The IM section was egregious too. How can they tout "Pidgin, the instant messenger for Linux (it exists for Windows as well, and for Mac OS X)" as an advantage of Linux?
Seriously dishonest and outdated as well. I love linux but I spend much more time installing things and tweaking my linux boxes than I do my Mac. Linux is awesome for the geek community but it's never going to compete with osx/windows for the casual user, nor should it.
That sections states that drivers are built in to the kernel, which is not always true.
There is a section below called "your hardware is not yet supported" under the "cases where you should stick to Windows" section, but that misses the biggest issue which is poorly supported drivers.
There are still many wireless cards, scanners, tablets, and other peripherals that have poorly written proprietary drivers or not-quite-functional open source drivers. The number is decreasing, but it's still a concern when buying new hardware.
I'm excited about it too but I don't think it's going to be "soon", There is basically one AAA title on Steam right now and about 20-30 indie titles (and a bunch of DLC to pad out the list.) It's a great start but I think it's going to be a few more years yet before there will be enough of a library to lure away the PC gamers full time.
Well, I believe soon all Valve games will run fine on Linux, since they ported the whole engine anyway.
Also there are a couple of AAA games already partially or completely ported, and it is just a matter of putting them to work properly on Steam (sometimes what lacks is legal stuff). For example Doom series, and some of Unreal games.
Of course, games using any of those "great engines" are easy to port too (ie: any game using idTech and family or Unreal and family).
I don't know why UT3 stopped (and if you ask icculus, he will get mad at you).
idTech5 stopped because crap driver support, but now with Valve pushing ahead to fix that, I think id can resume work on Linux idTech5 if they wish to.
I hope the SteamBox will change that soon. Valve can even sponsor indie devs to make a linux port / promote the Source Engine (I remember reading the linux port has better perfs than the windows version) / do something else, like selling Half Life 3 only on SteamBox during the first month (they won't, but they can).
If they manage to sell a lot of SteamBox from the beginning (with low costs, like the Nexus model for Android), they can start something.
Wow, the marketing department and designers really went to town on this one! </sarc>
Who exactly is this aimed at? Because if it's for anyone with any technical inclination then tell me something I don't know. If it for 'Joe Average' then see above.
Unfortunately, most of this is propaganda unbacked by facts; the correctness of these statements depends on the particular conditions (what machine is being used, under what conditions, etc.) Plus, it omits a whole slew of problems unique to Linux, such as the fragmentation caused by abundance of distributions.
Any site with a URL like 'whylinuxisbetter.net' is clearly going to be biased, but let's be honest, it's not as if Microsoft never play the FUD game themselves.
You're absolutely right that Linux does have it's own problems as well, but on the whole, I do think Linux is a better platform. However there is a big caveat there: it's the best platform for me.
The problem with having arguments about which OS is better is that the term 'better' is used too broadly. And as everyone has different criteria and preferences, what's 'better' for one person isn't always 'better' for another.
How is fragmentation hindering your usage ? This page is more for casual users and they don't have to worry about fragmentation.
My company sells software on all platforms. Our linux installer has never been a problem. Not only that Valve released their software just for one distribution. Within hours you had people working out how to get it to work on the distribution of their choice. So the fragmentation is not a problem, but more of a benefit where users do the work for you.
Fragmentation is a problem for casual users. Granted less than it used to be , since the casual user is probably on Ubuntu where there is likely a pre-packaged version of most stuff they might want to install.
You still do run into problems with stuff that was packaged for only Ubuntu 10.10 and it doesn't install on 12.04 for example.
In the days before there was one dominant distro it was a nightmare installing everything you wanted without browsing forums because you had Suse version X and the website only offered you a package for RedHat version Y.
It's still an issue for anybody who wants to ship software for more than one distro. Not to mention WM fragmentation.
It's also quite disingenuous to say "Use Linux you get a choice of Distros!" and then say "stick to Ubuntu if you want stuff to actually work".
> Our linux installer has never been a problem. Not only that Valve released their software just for one distribution. Within hours you had people working out how to get it to work on the distribution of their choice. So the fragmentation is not a problem, but more of a benefit where users do the work for you.
Direct quote from the guy you are in the thread with. If you put it on one distro, the others will port it for you.
