Hello all.
As a medium hardness geek I know of Linux as being an alternative operating system, but not much else.
What are some of its advantages? Disadvantages?
And no I do not by any means require an alternative operating system right now but again, perhaps if it has some nice advantages I could be persuaded to give it a try.
So die hard geeks of the Straight Dope, I request you eradicate my ignorance regarding Linux.
What are you using now?
Pro: Linux is a great platform for software development. Most (essentially all, in fact) major programming languages were first designed to operate in a Unix/Linux environment.
Con: Mac OS X provides a full Unix environment as well (in fact a certified Unix environment, which Linux is not), without the hassle of Linux and with much better major application support.
Pro: You have an enormous ability to customize your system - there are a practically infinite number of file managers, desktop environments, email programs, etc. available, most of which are themselves highly customizable. If you have some bizarre preference (you would prefer to be able to triple-right-click on your Desktop and open Firefox), you can probably make Linux do that.
Con: Most major commercial applications are not available, and (in my opinion) despite the huge number of theoretically equivalent open-source applications available, the poor quality of almost all of them and lack of support makes that irrelevant. Additionally, the enormous amount of customization places the burden on you to figure out what configuration of options works best.
Pro: If you like to tinker with your computer to get things to work, or try cutting-edge experimental software, you’ll never run out of things to play with. If spending 3 hours trying different desktop environments until you find one you like, and then spending another 2 hours getting all the options set up the way you want sounds like a good time, Linux is for you.
Con: Sometimes, you have to tinker with your computer even when you don’t want to.
largely stable. boots extremely quickly. recovers very well when it crashes.
You are probably already using linux now and don’t know it. (Android, PVR, etc.)
If your needs are simple (web, email, multimedia), then ubuntu would work well for you.
If your needs are complex (Log Data analysis, Satellite Video interpretation, MRI data gathering and display), then a variety of linuxen would work well for you.
If gaming is a priority, Linux may work for you.
If you’re somewhere in the middle, there may be things it won’t do well for you (work your printer, use your webcam, hit IE only websites)
You are by and large your own Tech support. There’s a wealth of information available to troubleshoot almost ANY problem via Google, but it requires the ability to formulate the question, and occasionally requires some Arkane Darq Magicks. (Symbolic link to a new FIFO spool using a serial device in /dev )
If anything, as a medium hardness geek, it would be beneficial for you to know it, if only to add it to your rucksack of tools. When you can build Gentoo from source using a Level 3 image, your journey will be complete.
I don’t use linux at home, but I have a linux workstation.
I like it because it’s very stable, and very customize-able.
If you do a lot of PC gaming, especially cutting edge games that are just coming out, you’ll definitely want to keep a windows partition for that.
I believe that malware and spyware and such are a lot less prevalent on Linux systems, so I believe you have less to worry about there.
WINE can be used for a number of windows-only programs, so even though major software may not have a linux version, you usually can get it working to some extent in Linux, if not working completely well.
I am actually thinking about heading over to Linux at home, put it alongside a windows 7 partition, just because it boots fast and it’s stable, and a lot of fun to tinker with.
ConCon: The Unix side of Mac OS X is annoying to maintain, and is about 12 years behind major Linux distributions as far as ease of use. Even with fink or macports it’s still difficult. You often end up with multiple copies of perl, gcc, etc. I can believe it’s certified Unix, because that is exactly how things were maintaining real Unix systems in the 90s.
Linux is now really the “default” Unix system. Most commercial software that historically ran on Unix is now supported on Linux (probably Red Hat) as a first tier system. Anyway, Linux might not be “real” Unix, but today that doesn’t matter at all.
I think that translates to “if what you’re expecting is Microsoft Excel then you won’t be happy with the alternatives.” I feel exactly that way whenever I go from my preferred Linux environment to Windows. Even with powershell and ports of many Linux/Unix applications it just doesn’t work the way I want. And of course I feel that many commercial applications exhibit poor quality and a lack of support.
That part above I agree with completely. If you like playing with a computer, then Linux is a vast new playground. Not merely configuring it to work the way you want, but just exploring it to see how things work.
Covered_In_Bees!, don’t ask why to try it, just give it a go. Grab a live CD or USB image, boot into a live system, preferably one that offers persistent storage, so changes that you make stay, and see what you think. A good reason to use it to put new life into an older computer or netbook which is too underpowered to satisfactorily run Windows 7.
