Onderstekop

In my latest article about Linux I discussed 5 practical and semi-philosophical reasons why Linux is better than Windows. I was happy when I found out Blog Rush had actually 'delivered' me some targeted traffic (don't give up people! :P) in the form of Janet from the pretty interestingAntigua Web Solutions blog. She stumbled upon this site through Blog Rush, liked the article about Linux and featured it on her own weblog.

As you can see in the link, Slevi posted a extensive comment to this article on which I'd like to reply in this article.

'Linux is free is pretty much the only valid argument there. The Linux GUI is trashy imo, design wise it simply is way too outdated to compete with windows or OSX. The software which comes along with it is all rubbish anyways, there's a reason it comes along free.'

The look and feel of Linux totally depends on the packages you use with it. The standard GNOME is pretty minimalistic and I can see how people would miss 'richness' in their applications, but all of this can easily be added by installing a couple of packages and themes to enhance the layout. All of this is a lot easier to do and modify than it is in Windows. This is because Linux is free and open. Installing a 3D cube like Beryl in Windows (this is possible -search for it if you're interested) requires a big, big hack into the Windows kernel making it instable and buggy. This makes the potential for future Linux distros even bigger!

'Useful stuff like MP3 codecs and such have been pulled out as well from the distro's due to legal issues and that was just actually one of the few things which was useful for directly being there.'

The use of open standards is one of the basic goals for most of the software developed for Linux. This doesn't however mean that you can't play mp3s and avis because you can always choose to install propriety packages. The standard Ubuntu multimedia player Totem will ask you to search for and download a decoder if it's asked to play an unknown format. Installing a certain codec will take you at most two clicks and after that everything works fine in most cases. This as well is another advantage over Windows: you don't need to install drivers and you won't ever stroll the net for codecs.

'What it offers now is as much rubbish as what windows offers along in the form of notepad, wordpad, calculator, patience and all the other shit it installs for you.'

I don't agree with this at all, but you might have imagined that. Most default installations indeed come with a sh*tload of basic editors and simple tools, but don't forget OpenOffice (with complete Office-like applications), GIMP (a very good picture editor) and all the compilers that come with it (although I must admit that most people won't bother about this). It still off course depends on what you want to do with your computer. Most games are written for Windows so gamers are better off with that; if you wan't to do a lot of picture and/or video editing you might want to consider a Mac, but for all your standard tasks like word processing, internet and e-mail you'd best use Linux (and you will be happy to find a lot of games that have been ported to it)

'Linux is safe? There's already been viruses written for linux as well which are capable of spreading just like they'd do on windows. Spyware and such same issue, the reason it just isn't going on massive is since why would anybody care about it? Linux is as good as dead still with by far a minority on market share.'

The reason it just isn't going on massive is -in my opinion- that Linux out of the box is safer. Even when a trojan gets installed it can't cause as much damage as easy, because the user and group system actually makes sense in Linux, so people or programs who don't have the rights can't read/write/delete valuable system information (unless off course the trojan has root access, but then there would be other things to worry about anyway). I have to admit that it helps that Linux is not as widely spread and used as Windows, but security in Windows has always been a secondary issue (something they looked at after all the work was done).

'Linux is open, although open source is nice the majority of the world could probably care less about the fact whether their OS is open or not. Applications ok, you might be able to do something with it but with linux it has simply come to the point of it being annoying now there's a thousand of different distro's going around each coming with different standards and eventually causing the downfall of linux if it goes on. There's no structure to be found anymore, the different distro's are going apart further and further when it comes to usability.'

It's true that there are a lot (and I mean hundreds) of distros, but among them their are only a dozen of widely-used and well-documented ones. The biggest difference is the use in graphical interface (GNOME, KDE, Flux, etc) and the installing of packages, but this is something you get used to very fast. Also, because the gcc compilers are installed it is easy to port Linux software to other distros, so I don't think this will cause 'the downfall of Linux' at all.

Well, I will shut my mouth since this might have already been my longest article yet. Thanks to Janet and Slevi for the feature and comments! Leave a comment yourself if you'd like to say something, because as you can see: it is much appreciated!