About a year or so ago, I had a problem with a Linksys NAS200 network storage device. I wanted be prepared in case of hardware failure, which meant reading one of the drives in an external enclosure. Turns out the NAS runs Linux, so I (innocently) posted here, got some great advice, started with Knoppix, then (cue dramatic lightning and music) I LOOKED LINUX IN THE EYES!!!
The NAS is now the backup device, sitting in the basement (I fished some cable down there to keep it somewhat physically distant from the office). In its place is a home-built Linux server with all sorts of servery goodness (RAID, Samba, LAMP) that makes our home office very, very happy. I still work on a Winbox, Mrs. Dvl on her Mac, but our workaday has been substantially enhappied by the addition of the Linbox.
My laptop (an old circa 2000 Dell) now runs Linux/OpenOffice just fine, along with a wireless USB device, and runs faster than XP ever did.
All because I looked Linux in the eyes. It all started slowly, of course, but in retrospect it was inevitable. The community is fantastic (Ubuntu, at least, but I’ve found help in lots of places), and though I’ve had a few hiccups here and there, nothing that wasn’t solvable.
Fantastic post! (Follow-up nitpicks and corrections included.)
If anyone else liked reading about the history, may I recommend Revolution OS. It’s available via Netflix (instant watch, too). It deals a lot with both Linux, GNU, and the whole open source shebang. Good interviews with the major figures in the development.
Good answers, most of them. Rather than comment on them, I will describe my own experiences. At home I use Win XP (and my experience with Vista was a disaster). In my office I struggled with Linux for a few years and finally got my sysop to install XP, which is still there. A couple reasons. Most important were two pieces of software that didn’t run under Linux and barely ran under the windows emulator I tried (Wine). One is the command line processor 4NT which, IMHO, makes the command line easier to use than windows (particularly for navigating among directories) and the other is the editor I have been using for nearly 25 years (Kedit, it is called) and which is now an outgrowth of my increasingly feeble brain. One (relatively minor) nitpick about linux is that a command file cannot be used to set an environment variable, since the setting goes away when the file terminates. This means that the way I work, which is to set the filename I work on in a variable and then operate on it with various utilities, cannot be used. This can be overcome by using temporary files, but is a nuisance.
On the other hand, all my mail comes to a Linux server in my department office and I read it using the unix program pine. It never comes to my windows machine unless I explicitly downloaded. One result is that I have never caught a virus! It has some deficiencies. It cannot run a url unless the http:// is explicit and does not respond to symbolic links at all, only explicit URLs. But that’s OK, they are nearly always junk anyway. So unix/linux has its advantages too, but I just don’t feel comfortable using it on my main machines.
Incidentally, one of these years, my editor will fail to install under some later version of windows (its last major upgrade was to Win 95, but there was a minor one for Vista, but support is likely to end this year or next) and, should I still be around, maybe I will finally abandon windows (as it has, with Vista, abandoned me).
It’s disingenuous to compare DOS to Unix-like OSes. Microsoft had its own version of Unix at the same time that it was selling DOS, called Xenix, which was actually quite successful. MS was perfectly aware of multi-tasking, different levels of privilege and so on. But at that time, getting something like Unix to run on a personal computer was a pipe dream. Simple OSes like DOS were the best that PCs could manage. Apple pioneered the mass-market GUI, but it was still running on top of a simple OS.
Is Red Hat Linux not popular any more? Their HQ used to be across the street from where I work but I don’t see many people mention them. I hear a lot more about Debian and Ubuntu.
I meant to say - anyone thinking about Linux must read the Linux Hater’s Blog. At first sight he may come across like a troll, but he actually knows his stuff, and obviously is a long-time user. Maybe a Linux-lover in disguise.
Best read from the earliest posts onwards, because he does run out of material later on. There are a few prominent people in the Linux world, like one of the top guys at Gnome, who confess to enjoying LHB.
I always hear Linux runs most servers but I don’t know what their market share is. I know a lot of big supercomputers are IBM mainframes. I also know there are some that are Linux clusters made of a large number of PCs.
I get what you’re saying, but I think that’s like saying a lot of motorcycles are trees. Supercomputers and mainframes are different classes of things.
My favorite quote “Linux is only free if your time is worthless”.
I’m a Windows man, but very computer savy. I had to setup Nagios to monitor a few hundred network clients. It had to run on Linux.
I installed Ubuntu on a Acer small form factor PC. I had installed Windows XP on the identical hardware the day before.
It was interesting, it took about the same amount of time to install both OS’s, they had about the same number of updates needed (~120), and had the same number of reboots (3).
My problem was just setting-up the application (which is probably more app based then OS). Talk about a PITA, I had to manually enter each device into a config file using a text editor. No problem, except the text editor would freak-out 1 in 5 times when I would paste data into the file. It wouldn’t paste where the cursor was, it would randomly choose a place in my 800 line text file! Awesome.
Then when I wanted to change the audible alert for Nagios, I changed the config file to point to a new .wav file that I moved into the folder. But it didn’t work. Why? Well I had to modify the permissions of the file using some crazy command line tags.
Once everything was configured it ran fine, but it was a pain to configure.
Just don’t let anyone talk you into Linux because of stability. Since Windows 2000 I can count the number of BSODs (Blue Screens of Death) on 1 hand. I’ll admit I haven’t touched Vista yet but I have XP running on 5 computers at home and not one has crashed. Hell I still have a P166 running Windows NT Server 4.0 (my domain controller) and I haven’t logged into it in like 2 years! But it still authenticates users onto my domain.
McDeath_the_Mad has a good point about configuration and permissions in Linux. It drives me nuts that there aren’t more GUI front ends available for certain tasks. Especially the ones you’d think people in the process of trying to leave Windows behind would need, like setting up and configuring Samba. If anyone knows of a good GUI front-end for that for Ubuntu, please let me know.