Advantages:
It’s completely immune to windows-based malware. It’s not 100 percent immune to every bit of malware out there, but the vast majority of viruses and malware is targeted at windows boxes. Malware and viruses for other systems (mac and linux) is rare enough that you could surf the SDMB on a linux box as a guest without an ad blocker and not really worry about ending up in one of the ATMB threads about your computer becoming infected. You can do random google searches for things and not worry about the links that you click on. For those who are so inclined, you could even surf porn sites safely. Linux weenies like to boast about how their OS is such a better design and all of that, while in reality it’s more due to security through obscurity than anything else. Whatever the reason though, surfing the web with a linux box is much, much safer than using a windows box.
Surfing and e-mail are pretty much the same as on a windows box. The learning curve for linux isn’t what it used to be. Switching to linux is pretty painless.
Support is much better than what you get from microsoft, which is kinda surprising since microsoft is the huge and powerful giant with paid tech support folks, and linux is supported by other users on message boards who don’t even get paid for their work. In my experience though, no matter what obscure question you can think of to ask, someone out there will answer it. The few times that I have used microsoft’s tech support, my question was brushed over by someone who obviously hadn’t taken the time to read it and think about it long enough to understand what I was talking about.
Cost.
Disadvantages:
Much more limited availability of software. For many programs, there simply isn’t a linux equivalent available. Games are the most common example. Many other windows programs do not have a linux equivalent though.
Many linux programs that are available are poor copies of their windows counterparts. Open office (or whatever it calls itself these days) claims to be a direct replacement for Microsoft Office. While the word processor is pretty good IMHO (and doesn’t suffer from the “let’s see how many buttons and tabs and useless bits of crap we can shove at the top your screen” that Microsoft seems caught up in), the overall office suite is not quite good enough to be the generic replacement for microsoft office that it claims to be. Linux has freecell, but it’s appearance is a bit clunky compared to the windows version. Freecell may be an unimportant game, but it’s typical of a lot of software out there. The linux version works and is usable, but it’s just not quite as spiffy and easy to use as the windows program. The more common and popular the app, the less likely this is to be true.
Installing programs that aren’t part of your linux distribution can be a royal pain in the backside. Something that is part of your linux distribution is usually easy to install. Just go into add/remove software, click on the software you want to install, follow the on-screen prompts, and you’re done. If you want software that isn’t part of the normal distribution though, quite often one of the installation steps is “compile your program”. Now you’re a software engineer, not a user, and if something fails during the compile portion, you get a few thousand error messages scrolling up your screen that mean absolutely nothing to you.
When everything works, it’s great. When it doesn’t work, fixing it can just about require you to be a software engineer. You may have to edit cryptic and very unintuitive scripts. For example, a fix for a VNC problem that I recently ran into was to add “xkb” to the file ~/.x11vncrc. Not exactly a point and click friendly type of solution.
Limited support for hardware. The latest whiz-bang thing is guaranteed to have a windows driver and windows based software to use it. It’s not guaranteed to have a linux driver or linux software available. Sometimes the new whiz-bang thing may be protected by non-disclosure agreements, which doesn’t work with linux. A lot of laptop wireless interfaces won’t work under linux because the chip manufacturer won’t release details about how the chip works without an NDA.
For what it’s worth, I do almost all of my internet surfing on a linux box these days. The immunity to windows viruses and malware outranks every other consideration by far. I also run windows systems for the windows based software that I want to use.
Another thing you might want to play with is Virtual Machines.
There are some VM drivers you could get for free (Oracle Virtual Box, formerly Sun Virtual Box).
With this, you can create a virtual machine within your Windows system, and in that VM you can install whatever other operating system you want, like Linux. You could create a whole bunch of VM’s and install a bunch of different Linuces to play with them and compare them.
I am using Ubuntu Linux right now. Inside of this, I had three VM’s for a Linux class I took, running three different Linux distributions. I also ran a VM with Windows Server when I took some classes for that. VM’s give you a lot of flexibility to just play around and experiment with things. If you make a mess of it, at worst you just delete the whole VM and start over.
Your VM’s can also be set up to be integrated with the surrounding “host” machine – you can transfer files back and forth, and have separate windows side by side running VM apps and host machine apps.
