Why Linux ?

[neowolf]

One advise. Should medium know user change on Linux

[Rudy]

1. Fast loading time (Only a little over a minute on a 500 MHz CPU)

how can you say over a minute is FAST?? My windows 2000 box can start in 25-30 sec and my xp one 20-25sec

while linux on the 2k one took around 50-55 and 45-55 on the xp on

this is NOT fast at all

[Rudy]

oh and starting a program is painfully slow!! takes me 0.5-1 sec to start phoenix under windows but takes about 5-7 sec in linux WHY???

[DaNIsH]

You are sure this would prove to be true, even though you can't go to the trouble and say why you think Linux open-source range to be inferior? You're walking on shaky ground argumentatively.. :no:

True, there's a smaller retail range for Linux, but I certaintly don't feel this means an inferior range overall. Of course it's a matter of opinion (not fact), but I prefer the range Linux offers.

My "Too much trouble" reply was directed at "What apps do you want? We can discuss each one.". I couldn't really think of anything off the top of my head, and still can't really.

I guess it wasn't that great of an argument, as I havn't used linux for years, and like everything else.. the applications change in time.

So its probably best to just ignore the whole statement.

RE: Rudys slow program loading times:

I also noticed this, mainly when using pre-compiled binarys. I'm guessing it had something to do with the lack of optimization.

From what i've heard Gentoo runs everything fairly well/fast, thanks to portage.

[MrStaticVoid]

oh and starting a program is painfully  slow!! takes me 0.5-1 sec to start phoenix under windows but takes about 5-7 sec in linux WHY???

Firebird in Windows is compiled statically while Firebird in Linux is compiled using shared libraries. Linux dynamically links the libraries on startup while Windows doesn't have to. You can either compile Firebird statically or Prelink to make Firebird faster in Linux.

By the way...the biggest arguments against against Linux seem to be it's GUI, games, and drivers. What you fail to realize is how sexy GNOME 2.4 is, not everyone plays computer games (I have an Xbox for that), and drivers are contained in kernel modules that are as simple to load as `modprobe <module>'. I use only Linux all the time.

Don't you all ever get bored of Windows?

Don't you all ever get bored of QWERTY?

Don't you all ever get bored of MSN Messenger?

TRY SOMETHING NEW FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!

[Rudy]

gnome 2.4 is not that great :\ using it right now

[Rudy]

Don't you all ever get bored of Windows?

Don't you all ever get bored of QWERTY?

Don't you all ever get bored of MSN Messenger?

TRY SOMETHING NEW FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!

Bored of windows?? nop, it does everything i need (minus ssh)

bored of qwerty?? hell no, why would i want to use a different type of keyboard when im used to qwerty???

bored of MSN Messenger? no, why would i change protocol while all my friends are on msn?? so i can be 'different' by myself on some obscur network ??

btw i found one thing i really like about Gnome.......the crux theme!!! its great :)

[FalseLogic]

Create a paritition and install some version of linux and try it out.

I tried RedHat about 5 years ago. I'm sure it's much improved since then, but I thought it was utterly ridiculous that I had to compile an application as part of an installation procedure. I didn't know much unix back then, so it was kinda difficult. I would hope that's not the case anymore and you can download direct executables for most stuff.

Some of the window managers were pretty slick, but it always felt like it was just a few guys who were too busy to support it and fix the bugs.

Viruses are a cheap shot at windows. Nobody wants to write a virus for linux because there are so few people using it compared to windows machines. If someone wanted to I'm sure they'd have no problem finding an exploit.

[negative_zero]

- Slower, more clogged up (by default) GUI's.

try some of the other lighter guis like xfce, enlightenment, etc. you have a wide range to choose from. you are not just restricted to one or two.

- Nice collection of open source apps, but most do not live up to their windows clones. Eg. You may find a program that does what you want for whatever, but itll be missing one or more of the nice features the windows clone has.

name one feature you cant live without. and dont say games.

- Hardware support. Yes most hardware can run/be used on linux. But its normally nowhere near optimised/lacking alot of the features Windows gives.

actually if you compile your whole system from scratch (eg gentoo), it is MORE optimised and the OS makes the most of it.

- Security. Yes, I know this is what most people class as a Windows problem. But really, Linux has more exploits/vulnerabilitys found than Windows does. Windows is just more at threat/more of a fuss is made about it because its widely used.

i agree with you on that one. windows is put under the microscope more than linux, simply because more people are using it. but also look at how ANYONE can come up with the patch for a hole in linux because it is source is available. while you have to "work for MS" (to put it that way) to come up with a patch.

- Everything working in together. While Linux has this to some extent, Windows is alot better at it. Its hard to explain. Just the way applications/the OS works in with each other. It tends to feel like you're running everything seperate. That probably doesn't make sense.

care to explain how linux runs "everything seperate". i dont see any difference.

