Why Linux? - The Complete Guide

Intro Goes Here

But Game x won't run on Linux!

Despite what some people may tell you, this simply isn't true. Most good indie games have a Linux Port, and with the rise of SteamOS (which is based on Debian), AAA titles are being ported to Linux all the time. A lot of older games will run in Wine («Put link There), a tool made so Windows applications run on Linux, and if you have a powerful PC, games can be run in VirtualBox («Link) (an emulator for Windows).

If you want to install Linux but absolutely need to use Windows for a certain task, you can install Linux alongside Windows and have the 2 operating systems on your PC at the same time, allowing you to select one OS when your computer boots up.

You can pick whatever Version of Linux you want

Unlike Traditional Operating Systems, there is no one OS called “Linux”. Instead, there are many different Operating Systems based off of the Linux Kernel, called “Distributions” or “Distros” for short. This means that if you don't like the way one distro works, you can chose another and still enjoy all the benefits of Linux. If one doesn’t suit you, and – most importantly – are skilled enough, you can even start your own distro!

Linux is free

You're probably saying to yourself : "Oh, I didn't pay for Windows". Are you absolutely sure ? If your computer came with a copy of Windows, then you paid for it, even if the store didn't tell you about that. The price for a Windows license amounts to an average of one fourth of each new computer's price. So unless you obtained Windows illegally, you probably paid for it. Where do you think Microsoft gets its money from?

On the other hand, you can get Linux completely free of charge. That's right, all these guys all around the world worked very hard to make a neat, secure, efficient, good-looking system, and they are giving their work away for everybody to use freely (if you wonder why these guys do such things, drop me a PM and I'll try to explain the best I can). Of course, some companies are making good business by selling support, documentation, hotline, etc., for their own version of Linux, and this is certainly a good thing. But most of the time, you won't need to pay a cent.

Linux is free (again)

Linux is also free as in freedom . This means their license is a "free license", and the most common is the GPL (General Public License). This license states that anyone is allowed to copy the software, see the source code (the "recipe"), modify it, and redistribute it as long as it remains licensed with the GPL.

So what do you care about freedom? Imagine that Microsoft disappears tomorrow (okay, that's not very likely, but what about in 5 years, 10 years?). Or imagine it suddenly triples the price for a Windows or Office license. If you're tied to Windows, there's nothing you can do. You (or your business) relies on this one company, on its software, and you can't possibly make things work without it (what good is a computer without an operating system?). Isn't that a serious problem? You're depending on one single company and trusting it wholeheartedly to let something so important nowadays as your computers work the way they should. If Microsoft decides to charge $1000 for the next version of Windows, there's nothing you can do about it (except switch to Linux, of course). If Windows has a bug that bothers you very much and Microsoft won't fix it, there's nothing you can do (and submitting bugs to Microsoft isn't that easy, see the "Report bugs" section).

With Open Source, if a particular project or company dies, all the code remains open to the community and people can keep improving it. If this project is especially useful to you, you can even do this yourself. If a particular bug annoys you, you can submit it, talk with the developers, but even better, you can fix it yourself (or hire someone to do so), and send the changes back to the upstream developers so that everyone gets the improvement as well. You're free to do (nearly) whatever you want with the software.

No Malware, At All!

This is for 4 main reasons.

1. When Someone makes a piece of Malware, they want it to affect the most people and be able to spread quickly. Which operating system do most people use? Windows. Over 11,000 unique viruses have been made for Windows (source: Panda Labs). Because only 16% of Malware consists of viruses (source: Panda Labs), through simple extrapolation we can say that there are 68,750 different viruses that can affect a current windows system! Now we'll compare that to Linux. According to the Ubuntu Wiki, there are only 35 pieces of Malware that ever affected Linux (out of 89 attempts), only 17 of which managed to do any harm to the system they were on when they were made, only 8 of them ever got out “into the wild”, and exactly 0 can actually do any harm to a modern (after 2002) Linux System. That’s 772 Windows vulnerabilities for every piece of Malware ever written for Linux!

