linux, something so good that they would be willing to temporarily forgo the lack of applications and work through the kludge of dual-booting or VMs until their programs supported Linux as a first class citizen. But for the entire life of the hundreds of Linux desktop distributions none has ever offered the user such a feature(s).
Now you can pretend this isn't true, mod it down and fantasize about how desktop Linux is simple held back by a big conspiracy perpetrated by Microsoft and Apple but the fact is it has succeeded incredibly in pretty much all other markets including those in which Microsoft and Apple participate - and it dominates! Server? Dominates! Embedded? Dominates! Mobile? Dominates! Desktop? Utter failure!
So you say Linux dominates in server, embedded, and mobile. So remember what the question was - why do you use linux? The three word answer could very well be "Server, Embedded, Mobile".
And if you don't like the linux desktop because you like or use something that isn't supported on it, that is ok too. I don't think that is an utter failure, however. That is more up to the applications than the OS. There is nothing the OS is doing to prevent them from creating a version for linux. Which brings me all the way back to where I said to hold that thought. Do you know WHY apps that are on linux are also on Windows and Mac? Because of the openness, the other freedom mentioned above. It's not ABOUT exclusivity. It's not about cornering market share, or keeping secrets, or patents, or obscurity, or profits, or lock-out, or lock-in, or backroom deals, or crushing the competition.
I use it, and have used it exclusively outside of my job, since 1998. No dual boot, no VM. It does everything I want. I can't say it hasn't been frustrating at times, but I have never ONCE considered going to windows or mac. It meshes we
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
> The industry I'm in requires 7-10 years of future supply availability for things we design/validate... so, we tend to stay away from the EBay bargains
Which pretty much ends up being the same thing, as far as driver support goes - you need to have confidence that it will still be supported in the future, when it becomes an eBay bargain. What you're starting to use today, I'll start using in five years - and you'll still be using it.
It's not uncommon on the Linux Kernel mailing List to see a post "is anybody still using 1999-era Foo hardware from Bar Inc? If not, we may remove support." If somebody is still using it, the general policy is that the newest kernel should keep supporting it. Of course we have to *know* that somebody is still using it, so if you rely on hardware that's 15+ years old it would be good to monitor support.
My understanding is that the same is not true of Windows - you can't even email their engineer in charge of hardware X, much less will he continue support for you. You -can- email most any Linux maintainer, and they'll respond (but see ESR's Smart Questions document).
As you probably know, enterprise distributions like RHEL/CentOS support the entire distro for up to ten years. Red Hat / CentOS 7 EOL is 2024, so anything supported by CentOS 7 today will still be supported at least until 2024.
If it were me, if I wanted support for a brand new consumer device that just came out last week, I'd bet on Windows. If I wanted long-term support, to have the device supported when it's ten years old, I'd definitely bet on Linux.