Why does everyone love Linux so much?

[wasab]

Just now, leadeater said:

What is just as easy?

 

I (my team) support over 300 Linux servers today, have for years. I also support over 1000 Windows servers. I kind of support Mac OS but only the endpoint backup software which is create the install package for and hand over to the desktop support team.

 

I get it you don't care what I have to say about this, it makes no difference to me either way. Explained why, we don't have to agree. I have not seen a significant increase in Linux usage on desktops and laptops I have think I have a good enough understanding of why, I could be wrong and the good thing about that is my opinion on it has no impact, I'd just be wrong.

When is the last time you ever used linux as a consumer desktop OS for at least a week instead of a gui-less server? I can run windows 10 servers from a command line at a job and it says nothing about the day to day experiences as a windows 10 home premium users. 

[Kisai]

9 minutes ago, wasab said:

I said windows updates 'sux' and for a good reason. This alone is enough for me to avoid it. How about you give me a better reason that linux is lesser a desktop OS besides just that it cant run Microsoft office suite? 

No, I'm done with your comments. You're firmly in the "I'm not listening, I'm not caring, I'm running Linux on my car and toaster because it runs on electricity therefor it must be the same" nonsense. 

 

The cloud is not a desktop. Period, full stop. Microsoft and Google are certainly barking up the wrong tree here because most of the world has crappy internet.

 

Linux on the Desktop, is a tiny edge case, not mainstream. It will never reach a point where people will prefer it over Windows, because people would rather switch to MacOS X first, even if that means buying an MacMini. MS Office is on the mac. Photoshop is on the mac. Autocad is on the Mac. 

 

None of those are on Linux.

[wasab]

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

The cloud is not a desktop. Period, full stop. Microsoft and Google are certainly barking up the wrong tree here because most of the world has crappy internet.

 

And those places still run windows xp and use flip phones just because they can't afford better. What does that say about popularity if any? 

 

Chrome OS and Android are Linux under the hood and both of them are mainstream. Android alone far outnumber windows and Mac/iOS devices and also outstrip other operating system in web traffic. 

 

Your argument that Linux is not viable in xyz makes absolutely no sense. 

[Kisai]

4 minutes ago, wasab said:

And those places still run windows xp and use flip phones just because they can't afford better. What does that say about popularity if any? 

 

Chrome OS and Android are Linux under the hood and both of them are mainstream. Android alone far outnumber windows and Mac/iOS devices and also outstrip other operating system in web traffic. 

 

Your argument that Linux is not viable in xyz makes absolutely no sense. 

 

For the nth time. Android is not a "Linux" distro, you can not install it on a desktop, and is not a Desktop OS. iOS (or rather iPadOS) and MacOS X both run on the same kernel, and both can do Desktop things, but the iPad and iPhone is still not a desktop replacement any more than an Android device is. 

 

For device to quality as a desktop:

 

1) It must have expandable, removable storage. Some Apple Laptops don't even qualify as this, and most touchscreen devices do not qualify either.

2) The user must have control over the user experience. Again, no IoT device qualifies, no tablets qualify, and no phones qualify.

3) The user must be able to use the device in perpetuity. Again, no phones qualify. If that 3G/4G network tech ages out, the devices are all worthless.

 

For a device to qualify as "Free, Open, Libre" etc, it must also

4) Permit the user access to the underlying configuration (be it terminal, apps, etc)

5) The source code to the OS, and all Firmware blobs must be available. This is the "GNU/Linux" goal, not FreeBSD or OSX's goal, because BSD has historically been closer to public domain "do not remove my copyright" license.

6) Security blackboxes must be documented (eg TPM, DRM schemes, Encryption algorithms, etc)

7) Hardware schematics, Verilog source, etc to all hardware bits must be made public.

 

Yet routinely, Linux distributions fall short of their goal, because the people advocating for Linux care more about making "Libre" forks of software that is already open source rather than trying to fix compatibility and security issues. The more this happens, the further Linux drifts away from mainstream desktop ever being a possibility. So now instead of having one or two choices of "Free" open source alternatives to some expensive application, there are now 10 incompatible versions.