2. As discussed above, anyone can look at and make changes to the Linux Kernel. This, combined with community bug tracking tools such as Canonical's Launchpad, means that bugs are found and fixed at an immense speed, usually within 1 or 2 weeks for low-risk bugs, 2 or 3 days for high-risk bugs.. In one famous case, a bug in Ubuntu that meant people could log in to a user without knowing the password by manipulating the onscreen keyboard, ease of access and function keys, was fixed within 9 hours. But it's not just about the pure speed of bugs being fixed. Say you found a bug in Windows (as you do). What would you do? You could ignore it, possibly try to make a temporary workaround? If you were concerned enough, you could report it to Microsoft (if their keyloggers haven’t done that already) and hope that they fix it in a few months, or in the next release of Windows, or the one after that. In Linux, you can either post it on a bug tracker, and, if you're so inclined, you could post a patch yourself.

3. A virus can spread only if it can affect the same vulnerability in each system it reaches. Because you are not allowed to modify Windows or OS X more than Microsoft or Apple want you to, most Windows and OS X builds are almost identical and will contain the same vulnerabilities. As discussed above, the Linux ecosystem is diverse, and almost every build is unique, due to the thousands of different distros available , so Malware cannot spread as easily.

4. As we will discuss below, almost All software in Linux is managed in a vast repository, not downloaded through third-parties like shadywebsite.com This means that almost no malware can be downloaded (the proper way) on Linux. And even if a piece of Malware got into the repository, it would easily be weeded out by someone if they installed it, and then removed.

Say Goodbye to Drivers

New pieces of hardware, even the simplest kind, usually come with a CD. On the CD, a very small piece of software called a "driver". If you read the instructions manual, you'll know that the hardware won't work on a Windows computer until you install the driver. If you're like most people and do not read the manual, then you'll probably figure it out yourself when you see your new high-tech gizmo doesn't work out of the box.

Insert CD, click on installation wizard, wait, eject CD, reboot computer.

If you bought the hardware a while ago and are re-using it on another computer, or you have realised how obsolete Optical Disks are and don’t have an Optical Disk Drive on your computer, you'll probably want to forget about the CD and fetch the latest version of the driver from the manufacturer's website. Which can take quite a bit of time, given how, huh, let's say strangely organized some manufacturers' web sites are.

Okay, now that's only one piece of hardware. Now imagine you want to install Windows on a whole new, untouched, computer. For each little piece of hardware you'll have to find the latest driver (or use a CD), install it, and reboot from time to time. Video card, sound card, keyboard, mouse, motherboard chipset, etc. (better do the video card driver first or you're stuck with your high-end screen showing a very low resolution mode). And that comes after an already rather long installation of Windows itself.

Linux doesn't need separate drivers. All the drivers are already included in the Linux kernel, the core of the system, and that comes with every single Linux installation. This means:

A very fast and standalone installation process. Once you're done, you have everything you need to start working (including the software you'll be using, see "When the system has installed..." item on this website).

Out-of-the-box ready peripherals.

Access and Update All your Software with one Click

If you want to install a piece of software in Windows, you'll need to:

1. Search the web to find which piece of software suits your needs.

2. Find a web site that allows you to download it.

3. Maybe pay for it.

4. Download it.

5. Install it.

6. Sometimes reboot your computer.

Whew, that's a lot of work to just try out something new!

With Linux, everything is much simpler. Linux has what is called a "package manager": each piece of software is contained in its own "package". If you need some new software, just open the package manager, type a few keywords, choose which software you want to install and press "Apply" or "OK". Or you can just browse existing software (that's a lot of choice!) in categories.

Linux also has an automatic software updater. So, about once or twice a week, your OS will ask you if you want to install updates to your software (or you can set them to be automatic) and, it you click yes, all your software will update. But there's more! (thatsnotall.png)

ever seen this message before?

(https://i.imgur.com/5UCpYVi.png)

If you're a Windows user, you probably have.

If you're a linux user, the message will look more like this

(https://i.imgur.com/O5Q7wDm.png)

In Linux, not only can you continue from where you left off after an update, you can use the applications while they are being updated. In some cases (such as Firefox) you might have to restart the application once to use the updated version, but with tightly integrated applications like GIMP (which is part of GNU), you can use the updated version when the updates have finished without having to restart the application. That's right, you can be in the middle of editing an image and use new features seconds after they are released.