I see fragmentation on Linux as diversity and worldview. When you talk about major distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Debian, OpenSuse, etc. they cater to completely different type of crowds. Ubuntu will never be able to satisfy Arch community and vice verse. Major problem would not be fragmentation but shoving Ubuntu on Arch or Fedora users. If you are a casual user then just stick with Ubuntu or Linux Mint and be happy.
This is mostly the same vein of stupid as "Macs can't get viruses".
" The average period of time before a Windows PC (connected to the Internet and with a default "Service Pack 2" installation) gets infected is 40 minutes (and it sometimes takes as little time as 30 seconds)."
Ok, so let's plug a 10+ year old unpatched default Linux distro into the net and see how long that lasts?
The article isn't very explicit about what it means by it's claim.
Does it mean just plugging an unpatched windows machine into the internet and walking away or does it mean somebody actively using it to surf websites which may have malicious applets etc?
Also doesn't specify whether it's naked on the internet or behind some kind of NAT/firewall.
If we're just talking about random bots port scanning netblocks and looking for daemon banners that indicate vulnerable services old linux distros could be quite bad in this regard.
I had my desktop pwned back in ~1999 because it came with a vulnerable version of telnetd enabled by default.
Not to mention databases with thousands of user details. Desktops will have -if you're lucky- just a households worth of data, and even then you'd have to probe for that.
Oh my. Why would you need to install things? Update all your software with a single click! Mostly! Need new software? Linux searches the web for you! As long as you know roughly what you want anyway. Too many workspaces?! Use windows! No big mess in your start menu! Unless you've taken our advice and let Linux install things for you. Use IM protocols in a single client! Linux only!
I've been a Gentoo user now for a good 7~8 years and every time I've tried playing with Windows again the one thing that I immediately notice and immediately get annoyed about is the lack of 'work spaces' ( http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/items/virtual_desktops/index... ). I know there are implementations of this idea for Windows (Heck I even built one when I was learn shudder VB6 back in the day) but not a one I've seen is worth the effort of finding it.
I'm primarily a Windows user, though I dip into Linux pretty often. The first thing I do in any new install is to disable all but one or maybe two workspaces. Multiple workspaces just strikes me as a hack to get around poor panel design, or to facilitate running a modern PC on an ancient monitor.
If I leave >1 active I'm prone to losing windows on alternate workspaces; if I'd upped the number to 12 like the person who wrote that page, I couldn't even fill them all. You can see even he had trouble making them look "used" so he could take a screenshot. I've been using this PC daily for the 24 or so weeks it's been up, and I've only got 13 windows open.
I usually run eight desktops on my machine. Most of the time, half of them sit empty until I need to switch tasks. In my previous day job, I'd keep email up on one, a development set for my local machine (editor, logs, browser, etc.), windows for references on another. I leave a full set of window up, positioned exactly the way I want them, and move to a clean desktop to deal with incidental, "could you take a look at X" tasks.
Being able to spread out what I'm working on without minimizing or overlapping windows really helps segregate what's going on.
I do similar things with tab groups/stacks in Firefox and Opera (mainly to keep fewer than 20 tabs visible at once). Guess it just doesn't feel "right" to me to run my whole system that way.
What about just trying it instead? I, as a developer that only had used Windows, was always angry when someone posted a new library, and the instructions were linux commands. Until one fine day I started using Ubuntu 10.04 in Virtualbox, only for development. It was a joy, so a few months later when 12.04 came out, I installed it in the host, and everything was just perfect, never looked back. In my experience, everything in whylinuxisbetter.com is true. I have also used Fedora 17 in my laptop (HP Pavilion m7), and all the functions work perfectly. Windows = only for games, but even that will change thanks to pioneers like Steam.
A lot of those are valid points, but they boil down to three overarching flaws:
1. Hardware vendors don't provide Linux drivers, often requiring people in their free time to create them from often nonexistent documentation.
2. Nobody can agree on APIs and interfaces. Whenever someone disagrees on something, they just fork it and make their own rather than compromise for a standard.
3. There are a lot of low level assumptions made 20 - 30 (or even up to the age of Unix) assumptions (ttys, shell script, group privilege model, kernel control and management of displays / network controllers / usb / devices) that hamper greatly the usability of the GNULinux ecosystem as a drop in replacement for Windows on the desktop. Android gets away with it by throwing out most of that plumbing.