[wasab]

19 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

For the nth time. Android is not a "Linux" distro, you can not install it on a desktop, and is not a Desktop OS. 

For the record I can. Android for x86 does exist. 

 

You call your car and toaster Linux but Android isn't. Oh my. Arent you taking the liberty to call something as whatever that's the most convenient for you. 

 

By your definition, Linux server isn't distro either considering most do not come with a display server and can't run gui desktop OS apps. What does that make them? None Linux ...Linux? Or distro less Linux despite the fact many of them carry the distro brand like Ubuntu server? Really?

 

And no. Most Linux users do use proprietary softwares and these softwares do exist for the Linux platforms. The fact Linux is open sourced does not hinder propietary developers in any way or shape to develop proprietary  apps for it. If you are gonna cite that as a reason that Linux will never become mainstream, why don't you read up on the Android open source project and see if it's open sourced nature has any negative impact on the amount of proprietary apps. Linux is open sourced. It dictates nothing other than that. Users are free to install whatever propietary components they want after agreeing to a license which means you literally tick an accept checkbox no different than on windows and Macs. 

 

You seriously do not make sense. 

 

[Dat Guy]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

average user doesn't care beyond "does it work and is it simple"

Precisely. The main point which Linux zealots usually try to make is "it's like Windows, but you can see the source code". Honestly: Why would most people care?

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, wasab said:

For the record I can. Android for x86 does exist. 

That is not a desktop distro. That is a mobile phone package called "Android" , not Linux. You can not use it as a desktop OS. It does not run the x11/wayland window manager (and no, you can't install this on a commodity whitebox PC either) and thus can run no GUI linux software. At this point, I don't think you even know what a desktop is, or you're being intentionally obtuse about it. 

 

Linux is only the kernel, you can run the Linux kernel on a BSD userland, or you can run the GNU userland on the BSD kernel, or the GNU userland on Mac OSX, you can not however run Android applications on a Linux Distro, because it is not a Linux distro, it's an Android (mobile phone) distro.

 

Even if you download an Android emulator, it does not come with a Linux userland, it does not come with the window manager backend to run Linux software.

 

Are we done yet, or are you going to next tell me that because you can run Minecraft on mobile phone, console and a desktop, all three must therefor be a desktop?

[Dat Guy]

51 minutes ago, Kisai said:

You can not use it as a desktop OS.

You could, but it sucks.

[Bramimond]

I have trouble using stuff like a mouse for longer periods, be it vertical, trackball, touchpad or the weirder things out there. With Linux it was possible to configure my system so that I do not have to use a mouse. Mostly by using i3wm and qutebrowser, but it helps that in Linux you can basically configure everything you want through text files, so you're not forced to click through GUIs.

 

There's also the advantage that you do not have to "set things up" once you install a new system. Just copy all your config files over and you're basically done. I'm using Linux since around 2003 and I never had to change any of my workflows involuntary. About the worst thing that happened was Gimp (an image editor) to introduce a weird workflow for saving in v2.8 (released 2012), so I just reverted back to the previous version and will keep that one indefinitely. If there's something that annoys you, you can fix it.

 

I enjoy the freedom I get with Linux. There's no

• "You have to update, now. And also, I'm restarting this PC."
• "I've downloaded Win10 for you, do you want me to upgrade your PC now? No? Tough luck. Updating now."
• "We've updated Office and put made it so none of the options or icons are where they were before. Also, we changed the color of all icons. Office and Outlook are now harder to differentiate".
• "This subwindow is so important, I will prevent you from interacting with the main window until you've closed it"
• Focus stealing

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Bramimond said:

 

I enjoy the freedom I get with Linux. There's no

• "You have to update, now. And also, I'm restarting this PC."
• "I've downloaded Win10 for you, do you want me to upgrade your PC now? No? Tough luck. Updating now."
• "We've updated Office and put made it so none of the options or icons are where they were before. Also, we changed the color of all icons. Office and Outlook are now harder to differentiate".
• "This subwindow is so important, I will prevent you from interacting with the main window until you've closed it"
• Focus stealing

That's a fairer argument, but not without it's issues.