- It tends to take a long time/spin you around doing the most basic things. Eg. Instead of "Wow ICQ! *double clicks executable* *clicks next a bunch* " its "Wow ICQ! tar xvzf icq.tar.gz | cd icq | ./configure | make *long wait* | Oh, no.. you're missing 11 dependencies | Get dependencies | make *wait* | ERROR | Work out and fix error | make | make install"

Of course it isnt as bad these days with all the package managers/gentoo emerge etc. but the compiling still takes alot of time.

tell me honestly that you have never seen something like this in your time using windows. thing is that all the "dependencies" in windows are bundled. some of which are utterly useless. to put is in a somewhat vague way, you have the option to choose which "dlls" you want to have on your system.

- Stability. Now im not going to say its "less stable than Windows XP/above". But its stability is overrated. Windows PROGRAMS may crash a fair bit. But actual OS crashes barely happen these days (forget Win9x). And you cant tell me Linux programs never crash.

well mandrake crashed on me once. but it was probably a human error... yes that's what is was... a human error. :ninja:

- Setup and configuration. Now installing Linux may be alot faster than Windows to begin with, but to get it working just how you want it it can take forever. While Windows only takes a few hours. I wont get into that much.. but anyone whos tried it will know what I mean.

i bet i can setup knoppix in 10min max. :p

- Ease of use. Don't even need to give a reasoning for that statement.

mandrake 9.0 installer was much more user friendly what windows xp's. actually winxp got owned.

- Virii. Thought id add this to reply to some others. AFAIK Linux would be fairly virus susceptible, but as the Windows user base is much higher and less 'professional', virus writers tend to target Windows systems. By professional I'm trying to say alot of Windows users barely know what they're doing and the warning signs. While Linux users tend to be people who know computing/warning signs well.

Windows does have good virus protection programs available though. And from what I hear longhorn will have some built in.

same comment as "security"

-0

[ZackStorm]

Linux is good as a secure Server. It should not be used as a desktop :no: .

Windows is good for everything else.

^ Those are my oppinions and do not disagree with them. :whistle:

[JadeWolf324]

i think that KDE 3 is the best GUI for linux at the moment but thats just me. i also think linux works quite well as a home box as well as a server box. i run at home on a slightly advanced little network and i run apache server and proftpd quite easily with linux. (2 commands and i was up and running actually) plus webmin is very VERY nice/cool. linux is going to be the way of the future. jump on now and get a head start!!

[QuarterSwede]

KDE is hyped too much. Gnome is much better in my opinion.

[siim04]

siim04, your post doesn't seem to have much ground to it at all.

First of all, I've never had a kernel panic or any form of crash in Linux since I started using it a month ago. I had some initial difficulties getting my winmodem to work but I know have my Conexant winmodem running smoothly. Everything else has been a breeze, primarily because of the incredible level of support from Linux users and from official support. Perhaps you were getting your support from the wrong place?

I also fail to see how you could say that Microsoft is trying to make Windows XP more Linux-like. How on earth are they? In terms of the GUI, they are definitely taking some ideas from Mac OSX (poorly, I might add), but I cannot think of anything which at all resembles something that may be inspired by Linux.

Windows 98SE was a fine OS of it's time but I have found that it still suffers from most of the problems that plague 9x OS', that being instability. 98SE crashes the least of the 9x line, but is still using an archaic kernel, and therefore will never surpass Windows 2000/XP, in my opinion. XP is reasonably stable on my machine, with a few issues here and there.

And by the way, I'm not sure what games you play but I haven't played a game from a floppy in over 6 years. I've certainly never seen a piece of retail software (application or game) for 98SE that came in diskettes.

Lastly, I don't understand how pirated software would cause general stability problems (especially if it's software so primitive that it comes on a floppy). Having improper functionality within a pirated piece of software is normal and understandable, but the pirated piece of software causing an entire system to become unstable? By the way, I'm in no way supporting piracy, I'm just making a comment.

Don't interpret this post as flame towards you, as that's certainly not my intent.

Great, I was hoping to get posts like these in reply!

1. You have used Linux only for a month? Well, the biggest surprises are then to come. Actually I have been using linux for longer time (I tried different distros to find the most stable one and I am thinking of trying Gentoo now. I would like to try LFS, but gcc won't compile - the cause is common and unanswered). I have had kernel panicing trice: once when I tried Mandrake 8 (just after install - I had to reinstall), once when RedHat started messing up my Linux partition (after each disk scan it repaired the partition by causing more errors on it till RedHat failed to boot and kernel paniced), and you can cause your kernel panic when you defragment your Linux partition without reinstalling the boot loader/kernel - I tried.

2. I can get most of my hardware working with linux too, though I had some trouble with Kodak LS420 digital camera and I I have not yet tried to use my TI-83 with linux. Older versions of Linux also had trouble with ADSL connection (I had to use specific packets, which I had to download first), but RedHat 9 had it covered (though I had to reconfigure it manually).

