Seven Reasons I Love Linux

There are a huge number of reasons why I love Linux and have had some flavor of Linux on my computer (sometimes the only OS on my system) for 14 years, and see clear advantages over the Microsoft family of operating systems. Of course, I’ve n…

There are a huge number of reasons why I love Linux and have had some flavor of Linux on my computer (sometimes the only OS on my system) for 14 years, and see clear advantages over the Microsoft family of operating systems. Of course, I’ve never used a Mac for more than 5 minutes so I can’t compare anything there, but here are a few of main reasons why I love Linux so much.

1. I’m a command-line geek
My first computer was a Commodore 64, then a “286″ PC running DOS, so it’s no wonder I grew up with a love for the command-line interface (CLI). From the ubiquitous load "*",8,1 or writing BASIC code as an 8-year old kid in 1982, the Commodore 64 was all about typing what you wanted to do. Later on, people would develop things that allowed you to boot to a graphical interface, but that was way later. As for DOS on our old 286, I spent that summer of 1988 learning every command-line switch to every utility under DOS, and even taught the senior IT tech a thing or two at the college where my dad taught. My parents bought me my own PC when I turned 16 or 17, and while at a computer expo in Toronto I learned about this thing called “Slackware Linux” which revolutionized my thinking about computers.

And to this day, I find I’m faster at performing tasks on the command line, or writing code in vi (okay, vim), than using graphical tools. Clicking a actually slows me down, so I still try to learn every keyboard shortcut possible on any interface I use, whether it’s Gnome or Windows XP.

2. Cost of ownership
Some would argue that learning Linux is a huge investment in time, and I’d have to agree. If you totaled up the number of hours I’ve spent learning how to use and administer Linux and multiply that by how much I typically charge per hour, it would probably buy me a house on the beach here in Los Angeles. Still, to actually ‘own’ a legit/legal copy of Linux, you only need an Internet connection and a $0.50 blank writable CD. The cheapest Microsoft operating system I can think of off the top of my head is about $100 for Windows XP.

But once you factor in the cost of the utilities and tools to actually do anything on the operating system, the cost increases dramatically under a Windows environment. Even more so for a Mac given the price of their hardware. For example, OpenOffice which can read/write MS Office documents is free to download. MS Office, on the other hand, as of January 22 2008 on Amazon, starts at $329. If you’re a developer, you can download all of the compiler tools and even some graphical development environments for Linux for free. The MS Visual Studio 2008 ‘Standard’ edition, again from Amazon, will set you back an additional $300 (the Professional version is over $800). Want to edit some photos? Download “the gimp” for free, or buy Adobe Photoshop CS3 for $625. Anti-virus software? Not really needed under Linux, but you can download clamav for free anyway. Running Windows? Well, you’re probably looking at $50/year or so for McAfee or Norton…

And before you cry foul, most of the free software I’ve just listed for Linux is available for Windows too. But the marketing done to users doesn’t share that tidbit of information. They only see ads for software they have to pay for, unless someone tells them about it or installs it for them. Of course in the case of MS Office, I imagine more home users simply purchase a license because that’s what they use at work.

3. Open-Source Software is Safer Software
Being able to release your software to the whole world in source-code format for others to give peer reviews, feedback, suggestions, or just helpful comments, lends itself to a much safer environment for the end-user. If you know a little about programming and want to make sure some application isn’t going to log your keystrokes and send them to some unscrupulous person, you can trace through the source code and see *exactly* what it’s doing. Good luck doing that with any software that Microsoft sells. And if your open-source project gets really popular, having tens of thousands of developers pouring through your code (like the Linux kernel) can only help make it the most efficient piece of software in its class. If they find something, they’ll holler and scream until you fix it, or fix it themselves, and in the end, the end-user is safer from security issues because of simple peer review of source code.

4. Software development is easier
For guys like me who work with Perl/PHP, it’s just a more natural feel to use Linux where you can configure the whole LAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python/etc) to work natively without having to upload your code anywhere. There’s nothing worse than having to debug your code and upload your changes via FTP. Plus, it means I can install the whole “AMP” part of the stack on my Linux laptop and work while I travel — no need to even be online! Everything is done on the local machine which I can configure however I want to connect to local databases, run code, compile software. And once I’m off the plane, I can find an Internet connection for a few minutes and upload my changes to a live server, and my work is done — less lost productivity!

5. I’m more productive overall
The biggest argument against Linux and Mac is lack of game support. Yes, Cedega and other emulators allow you to play some Windows games under Linux, but when I’m booted into Linux I simply don’t have the temptation to fire up Tabula Rasa or Everquest 2. Granted, I don’t game during the day anyway given the workload I pile on myself, but it’s always easier to give into temptation when the environment allows for it. Like that dark chocolate my wife has in the kitchen right now that’s calling my name… if I were working outside of the house, it would be a non-issue, but because I’m a work-from-home kinda guy right now, well, nom nom nom …

6. Linux lets you have multiple OS’s installed
If you install Windows on your PC, then install Linux, modern distributions (“distros”) of Linux will add a boot menu to your PC allowing you access to your Windows installation, your Linux installation, and whatever other OS’s you have on the machine. However, if you install any other OS and then install Windows, Windows assumes it will be the only OS on the system, and overwrite the boot sector of your hard drive so that you can only boot Windows. Talk about not playing nicely with others… Reinstalling the ‘grub’ boot menu isn’t hard, but it’s terribly inconvenient.

7. It’s a geek’s paradise
I’ve never seen the level of hackability in an operating system without having to install loads of third-party applications like TweakUI that do things behind the scenes without your full knowledge. And forget about spyware. Being able to customize the OS, especially on distributions like Gentoo where it installs only exactly what you want nothing more, makes the PC a perfectly customized environment. If you want a different window manager, you can run KDE or Gnome or XFCE or whatever … under Windows you have, well, Windows.