 

- Frequent (albeit too frequent) updates are due to the frequency of software bugs becoming security holes. If the frequent updates were entirely to address this, I might be inclined to just let the OS update. But why reboot? WHY. This is shared by Windows, OSX, Linux, and pretty much every mobile device. 

 

There has been a feature in Linux (kpatch) for some time that allows live-patching the kernel, why doesn't that exist on all platforms? Probably because there's not enough separation between ring 0 and ring 3. To reset everything in Ring 0 1 and 2, it's faster to do a reboot than to interrupt a critical process. The only time a PC should be "required" to reboot for an update is when attached hardware (eg hard drive firmware, raid firmware, tpm firmware) will be critically affected. There should be no reason to reboot when you update things like the GPU, Sound card or Network card.

 

Unfortunately kpatch still inevitably leads to a reboot because the original memory is not freed. So as of today, it's still not readily used by (any?) distro, and is more of a cloud-services solution so that the cloud vendor can update it's running VM's without restarting them.

 

Time and time again, many OSS projects are full of bugs, because the developers don't address compiler warnings, and "build systems" don't treat warnings as errors. They treat missing or stale libraries as "optional features" thus bugs and security failures perpetuate and ship "as long as it compiles". 

 

It would be nice, if an OS can be installed, and only receive security updates for 10 years, without a reboot. Don't install new "features" at all. But It took microsoft, what, 4 years to discover that people don't like having updates pushed like they are now? These large scale updates are preferable to how Vista and earlier updated, which was through a lot of piece-meal updates. Auto-updating is the preferred mechanism, but only to address security issues. If a new feature is going to be introduced I'd rather be able to put it off, or never install it in the first place.

 

And as I've stated, Linux is just as bad as Windows, if not worse for feature creep. You may not be forced to update, but when you do, the updates often pull in more and more libraries, thus inevitably leading to a point in time where you are installing the entire x11/wayland environment on a server just to use one feature (which is what happens on both Linux and FreeBSD if you use binary packages to install imagemagick.) If you want to avoid it, you have to build it from source. Defeating the purpose of using the system binary packages and the security updates.

[wasab]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

 You can not use it as a desktop OS. It does not run the x11/wayland window manager (and no, you can't install this on a commodity whitebox PC either) and thus can run no GUI linux software. 

What does that Make Linux servers lacking x.org and Wayland then? None Linux distros? What does that make chrome OS which lacks xorg and Wayland as well? None desktop?

[wasab]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Time and time again, many OSS projects are full of bugs, because the developers don't address compiler warnings.

That is just wrong. Maybe you ought to avoid all the legacy windows and mac applications because all of them would throw complier warnings for deprecated libraries if compiled from source by now. 

 

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

And as I've stated, Linux is just as bad as Windows, if not worse for feature creep. You may not be forced to update, but when you do, the updates often pull in more and more libraries, thus inevitably leading to a point in time where you are installing the entire x11/wayland environment on a server just to use one feature (which is what happens on both Linux and FreeBSD if you use binary packages to install imagemagick.) If you want to avoid it, you have to build it from source. Defeating the purpose of using the system binary packages and the security updates.

You do realize Linux servers are typically ran for years without ever rebooting and Linux is known for stability as oppose to your misinformed notions of bugs and unusability right? Also, servers can do without a gui, there is no need to use gui at all frankly. Everything can be done via the terminal. 

 

Why would a web server ran something like imagemagick in the first place.... 

[Dat Guy]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

There has been a feature in Linux (kpatch) for some time that allows live-patching the kernel

In theory.

 

1 hour ago, wasab said:

Linux is known for stability

Pre-systemd, that is.

