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Forbes.com has published a piece by contributor Jason Evangelho entitled "5 Reasons You Should Switch From Windows To Linux Right Now".
When I published the highlights of my journey switching from Windows to Linux on my everyday laptop... it became one of my most viewed pieces this year. From where I'm sitting, that tells me a ton of people are interested -- are at least actively curious -- about ditching Windows and making the jump to Linux.
With that in mind, I wanted to present five reasons that may lead you to consider switching. Know that these are subjective, and they're targeted at the average Windows user and not folks who rely on Windows-exclusive applications for a paycheck.
One thing to know right up front: the modern Linux desktop OS is no longer the obtuse, bewildering and command line driven thing it used to be. Not remotely.
It's nice to see a free operating system getting some love in the mainstream press. Forbes running this article is more the story here than desktop Linux having advantages over Windows.
Be sure to read TFA to find out what the five reasons are. (Or see spoiler, below.)
1: Linux Gets Out Of Your Way
2: You're Not A Slave To The Terminal
3: Installing Software Is Even Easier
4: Updates aren't a headache. They're glorious
5: The Linux Community
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 24 2018, @08:13PM (13 children)
It's time people face facts, GUIs were massively oversold. They are good for a few tasks, but for many others they only get in the way and make things harder, at best. Having a GUI for things that need a GUI is great. But the GUI is nowhere near as revolutionary as the CLI was, and is in no way capable of replacing the CLI as the CLI replaced punch-cards and toggle switches. People have nonetheless been doggedly insisting trying to do just that for decades now, but it's never worked and it won't work for the foreseeable future because it just isn't as suitable for purpose.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @08:27PM (6 children)
Commandline is great for tiny apps that output a small amount of information in a regular form. But if you want to automatically manage changing state or do anything interactive, it tends to blow. Commandline is a low bandwidth interface. That is its plus and minus.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday July 24 2018, @08:54PM (4 children)
Sure, but It's even better for programs that output enormous amounts of data in irregular forms! You should look up something called piping and redirection. Most of the problems that are solved today using proprietary libraries (representing a huge amount of wheel re-invention) were solved more elegantly, long ago, by using simple utilities and the CLI.
"But if you want to automatically manage changing state or do anything interactive, it tends to blow."
Completely wrong. Automatically managing changing states is always done by inputting parameters. Inputting parameters in a CLI is extremely simple, straightforward, and efficient. Doing the same thing in a GUI is, at best, only a little more cumbersome. Your best argument is "interactive" which is often a code-word for 'point and click' and insofar as that is what you mean it's just circular logic. But the keyboard is a much richer object to interact with than a mouse, even if it does have a half dozen mostly unstandardized buttons, the keyboard has well over 100!
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:32PM (3 children)
I said commandlines were bad for automatically managing changing state. Your example of commandline piping doesn't work. In piping, information flows in one direction: forward. Show me how to do piping with a feedback loop: send the output back upstream as input to a prior command and let it keep looping. That is what I meant by changing state. The only Unix scripting "solution" you can give is to have a script that periodically polls an output file for its input, I believe. (Can't be done with piping.) Clunky and inefficient as heck compared to a GUI.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday July 24 2018, @10:22PM (1 child)
And you're wrong.
"Your example of commandline piping doesn't work."
I didn't give any examples, and the mention was not in the context of managing changing states, but of processing large amounts of irregular data.
"Show me how to do piping with a feedback loop: send the output back upstream as input to a prior command and let it keep looping."
With shell commands like FOR IF and ELSE, of course.
"Clunky and inefficient as heck compared to a GUI."
Nonsense, you can't do that in a GUI at all. You just rely on having a GUI app that knows what to do behind the scenes - the GUI itself doesn't give you any of this (but the CLI does.)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: -1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @12:22PM
You have no answers in your reply for anything I said in my post. FAIL.
You lost this one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:50PM
It's called a co-process fool
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mr_mischief on Tuesday July 24 2018, @08:59PM
What do you mean by "manage changing state"? The configuration of your systems? Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Terraform... The text on the screen? Curses. The real place a GUI shines is with graphics, and providing a user interface for programs that use a lot of graphics.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday July 24 2018, @08:29PM (5 children)
And Linux documentation, you never know which version you have and are left with "does this apply to my box?"
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:05PM (4 children)
One of the reasons that big companies were drooling over GUIs and pushing them all along was because of the belief that they would eliminate the need for documentation.
This is another false promise. GUIs need documentation, and more of it, at least if you go by page counts, because they need many many pictures to make any sense.
But, though it doesn't actually work, the belief that it works has been clung to so tightly that we now depend on a great many programs, very few of which have any reliable documentation. Software companies, in particular, LOVE not producing documentation, because with no documented behavior, they are free to change behavior at their whim. And they do.
None of this is of any value to the typical end user, however.
On the surface it seems easier to learn a GUI, but when you have spent some time with it, found that it's undocumented, inconsistent, downright wierd at places, and furthermore that just when you get used to it it will be unilaterally changed (if not by MS then by Volkerding) that value pales quickly.
A CLI with good documentation and a good inline help system (4Dos could be a model) is no harder to learn than any GUI.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:35PM (3 children)
Now if the GUI is, like you mention, inconsistent, then all bets are off. It can be a total PITA. And those unilateral changes are even worse. Then a GUI would be a pain, but that is definitely an edge case.
Unfortunately this is something I have to give credit to Apple for. The UI widgets do the same function version after version but they moved from aqua looks to gray looks. Not a problem. Disappearing scroll bar is a problem unless you use a scroll wheel all the time so 50/50 on that. They have functional consistency down better than anyone else and they reap the user love because of it. I have a lot of reasons to hate Apple but user experience isn't one.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 24 2018, @11:02PM (2 children)
By using apropos.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:52PM (1 child)
Now I'm back to deciphering cryptic man page descriptions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:54PM
... and you could have just typed 'man man' at the shell...