Do you like Linux? (If so. Why?)

Post Reply New Topic

There's been a huge impetus in adoption of linux, and partly because of that development has been given an impetus as well. I would recommend linux for any company and user these days, a system like ubuntu is as, or more, usable as windows for the average user. (And from a maintenance point much better as the maintainer can easily be the only one who can install things on the system or do anything damaging)

+1

I use Linux MInt 11, but I hopped around distros for a while. I changed from Red Hat to Mandrake/Mandriva to SUSE to Ubuntu then moved across to Mint and stayed there.

Most of all, I like Linux because it is neither Microsoft nor Apple.

+2

(After seeing games advertised as "PC", when it should have said "Microsoft regular subscribers only", I had to visit an "Apple store" today. Very pretty. What else?)

In an interview for Coders at Work (an excellent book for programmers, BTW), Ken said "It's much more reliable--there's no doubt about that. And I've looked at the code occasionally. I don't look at it as much as I used to. I used to, for Plan 9. They were always ahead of us--they just had massively more resources to deal with hardware." The book was published in 2009, so the interview was probably around then.

I've been using Ubuntu for years and I'm now using Ubuntu 10.10, but I won't upgrade to 11.04 because of my dislike for the new features this version brings with it. I'm happy with what I can do with 10.10 and don't need more, so there is no need to upgrade either. I like to play some games, but that requires Windows most of the time. This is why I installed both Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows Vista Home Premium on the same system. Either one can be picked on startup, but I use Ubuntu most of the time.

Last edited by Masato on 01 Aug 2011, 10:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

Excuse me for the double post. Please ignore it.

Last edited by Masato on 01 Aug 2011, 5:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I like Linux because life would be crap without yaourt

Before I abandoned Windows, this is what would happen from a cold boot:

Boot up computer.
At password login screen, type in password and hit Enter.
At desktop, click on Firefox icon.
Wait 2 minutes for Firefox to launch.
On launch, Firefox would promptly freeze for about 2 minutes.

So 4 minutes before I could do anything. This is every time I cold booted. Linux, on the other hand, was a dream.

Boot up computer.
Select Linux option from GRUB.
At password login screen, type in password and hit Enter.
At desktop, launch Firefox.

No freezing. Ready to go as soon as I got to the desktop. Switched to Linux 3 years ago this October and never looked back. Started with PCLOS, then Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) and currently Ubuntu Lucid (10.04).

Alternatively, everyone could just jump ship to XFCE. Seriously, I don't even know why I used GNOME for as long as I did. XFCE is like Gnome 2 AND it's faster. Gnome 3 can go soak it's head in a bucket.

I have been considering XFCE, I have used it in the past and I don't really have a good reason why I stopped using it... except Gnome is default in the distro I use (Fedora) and I just got comfortable with the default setup. I am just afraid that if I switch distros and switch to XFCE or something I will just become a minimalist control freak. I used to run servers installed with Debian where I knew basically every detail of the configuration, had less than 10 processes running (until people logged in), and could pretty much recite the output of "dpkg --list" from memory (including version numbers). If I start customizing my desktop installation this will probably happen!

Aside from the fact that Xfce sucks? It's missing a lot of functionality, and usually ends up using more memory than GNOME2 anyways because it has to load half the GNOME libraries to meet functions that Xfce isn't capable of handling on its own. On top of that, there's no documentation, and the way it does stuff isn't transparent enough that you can always figure it out just by poking around.

I like linux because of the freedom to tinker, the better security paradigm and the focus of the software being the user not a corporate best interest.

If you start a windows pc after a year of someone using it and installing things on it you always find a dozen TSR's and competing applications with their own updaters running all the time demanding attention from you.

In linux you simply choose the software from the default repository or add a new repository to your sources. You choose exactly when and how things are maintained and how interactive you have to be with them.

That said I ditched suse when novell took it over because they took a good distro with loads of hardware support and decided to ditch half the reliable stuff for shiny things.

I ditched KDE when KDE4 came out and switched over to Gnome but now Gnome is going the same way and ubuntu keeps doing annoying things during updates like automatically changing the hard drive labels over to UUID and rendering my machine unbootable during updates or getting rid ctrl-alt-backspace so I end up whacking my keyboard like an idiot trying to fix my xorg file after an update or changing your desktop over to that unity thing without asking...


Grrrr. I'm with Linus, can't we stop all this desktop silliness and go back to having sane desktops that are boring so that we can get on with work?


Solaris was good, but that's dead now.

I walked away from SUSE because of that ridiculous deal Novell made with the devil. Patent infringements, my arse.

It's not such a bad idea to bite the bullet and just adopt it. At least then drives are free to 'float about' if new ones are added or they're moved, but things continue to work anyway.

Option "DontZap" "boolean"

The only reason I still use Windows is because I'm a gamer, and can't wrap my head around trying to get everything to work hunky dory in wine. (Actually tried it last night to no avail.)

I've always wanted to have a dual boot windows/linux machine though. Ubuntu's wubi installer made it possible though not in ideal circumstances.

It's not a bad idea, just annoying implementation if you have a load of hard drives, a load of OS's spread across them and doing an update on one OS nukes your machine so you have to boot off a live cd and start manually putting back all your grub entries.


right alt, print screen + k still works.

Unity still sucks though.

So it seems.
Never used it myself and going by comments I've seen, I'm unlikely to.