 

6 hours ago, Bramimond said:

"I've downloaded Win10 for you, do you want me to upgrade your PC now? No? Tough luck. Updating now."

That literally never happened like this.

 

6 hours ago, Bramimond said:

"We've updated Office and put made it so none of the options or icons are where they were before. Also, we changed the color of all icons. Office and Outlook are now harder to differentiate".

Nobody has ever forced anyone to upgrade Microsoft Office. (I know that this is not quite true. I think you understand my point though.) By the way, have you seen that LibreOffice has ribbons now?

 

6 hours ago, Bramimond said:

I enjoy the freedom I get with Linux.

When compared to Windows? Maybe, depending on the subset of freedom you're looking at. When compared to other systems? LOL.

[leadeater]

7 hours ago, Bramimond said:

There's also the advantage that you do not have to "set things up" once you install a new system. Just copy all your config files over and you're basically done.

You can actually do the same for Windows. You could also just create a reference image in audit mode then capture it then use this wim file instead of the MS default, or you could put all your settings in to local GPO and back those up and apply on reinstall, or use PowerShell DSE and put all your customization in there with these last two being able to ensure that the settings stay as you'd like and won't be altered.

 

Or you could go with open tools like Puppet, Ansible etc and do local play files on the system, but PowerShell DSE makes more sense here.

[Bramimond]

2 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

That literally never happened like this.

 

Nobody has ever forced anyone to upgrade Microsoft Office. (I know that this is not quite true. I think you understand my point though.) By the way, have you seen that LibreOffice has ribbons now?

It happened to an acquaintance of mine who works at a doctor's office. Since all their systems they used to work weren't compatible with Win10 yet, they had to call tech support to fix it, leading to them not being able to admit patients for half a day.

 

Also, pretty much everyone forced to use Windows at work will be forced to upgrade Office at work, too. I'm not using LibreOffice. Most of the programs I use are terminal programs. All my grievances with Windows come from having to use it at work.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

You can actually do the same for Windows. You could also just create a reference image in audit mode then capture it then use this wim file instead of the MS default, or you could put all your settings in to local GPO and back those up and apply on reinstall, or use PowerShell DSE and put all your customization in there with these last two being able to ensure that the settings stay as you'd like and won't be altered.

 

Or you could go with open tools like Puppet, Ansible etc and do local play files on the system, but PowerShell DSE makes more sense here.

Are you seriously telling me that I can have the exact same experience on Windows10 as I did have on WindowsXP? Because I was telling you that I can have the exact same experience I had on Linux in 2003 on Linux in 2019. With all workflows remaining unchanged. If that was even remotely true, people on Windows wouldn't feel as much pain upgrading to a new version of Windows.

 

I didn't even stay on the same flavor of Linux since 2003, but I could still just copy over all my configs and had the same experience, basically. Like, same terminal color scheme, same desktop background, all programs configured like I had them before. My music player would even have the same playlist on the same song that I left off on the old flavor of Linux after doing a fresh reinstall of the newest version and copying over my files and configs. (Basically just copy the /home folder over)

 

My experience in upgrading from XP to Win7 and from Win7 to Win10 has been... quite different. And it's not unusual to hear folks complain that "everything is different" on a new version of Windows. On Linux, it doesn't have to be. You can have the same experience basically forever, despite upgrading everything. Individual programs may decide to go batshit insane, like Firefox, but I blame Mozilla for that, not Linux. Likewise with hardware support. Yes, it's difficult to find laptops compatible with Linux, but I blame Microsoft's Shenenigans for that, not Linux. Didn't they basically invent/push secure boot and UEFI specifically to make it harder to install Linux? Of course, they gave some different excuse, but if memory serves well, that was basically the motivation.

[Dat Guy]

9 minutes ago, Bramimond said:

Most of the programs I use are terminal programs. All my grievances with Windows come from having to use it at work.

