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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: 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