3. Most Linux distros have official support only for paying members/commercial versions, which I am not (using). I got my support from google and dogpile (and from my fellow students). Though I just reinstalled Linux when it had kernel panicing or doing something even more stupid.

4. One example of Windows becoming more like Linux is the fact that after a default install Windows XP launches telnet server, Windows 9x does not do that (Linux launches about 5 terminals). Also, Windows XP now has user rights system built in (which is kind of useless because it only uses these rights when you are using this copy of OS, but you can freely read/write any files from other OSes - at least it is so with Linux rights system. Anyways, the only really safe method of keeping your files secure is encrypting them (with one time pads preferrably)). And there are many other 'small' things like these. Besides, who cares about GUI - it is only what you see, but what is inside is important! You do not choose girls by looks only, do you?

5. Game on floppies - Transport Tycoon Delux (the excact game that caused my system to seize working - illegal version only), Digger, Civilization, Wolfenstein, Colonization.

I suggest Knoppix for trying Linux out - personal experience: 3 out of 5 stick to Windows, 1 or 2 start using dual-booting, maybe the rest switch to Linux.

I agree with DaNIsH in majority, though I don't see why Linux is easier to use? Maybe it is easier to use after you have configured it to your needs (which takes forever as there will always be something you want to change/add or update), but till then it most definitely is not.

Actually there are more arguments against Linux than Games, GUI (though I don't understand why - it should be so slow with all the configurability, besides it is running as a separate process, that allows you to restart it without restarting the entire OS, and you won't be using the complex GUI elements. My GUI (KDE 3) is fast enough for me and the games all use OpenGL with nvidia drivers, which makes them quite fast), drivers (I have not had much trouble). Some of these: lack of support, drivers come out later than for Windows (with some exceptions), dependencies - especially if you run into dependencies that need packets for other architectures (and no, I have never seen screens like negative_zero showed on Windows), missing many graphical configuration applications (or they are not complete), high training costs (significant only to organizations I guess), ...

And to lighten up this forum :D :

The most frequent argument we hear against Windows:

"It is too user friendly".

How do you comment that? Windows is so user friendly that you can even crash the computer with a single click (well, Linux can do that too, but it takes it much longer to do that).

Hoping to hear good responces to my posts all the time :yes: , (too long post???)

[Mike Douglas]

First, you can successfully get a Linux virus even without being the root, just there are not so many people bothering to write viruses for Linux (It is so boring to write viruses when you don't have to use try-and-attempt technique and can find holes by just looking at the source). Most desktops are Windows so that is the reason why most virus programmers use Windows and most viruses use Windows. However you can see that most Linux distros get 0.5-2 erratas a day while the last Windows critical update was released week ago (at least for Windows 98SE).

And about stability: My Windows 98SE is quite stable - much more stable than Mandrake or Peanut Linux I tryed. RedHat is almost as stable as my Windows. Of course my Windows stability has benefited from me only using legal software (when I tried illegal (years ago - when I did not yet know that it was illegal to share programs and most games were on floppys), I had many more stability problems, so I quit - I suggest you do the same). My computer only crashes when I write some really stupid program (which is not frequent! meaning it is very rare) and run it without debugger.

And those horrible Linux error messages: Segmentation fault (frequent), kernel panicing (less frequent), something called SIGEGV and crashed (even less frequent); are really hard to understand (compare: access violation(frequent), programm A caused an error in module B(less frequent), stack overflow(only with some older games)).

And it is really difficult to get support - I have run into many problems with RedHat, that are common with any architecture and Linux OS, that have not been solved (I googled and dogpiled these).

If you REALLY want to learn Linux or spend more time configuring your desktop, then Linux is for you, otherways I suggest sticking with Windows. Don't know about XPs stability though (I've seen many problems with it - they are trying to make Windows more Linux-like).

One of the reasons Linux is open-source, is that it allows developers to look for exploits and fix them before scipt kiddies can exploit them.

There are several reasons for the non-issue of the Linux virus. Most of those reasons a Linux user would already be familiar with, but there is one, all important, reason that a student of evolution or zoology would also appreciate.

First, let's take a look at the way Linux has stacked the deck against the virus.

For a Linux binary virus to infect executables, those executables must be writable by the user activating the virus. That is not likely to be the case. Chances are, the programs are owned by root and the user is running from a non-privileged account. Further, the less experienced the user, the lower the likelihood that he actually owns any executable programs. Therefore, the users who are the least savvy about such hazards are also the ones with the least fertile home directories for viruses.

Even if the virus successfully infects a program owned by the user, its task of propagation is made much more difficult by the limited privileges of the user account. [For neophyte Linux users running a single-user system, of course, this argument may not apply. Such a user might be careless with the root account.]