No Fragmentation

If you already know what fragmentation is, and are already used to defragmenting your disk every month or so, here is the short version : Linux doesn't need defragmenting.

our hard disk is a huge file cabinet, with millions of drawers. Each drawer can only contain a fixed amount of data. Therefore, files that are larger than what such a drawer can contain need to be split up. Some files are so large that they need thousands of drawers. And of course, accessing these files is much easier when the drawers they occupy are close to one another in the file cabinet.

Now imagine you're the owner of this file cabinet, but you don't have time to take care of it, and you want to hire someone to take care of it for you. Two people come for the job, Alice and Bob.

Alice has the following strategy : she just empties the drawers when a file is removed, splits up any new file into smaller pieces the size of a drawer, and randomly stuffs each piece into the first available empty drawer. When you mention that this makes it rather difficult to find all the pieces of a particular file, the response is that a dozen workers must be hired every weekend to put the chest back in order.

Bob has a different technique : he keeps track, on a piece of paper, of contiguous empty drawers. When a new file arrives, he searches this list for a sufficiently long row of empty drawers, and this is where the file is placed. In this way, provided there is enough activity, the file cabinet is always tidy.

Without a doubt, you should hire Bob. Well, Windows uses Alice's method ; Linux uses Bob's. The more you use Windows, the slower it is to access files ; the more you use Linux, the faster it is.

If you don’t know what fragmenting is, your hard drive is divided into little chunks of, say, 1 Megabyte. Say you want to install Steam, and your hard drive is divided like this:

(HDD Graph)

For simplification purposes, let's say Steam is 5 Megabytes. On Windows, the HDD is searched for free chunks, and bits of the application are put into the first empty chunk, until the entire application is on the HDD. Not only does this make the Application slow to use and launch, it also makes for a longer installation process. Microsoft's solution to this was to make a defragmentation feature to resort the HDD, and get it up to the state of a Linux HDD.

(here's an idea. Have a picture of “3 hours remaining” on a windows file transfer, for example, and then have a caption underneath it say “now you know it's not just Bill Gate's terrible prediction skills causing this)

On Linux, the System keeps a record of contiguous empty chunks. When a new file arrives, it searches this list for a sufficiently long row of empty chunks, and places Steam there. This means that, provided there is enough activity, your HDD is always neat, tidy and easily accessible.

No more crapware.

If you've ever purchased a new computer running Windows, you must know that it can be a very frustrating experience.

It all starts when you first turn it on: countless windows start to open, asking you to subscribe for services, the premium version of an antivirus, games you never asked for, productivity applications requiring you to create an account online, etc.

But it doesn't stop there. Each time you boot your computer, all those pre-installed programs need to start in the background, and you have to wait longer and longer between the time you see your desktop appear on the screen and the time when it stops being much too slow to use because all those programs are starting up.

To add insult to injury, often times after you've owned your new computer for 30 days, new dialogs start to pop up, and you realize that some of these programs that you thought were free (for example, an antivirus) really aren't, all you have is a free 30-day trial.

The thing is, most computer manufacturers believe this is a good thing. They are installing programs onto your computer before you purchase it, thinking they will improve your experience, because you get "more" for the same price, and they believe this can help differentiate them from the competitors, who may not offer as many "improvements" over the default system, or maybe not the same ones. For them, this is added value.

But for the user, this is mostly more pain, more waiting, more uninstalling unwanted programs, more money to pay if you decide you do need that not-so-free-after-all antivirus, and at the end of the day, a bloated and crippled computer. That's why these programs have been given a not very polite name: "crapware".

None of that happens with Linux. Because almost no OS makers who make a Distro of Linux partner with any application makers, there is no software except the basics (Web Browser, Office Suite, E-Mail Client, so on) installed on Linux, and definitely no trial software!

Put Ideas Here

Microsoft Makes The Xbox

External links (for possible additions)

youtu.be/bARgcnyJ2I4

Wiki by /u/DAEderp

Sources:

ubuntu.com

Whylinuxisbetter.net

Wikipedia

Panda Labs