I disagree with the hardware comments. It might seem like Windows is better for hardware because manufacturers make drivers specifically for it and vendors make sure the machine is actually working before sellng it, but have you tried installing something in Windows? Or reinstalling Windows and having to track down the drivers for your hardware afterwards? Pain in the arse. I bought a TV tuner card, which came with a CD with the drivers and a piece of software to use, didn’t work at all. I was using Vista 64bit, which is commonly believed to be one of the worst windows systems, but as soon as I plugged it into the linux machine it worked straight away, with plenty of freely available tools to record from it. In fact I just moved it to an unmodified Slackware machine and it worked straight away. In Ubuntu the jockey-gtk tool automatically installed a special driver for it.
Similarly for software. I’ve never had to compile my own software on Ubuntu, although that’s the norm on Slackware. Ubuntu comes with a very large repository, easily extended through the PPA system. I can’t compare all the available software to proprietary equivalents, but LibreOffice is perfectly adequate for Office stuff, GIMP for image manipulation, Openshot for video editing and so on. Mythtv for a PVR, of course. Obviously the standard casual software is the same, Firefox and Thunderbird and so on. Not as many games of course, although there’s a number of good ones, but the big name ones aren’t normally available.
One of Linux’s strengths is that you can do whatever you like with it, so supercomputers tend to run on Linux because they can compile their own kernel to optimise their speed, the same for Google’s Android and Chrome systems, based on Gentoo Linux. But most users won’t need to do that. It’s also the reason there are so many versions about, including all the Live systems out there.
Also, on the outside chance that something goes horribly wrong, like an ACPI problem I once had, there’s probably a kernel patch out there somewhere to fix it, while if Windows goes wrong, good luck with Microsoft tech support.
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A Live CD will also let you install as a dual boot, allowing you to have both your existing Windows and Linux available. It can shrink your Windows partition* to make room for Linux (20 GB would be more than enough). Linux can see your Windows partition, so all your data will be available in both OSs.
If you have room, shrink Windows by 30 to 40 GB, and you can install more than one Linux, while you’re trying them out. I have two Linux partitions, and whenever I want to upgrade, or try a different Linux version, I can overwrite the one I’m not using. Zero risk.
*Backup your Windows partition first, of course, as a precaution.
It’s a little crusty, but the main points still hold true:
In the Beginning was the command line
When the wife jumped ship from windows to Mac, we P2V’d her laptop and made a VM image out of it. So she ended up with exactly the environment she was used to (Software, documents, shortcuts), and was able to get comfortable with OS X at her own speed.
In what way?
Without spending an hour doing the research for you*, Un*x is the preeminent development environment used in universities, where a great deal of language development occurs. (There’s a neat intersection of Professors who are doing research, students who work for free, and the price can’t be beat.)
Nearly ALL security related software comes out under oper source first. Where it comes to a windows environment, it’d often bodged on top of cygwin, to varying degrees of success.
Commenting on the underlying core of OS X, it’s pretty hit or miss. Macports/fink goes a long way to getting your un*x stuff working on a Mac…and I’ve had great success with Wireshark, Nmap, and other security packages on the Mac, running a LAMP stack was…less than satisfying.
Absolute: I’m using Windows 7 Home 64-bit.
Hopefully there is some exaggeration in there because I don’t know if I’d enjoy myself after the first hour.
johnpost: Those are some definite pros.
I do indeed own an Android phone and completely forgot that Android is based on Linux.
Regarding your listed needs, my needs are #1 and #3. I tend to be pretty basic on my computer when I’m not playing graphics intensive games.
If it comes down to it I will definitely be going with a dual boot of Windows/Linux as has been mentioned more recently in the thread.
Ah yes, I had my suspicions about this from the various e-conversations I’ve read where Linux gets brought up and it is unfortunate. As I’d be dual booting with Windows it hopefully would be less of an issue though.
The idea to use an older computer is one I will have to look into. I do have an older one sitting around that would probably benefit from a hard drive wipe and just starting fresh. Poor thing is filled with aforementioned malware and god knows what else. Speaking of malware and viruses, the difficulty in which it is to acquire a virus of malicious software makes me want to do this almost exclusively for the girl I’m seeing. She’s notoriously bad at reading the prompts that come when you’re installing new software and usually ends with new undocumented features with each new download.
Myself on the other hand am already quite careful when it comes to such things but the freedom of mind in safer net exploration is a benefit can’t be denied.
engineer comp geek: Thank you for your post. I’d quote it but I already touched on the malware and software issues.
Senegoid: What is the meaningful difference between running a virtual machine and simply partitioning off a piece of my hard drive and loading The Real Deal onto it? Going back and forth between Windows and Linux would be several times easier with VMs at least, so I imagine.