Linux networking programs are conservatively constructed, without the high-level macro facilities that have enabled the recent Windows viruses to propagate so rapidly. This is not an inherent feature of Linux; it is simply a reflection of the differences between the two user bases and the resulting differences between the products that are successful in those markets. The lessons learned from observing these problems will also serve as an innoculation for future Linux products as well.

Linux applications and system software is almost all open source. Because so much of the Linux market is accustomed to the availability of source code, binary-only products are rare and have a harder time achieving a substantial market presence. This has two effects on the virus. First, open source code is a tough place for a virus to hide. Second, for the binary-only virus, a newly compiled installation cuts off a prime propagation vector.

One of the main reason for so many windows viruses is that only a few people are working on patching MS and they have to find the vunrabilities before the hackers. Windows by design is very subseptible to viruses. Its high level of integration allows viruses to easily affect many programs (ie. Most viruses I mentioned above were spread using Outlook Express).

It's just an opinion :whistle:

[Schmoove]

Besides, who cares about GUI - it is only what you see, but what is inside is important! You do not choose girls by looks only, do you?

You couldn't be more wrong there.... :no:

The GUI is one of the most important, if not the most important, element in user acceptation.

Without a decent (and consitent) GUI Linux isn't going anywhere. It is good to see that they are realizing that (hence the great progress both KDE and Gnome are making).

[Slayer]

I switch to Linux because I was interested in using something other than Windows (which was what I had been using my whole life). To me, using GUIs for anything simple like untarballing something or moving a file is Windows all over again. If you think that a bunch of GUIs are what's going to sell Linux, you might be right, but sooner or later people will want to move away from the GUIs because it's Windows with a different look. By the way, Linux makes a good desktop operating system, but not a good server. For servers, you want OPENBSD! I can't stress enough how good a server operating system this is in so many ways. That's my piece.

[neogort]

For servers, you want OPENBSD!

I think you forgot to link it, OPENBSD

[UKer]

You couldn't be more wrong there.... :no:

The GUI is one of the most important, if not the most important, element in user acceptation.

Without a decent (and consitent) GUI Linux isn't going anywhere. It is good to see that they are realizing that (hence the great progress both KDE and Gnome are making).

I don't accept that Linux isn't going anywhere without a GUI, or that it is the most important factor, it's still developed as a server OS by the kernel hackers, shown by the fact that there are hardly any improvements coming in the 2.6 kernel for desktop users, but for enterprise users there are a vast number of improvements making it more scalable and robust.

For a home user, perhaps it is an important thing, but at the moment it isn't used hardly at all in the workplace except as a server, and if you're running a server it is beyond me why anyone would want to risk running X (at least on a production server), from the point of performance and stability. Don't forget most 'users' of any UNIX are people deploying servers and at work most connect to the servers using their Windows boxes (unless they're into monitoring or similar, when a UNIX box is useful).

Developers need X but they are more interested in the ability to collaborate well on a project than how well KDE/GNOME work, most need Emacs and a terminal, as well as basic email and communications tools, and Linux already caters more than well in this area. In terms of home users this is a very new area for UNIX based systems, taking into account how much older UNIX is than Windows.

When/if Linux finally breaks into the workplace in a large way then the improvements will come. The excellent support for graphics cards seen in recent times has nothing to do with home users demanding games, but is down to the people in the movie inductry wanting to use Linux workstations, this motivated ATI/nVidia to get their act together as the obviously wanted the corporate business (this came out in an interview I did with the editor of Linux Format for my Master's degree dissertation).

[neowolf]

OK. People. thank you for all post. i change Windows on Linux. It`s perfekt. Now this post I am writing on Linux. THX !!! :yes:

[Tek]

Does that mean we can stop this silly arguing?

[siim04]

There was article about Linux viruses at Neowin news. It had the most important points in it.

Oh, I forgot to to mention: Legal Linux is always better than illegal Windows.

[Ryne]

Linux is a good product that I would like to use again someday. The past distros I used left a bad feeling with me though. I would have to buy new parts for my PC to make some Linux distros work. They just do not seem to want to, or I cannot find any compatible ones.

I'm so attached to windows (although I know it runs like a POS sometimes), that I can't pull away; some of my favourite games and apps are windows only also. If I could persuade the devs to change that I would :/

[Slayer]

WineX, the tried, tested and true DirectX library for Linux.

[neowolf]

Yes true :)

[scoult01]

but sooner or later people will want to move away from the GUIs because it's Windows with a different look.

Why do you think people use GUIs? :blink:

Its all about user interaction. Just tell me would you rather hold the right mouse button to move a file/folder, or would u rather type mv "/dir/dir/dir/dir/dir/dir/dir/dir/file" etc etc...

Sure it may be leet to type all your commands, but using a gui for such a task is much more productive.

Time == money