The first 2 are an inherent problem to the entire ecosystem being FOSS. The userbase is the only group that can fix the second, by focusing and standardizing on one way to do it in the most popular distros and hoping it trickles down (pulseaudio, for example). Both are momentum problems.
The latter I just think ads a lot of unnecessary complexity, but you can work around it. I type this on an Arch box running mostly KDE stuff, it can be done.
Lately I have seen quite a few "Linux is better than Windoze" posts. Each and every one of those posts woefully miss the mark. I include whylinuxisbetter.net to this list.
Especially the penguin at the bottom with the flyswatter makes me dismiss the whole post out of hand. Nobody in their right mind can take a site like that seriously.
The problem is that these sorts of efforts have an exact opposite effect and are more likely to drive people to Macs or back to Windows.
I have yet to see an article or video that explains the true virtues of Linux over other operating systems: A stable feature rich ecosystem developed by a diverse set of professional developers giving users free access to an incredible range of software.
Instead we get these lame websites littered with crap ads and factually incorrect statements.
While the author seems to be targeting Windows users I can't help but notice that most of these points benefits can accurately be ascribed to OS X as well.
Biased or not, the OS/platform arguments always need a context. I agree that Linux/Unix is better for me but I would not uninstall my mother's copy of Windows 8 and slap Ubuntu on there. The stability, flexibility, etc. actually feels like overhead when you don't need it to be there. The same thing goes for iOS vs. Android, in my opinion. It's not even a matter of saying "oh well let's just dumb down the interface and call it friendly."
In my experience, the heuristic I use for any device is "how much obstacle is there between me and what I want to get done?" If I want to run some development VM's or do full-stack web programming, I would hands down choose OSX or Linux because of their native support for that kind of stuff. If I wanted to log in to a computer, get a quick survey of pending emails, messages, and other generic consumer content, I have to say that Windows 8 did a decent job of delivering that kind of experience.
Sure, there aren't many viruses for Linux or OSX but it's partly because the writers of the viruses have a statistically better opportunity right now to target Windows. There have been plenty of OSX and cross-platform exploits. Most of the famous hacking stories are a person getting a rootkit to let the ssh into a backdoor on some Linux webserver.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadThere is a section below called "your hardware is not yet supported" under the "cases where you should stick to Windows" section, but that misses the biggest issue which is poorly supported drivers.
There are still many wireless cards, scanners, tablets, and other peripherals that have poorly written proprietary drivers or not-quite-functional open source drivers. The number is decreasing, but it's still a concern when buying new hardware.
Well, I believe soon all Valve games will run fine on Linux, since they ported the whole engine anyway.
Also there are a couple of AAA games already partially or completely ported, and it is just a matter of putting them to work properly on Steam (sometimes what lacks is legal stuff). For example Doom series, and some of Unreal games.
Of course, games using any of those "great engines" are easy to port too (ie: any game using idTech and family or Unreal and family).
I don't know why UT3 stopped (and if you ask icculus, he will get mad at you).
idTech5 stopped because crap driver support, but now with Valve pushing ahead to fix that, I think id can resume work on Linux idTech5 if they wish to.
EDIT: Actually UT3 engine DO work on Linux (and icculus that did it!) http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI1O...
If they manage to sell a lot of SteamBox from the beginning (with low costs, like the Nexus model for Android), they can start something.
And then the big players will come.
And then we'll get good linux CG drivers.
Who exactly is this aimed at? Because if it's for anyone with any technical inclination then tell me something I don't know. If it for 'Joe Average' then see above.
You're absolutely right that Linux does have it's own problems as well, but on the whole, I do think Linux is a better platform. However there is a big caveat there: it's the best platform for me.
The problem with having arguments about which OS is better is that the term 'better' is used too broadly. And as everyone has different criteria and preferences, what's 'better' for one person isn't always 'better' for another.
My company sells software on all platforms. Our linux installer has never been a problem. Not only that Valve released their software just for one distribution. Within hours you had people working out how to get it to work on the distribution of their choice. So the fragmentation is not a problem, but more of a benefit where users do the work for you.
