SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Insightful) by shipofgold on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:03PM (10 children)
updates are easy?
I have been using Linux for 20+ years and curse every time I need to upgrade from one distro version to another.
Most often the story is something like: I want to upgrade to the latest version of Gimp! But I am still running on a Fedora release that is 4 years old and the new version isn't supported for my release, and I can't even build the new version of Gimp on my release because some library is out of date. Soooo what do I do? Update the release which means a full System upgrade.
But I generally can't upgrade from release XX to release XX+3 directly. Most times the advice is "backup", reformat/install fresh and restore config...what a pain....especially when the backed up config files are no longer the same, and the old format isn't supported.
Then I need to go through every config file and see how to map old and new to get my original configuration.
I have one box that runs DNS, Asterisk, DHCP and HTTP server. I ended up spending 2 weeks upgrading that from F20 -> F26 because of all the config files I needed to check.
Sure it is easy to update packages within a release, but with the current "release" mechanism it sure is painful to keep up-to-date.
I will stick with Linux since these pain points are not often, but I can't see the unwashed masses ever doing this.
I am pretty confident I can install the latest Gimp on my Win7 box which is running a pretty old version. Not so with my Linux boxes.
I don't have a solution, but I wish these distros would be continuous update instead of release based.
Don't tell me upgrades are easy...at least on Fedora.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:16PM (3 children)
Switch to a rolling release: on Manjaro, i've only had one quirk (it upgraded a kernel and my box didn't like it: solution is i now ALWAYS have a working kernel installed in case an upgrade bork my boot.
Other than that, i am QUITE happy with Manjaro. I just wish i had a better, faster, stronger PC to run it on, lol.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:36PM (2 children)
Or a distribution using a less idiotic package management.
There are some risks and effort involved, but e.g. in Debian you can most of the time install a newer version of a single program.
For those who think that is too much effort, they came up with the security and efficiency nightmares of snap and flatpak...
(Score: 2) by shipofgold on Wednesday July 25 2018, @12:16AM (1 child)
Call me skeptical but I am guessing if I have a 6 year old box that I have been happily running Debian Squeeze on, and now need the latest MythTV one it, it won't be a simple download/install. Manjaro isn't even 6 years old, so can't even think whether their rolling releases would be able to handle this scenario. Yes, I know I should update regularly, but if it ain't broke don't fix it. I have updated too many things only to find that functionality has changed in ways that are not positive for me. Security fixes aside, I generally don't "upgrade" when it already works as I need it. If they could separate security fixes from functionality "fixes" I would be much happier.
We have now touched on another of my gripes on Linux SW management...upgrades of one box may require upgrades of another box.
I have one computer running Fedora with a MythTV backend. I updated a TV box to Kodi 17 and suddenly the box couldn't talk to the MythTV backend because it was too old. MythTV apparently has protocol versions that are not backwards compatible.
Here, in order to use the updated Kodi, I needed to update MythTV backend, which required a complete Fedora update because the backend version was not available on my 4 year old SW release. To make matters worse, the new MythTV would not talk to my older Kodi boxes, so they all needed upgrades as well. A couple of them were LibreElec which doesn't upgrade easily...those need downloads and re-install of all add-ons.
I don't like windows for a lot of reasons, but SW management and "easy upgrades" are still something they do better than any Linux distro I have seen. I can install Kodi 17 on my 7 year old Win7 box running SP1....I can't say the same for my 5 year old Fedora box.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:48AM
I bet latest MythTV doesn't work in DOS either.
(Score: 3, Touché) by NewNic on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:27PM (2 children)
Be realistic. Most Windows installations are NEVER upgraded. The average person's upgrade method is to buy a new PC.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @10:34PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:37PM
GP kind of mixed "updating" and "upgrading" together, which is somewhat fair when you need to update the whole OS to get the libraries in place to run the New Hotness of some program that has a dependency on J Random Lib, which is in the latest GNOME, which means you need to update systemd...
PFFFFFBAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA Chrome and Firefox don't even support Vista anymore, and you're talking about 9x? Get the fuck out of here.
Horseshit.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday July 24 2018, @09:53PM
From what I'm hearing, updates are a pain in the ass on every platform these days. (Except "obsolete" platforms that don't get any more updates!) Developers probably think nothing of it because they've automated the process of generating a patch and rebuilding everything on their end. If they would make an effort to avoid changes that result in that cascading effect of forcing an update to dependencies in every direction, it would do wonders for everyone's sanity.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:30AM
Give FreeBSD a try. Just backup /etc and you're good to go. Way less bullshit to deal with. Upgrading my OpenBSD box that does some light http, minecraft serving, and cctv recording takes maybe 10 minutes for the OS. Maybe another 10 for pkg update to finish.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:34PM
Was going to do a point-by-point but you anticipated all my counterarguments, lol.
Kind of seems like a fundamental computing problem, yeah. Seems reasonable that the devs only want to support upgrading from the last 1 or maybe 2 releases. But it's not like even Microsoft is flawless in that area. (If I mention Hairyfeet and his stupid Challenge will he show up?)
At least Lennart Poettering is working directly for them so they should be better at...erm...actually never mind.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"