Sùil Dubh: I’m warning you now, the last person to speak ill of my family hasn’t been found.
ZenBeam: Thanks for bringing up dual booting and saying how much drive space should be for Linux. It was something I was planning on asking.
Everyone: Thank you all for your replies and the wealth of information we’ve already got covered. Keep the good stuff coming.
One thing I want to ask is hypothetically, if I were to Linux installed in some form (actual OS on my disk or VM or LiveBoot disc), where would I go to actually learn what I’m doing? It’s not an operating system you just jump into, is it? Does it not require some knowledge of how to do things before you can start enjoying it? Is this where my full ignorance will be revealed?
Addendum: I wrote this post in Notepad first and when I copied it into the reply box it came out double-spaced, which I had not done in Notepad. Any idea how to prevent that in the future? EDIT: Damn Notepad apparently also compressed the whole post to the left of the page. WTF?
Again, thank you all for the replies. You’re awesome!
good stuff here
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromWindows
also stuff around there on making a dual boot machine.
you can have two operating systems on the same machine though dual booting or running a virtual machine.
making a dual booting machine needs to be done carefully. windows has to be installed first if you want the easiest process. the windows partition tool will give results that both windows and linux will see.
if you have an older machine you will get more performance with the same hardware using linux.
Remember that “Linux” is technically just the kernel, which most users don’t actually work with directly. The stuff that you DO interact with are things like the shell, windowing system, and GUI widgets. What you DO get with an installation of Ubuntu or Fedora is a system that acts somewhat like a traditional UNIX system and has (or can easily run) lot of classic UNIX type utilities, and for which porting to another Unixlike system may be easier than porting to or from a native Windows app (though, there’s this thing called Cygwin that gives Windows a Unixlike API).
VMs take up a lot of system resources, especially RAM. Fine on a big system, > 4 GB of RAM, but not ideal for an old system.
You’ll most probably start up into a normal GUI rather like Windows to the naked eye, applet on the top bar for connecting to a network, that sort of thing. Obviously the more advanced functions will be different, but just for basic use it’s the same sort of thing you’re probably used to.
Allow me to foist my recent experiences into this thread. I recently got sick of XP install on my home machine - after it crapped out for the second time in two months (stuck in a boot loop, no solution but format and re-install).
After the first crap-out I was finally motivated enough to start investigating live-cds, although I procrastinated on committing until the second crap-out (I’d been toying with the idea of moving to linux for some time).
So of course the first distro I tried out was ubuntu, but sadly it just got stuck on the loading screen every time. Checked out knoppix, was not impressed, checked out Fedora 15 and was somewhat more impressed.
By the time XP crapped out the second time Fedora 16 was out, and that’s what I went with.
I tried to install a dual-boot initially, XP and F16, but gasp, shock, XP was having none of that, so Fedora won first place in the installed O/S competition.
A word of caution, my bee-covered friend: I don’t know about later Windows versions, but XP does not take kindly to shrinking or any other offences to its partition. I’d suggest you familiarize yourself with a partition cloning tool like Clonezilla before attempting any install (unless you’re fine with losing Windows entirely).
That said, it’s best to install linux after Windows (I don’t think you can install Windows as a second O/S - it has to be on first, think it’s the only O/S, and be circumnavigated by bootloaders later).
I must now point out that just about every XP install I’ve done, very much including the latest ones, I’ve battled with display and network drivers. Network drivers being my favourite, because then you can’t connect to the internet to search.
Installing F16 took about 10 minutes and when it was done EVERYTHING WORKED. Granted this is a fairly bare-bones machine as far as graphic cards and what-not, but my point is Fedora succeeded where XP sp 3 slipstreamed installs fail reliably.
I’m somewhat in the same boat here, and all I can say is linux tutorials are abundant on the web.
What you might want to read up on so long:
The terminal, and using the command-line. It may be possible to do a pure GUI set-up and never need the command-line, but I certainly wouldn’t bet on it.
Bootloaders - unfortunately if you’re dual-booting you may have to get your hands dirty here if your linux distro doesn’t nail it 100%.
I’d also recommend at least understanding how linux is different to Windows - understanding how certain things are fundamentally different may help you later. Also read up on the difference between Debian and Red Hat file packaging.
Have you looked at any livecd distros yet? I would obviously recommend Fedora 16, but I’m also strongly considering putting Mint 12 on as a second linux install - it looks like a nice distro indeed.
Linux is free