You still do run into problems with stuff that was packaged for only Ubuntu 10.10 and it doesn't install on 12.04 for example.
In the days before there was one dominant distro it was a nightmare installing everything you wanted without browsing forums because you had Suse version X and the website only offered you a package for RedHat version Y.
Direct quote from the guy you are in the thread with. If you put it on one distro, the others will port it for you.
Even with open source , you get version lag between distros.
If I release some small program for one distro I certainly cannot count on all of the other distros bending over backwards to repackage it for me.
" The average period of time before a Windows PC (connected to the Internet and with a default "Service Pack 2" installation) gets infected is 40 minutes (and it sometimes takes as little time as 30 seconds)."
Ok, so let's plug a 10+ year old unpatched default Linux distro into the net and see how long that lasts?
The technical skills of an user behind a desktop windows PC in average is at most fair.
The technical skills of an user behind a Linux server is very high, so no wonder why there are more viruses on Windows in comparison with Linux.
Does it mean just plugging an unpatched windows machine into the internet and walking away or does it mean somebody actively using it to surf websites which may have malicious applets etc?
Also doesn't specify whether it's naked on the internet or behind some kind of NAT/firewall.
If we're just talking about random bots port scanning netblocks and looking for daemon banners that indicate vulnerable services old linux distros could be quite bad in this regard.
I had my desktop pwned back in ~1999 because it came with a vulnerable version of telnetd enabled by default.
Yep true, but SELinux is 10 years old now, and with it enabled? I bet it would do a lot better than an unpatched Windows box.
How bad is malware? I bought a Dell 3 years ago, and there was virtually no crapware on it...just the Dell service software I believe...
Ridiculous.
If I leave >1 active I'm prone to losing windows on alternate workspaces; if I'd upped the number to 12 like the person who wrote that page, I couldn't even fill them all. You can see even he had trouble making them look "used" so he could take a screenshot. I've been using this PC daily for the 24 or so weeks it's been up, and I've only got 13 windows open.
Being able to spread out what I'm working on without minimizing or overlapping windows really helps segregate what's going on.
1. Hardware vendors don't provide Linux drivers, often requiring people in their free time to create them from often nonexistent documentation.
2. Nobody can agree on APIs and interfaces. Whenever someone disagrees on something, they just fork it and make their own rather than compromise for a standard.
3. There are a lot of low level assumptions made 20 - 30 (or even up to the age of Unix) assumptions (ttys, shell script, group privilege model, kernel control and management of displays / network controllers / usb / devices) that hamper greatly the usability of the GNULinux ecosystem as a drop in replacement for Windows on the desktop. Android gets away with it by throwing out most of that plumbing.
The first 2 are an inherent problem to the entire ecosystem being FOSS. The userbase is the only group that can fix the second, by focusing and standardizing on one way to do it in the most popular distros and hoping it trickles down (pulseaudio, for example). Both are momentum problems.
The latter I just think ads a lot of unnecessary complexity, but you can work around it. I type this on an Arch box running mostly KDE stuff, it can be done.
Especially the penguin at the bottom with the flyswatter makes me dismiss the whole post out of hand. Nobody in their right mind can take a site like that seriously.
The problem is that these sorts of efforts have an exact opposite effect and are more likely to drive people to Macs or back to Windows.
I have yet to see an article or video that explains the true virtues of Linux over other operating systems: A stable feature rich ecosystem developed by a diverse set of professional developers giving users free access to an incredible range of software.
Instead we get these lame websites littered with crap ads and factually incorrect statements.
In my experience, the heuristic I use for any device is "how much obstacle is there between me and what I want to get done?" If I want to run some development VM's or do full-stack web programming, I would hands down choose OSX or Linux because of their native support for that kind of stuff. If I wanted to log in to a computer, get a quick survey of pending emails, messages, and other generic consumer content, I have to say that Windows 8 did a decent job of delivering that kind of experience.
Sure, there aren't many viruses for Linux or OSX but it's partly because the writers of the viruses have a statistically better opportunity right now to target Windows. There have been plenty of OSX and cross-platform exploits. Most of the famous hacking stories are a person getting a rootkit to let the ssh into a backdoor on some Linux webserver.
As in most things, context matters.
Proper logging.