Linux: Why I like it

I like Linux, but I haven't always.

Here's a timeline:

I used to like Windows, but then I got Windows 8...

and then I found Linux...

I kept going with Windows because I didn't like the Ubuntu UI...

Windows choked on AMD drivers while playing War Thunder... It committed suicide.

I switched to Linux Mint with Windows 10 on the side for Space Engineers.

I wrote this blog post some time later about why I like Linux.

Linux has many advantages over Windows. It's free and easy to repair. It's secure and doesn't need to be repaired often. It's technically oriented, and very flexible.

First of all, Linux is completely free and open-source. That means that it can be reinstalled as many times as you want, on as many different computers as you want, and unlike Windows, there's no reason to put in anti-piracy hoops to jump through. The reason for it's lack of price tag is that it's developed by volunteers, people who aren't paid, but want to help make Linux better. Any money that it gets comes from donations. Open source means that the source code is available for everyone to examine and tweak. When the developers of Ubuntu Linux installed spyware to send searches to Amazon, people found out and went crazy. Thus, it got disabled by default. Windows, on the other hand, costs around $200 and requires special product codes that you have to keep track of.

Next, Linux is very secure. It requires your password every time you (or malware) tries to modify root files. This means that you can't accidentally install a virus by running a bad file. You can realize that the file shouldn't need root access, and deny it. Also, Linux doesn't allow programs to run themselves on boot. Viruses will have to get the user to run them whenever they reboot. Last but not least, most viruses and exploits are geared towards Windows, because Windows has around 90% of the personal computer market share. Windows also allows applications to both run without the password (when the user is an administrator), and allows them to run themselves on reboot.

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Linux is complicated and technically oriented. The command line is a big part of Linux, and you can use it to bypass the User Interface with a simple 'sudo apt-get install default-jre' to install java, or more importantly, 'sudo mount -t "ntfs" -o ro /dev/sda3 /media/newhd' to mount a broken Windows drive in read-only mode for file-evacuation. For Windows, mounting a broken drive would probably include banging your head against the screen, cursing Microsoft for their broken OS. A Mac user would probably briefly wonder what a hard drive is, and promptly buy a whole new computer.

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An interesting fact to note about Linux is that it is the number 1 choice when it comes to web hosting. Not only does it's lack of price tag and secure design make it ideal, but it's light weight and can run on older computers. Several major web-hosting programs like Apache2, PHP, and MySQL run on Linux. In 2011, five years ago, Google had more than 15,000 Linux servers.

That's why I like Linux. True, there are some games out there that are Windows-exclusive (like Space Engineers), but that's why I have Windows 10 on a separate hard drive. All it's got is gaming software (Space Engineers, Offworld Trading Company, etc.). My Linux drive has everything else (Kerbal Space Program, all of my documents, Android Studio, etc.).

If you're afraid that maybe you can't do certain tasks on Linux because Microsoft Word or Paint isn't available to non-Windows computers, don't worry! Linux comes with editors for lots of file types. Libre Office is great for text documents of any kind, and GIMP is a very powerful image editor. Linux computers can access compressed .zip files and .jar files with Archive Manager, and video editors are all over the place (online, not default).

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I'll do a blog post at some point about how to install Linux.