The PowerShell is decent, to be honest.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Bramimond said:

Are you seriously telling me that I can have the exact same experience on Windows10 as I did have on WindowsXP? Because I was telling you that I can have the exact same experience I had on Linux in 2003 on Linux in 2019. With all workflows remaining unchanged. If that was even remotely true, people on Windows wouldn't feel as much pain upgrading to a new version of Windows.

Yes you can, beyond the application developer changing the UI of the software over time but that is not unique to Windows. If you want your settings to persist across installs and be transferable you can indeed achieve this in Windows, you do have to learn how to do it just the same as Linux. It is of course simpler on Linux due to it being just files as opposed to having to learn a configuration tool. Not that I mind learning such a thing because I also use them in my job, for both Windows and Linux.

 

If Microsoft decides to change the UI we can complain but most of the settings are held in the same place to control the same thing.

 

You can pick and choose the UI experience of Linux unlike Windows, but as to just copying over "config files and you're done" you "can do that on Windows".

 

1 hour ago, Bramimond said:

My music player would even have the same playlist on the same song that I left off on the old flavor of Linux after doing a fresh reinstall of the newest version and copying over my files and configs. (Basically just copy the /home folder over)

User State Migration Tool. I've migrated many hundreds, likely in the thousands of Windows computers over night and the user has not noticed any change at all and everything is exactly the same as before, we do leave a note saying their computer hardware has been upgraded.

[wasab]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Yes you can

Without your drivers breaking and many backwards compatibility issues with previous windows apps? really? 

[leadeater]

57 minutes ago, wasab said:

Without your drivers breaking and many backwards compatibility issues with previous windows apps? really? 

Yes, but not even Linux is immune from very old legacy software compatibility problems, not that it's an OS problem in the first place either though. Not like a I can force for example the engineer department to not use their old ass 16bit application, mind you when Windows 7 ends support that will be a problem because that's only supported on 32bit versions, 64bit Windows has no 16bit app support at all.

 

Supporting an application 15 years dead is never a good thing, it can be your only choice but that's pretty rare to have zero other options.

 

Edit:

Also FYI drivers are not configuration files or configuration settings. Drivers can have configuration settings which you can transfer even across different backing hardware, do it properly.

 

Starting to sound a bit like "I don't want to learn Windows better but I am willing to learn Linux" issue.

[wasab]

50 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Edit:

Also FYI drivers are not configuration files or configuration settings. Drivers can have configuration settings which you can transfer even across different backing hardware, do it properly.

Doesn't matter. I know I can plug in my microphone into my Linux machine and it works right out of the box. 

 

On windows 7, I install a driver in device manager and it works. I upgraded to windows 10, install the same driver, it no longer works. 

 

That's what you call a broken driver. 

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, wasab said:

install the same driver, it no longer works.

Probably should have used the Windows 10 driver not the Windows 7 driver 

 

Plus I've never actually had to install a microphone driver on Windows 10 either, plugs in and works right away for the ones I've used.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Probably should have used the Windows 10 driver not the Windows 7 driver 

 

Plus I've never actually had to install a microphone driver on Windows 10 either, plugs in and works right away for the ones I've used.

At this point, I think the poster you're responding to just likes hearing themselves. They put forward no arguments for their case and are relying on ignoratio elenchi to keep it going.

 

From experience:

Windows 10/8.1/8, 7/Vista, and XP/2K/NT4 are the three "versions" of Windows NT that evolved out of each other. Mac OS meanwhile has only ever had three versions, Mac OS "Classic" (PPC), Mac OS X (PPC), and Mac OS X (x86). And you know what the Mac can do that Windows and Linux never do? It can run "fat binaries", which means you can compile the application once for all chips that the OS runs on. Windows NT4 had Alpha, PPC, and Itanium support at some point.

 

You know what happens when you unzip an APK? You get a bunch of Dalvik junk glued together and then typically 1-4 binaries, one for x86, one for x86-64, one for ARM7, and one for AARCH64 (ARM64), and most Android developers were still shipping 32-bit binaries only, THIS year, and only because Google twisted their arm and said "no 32-bit only binaries on Google play". Unity was the last holdout to start shipping 64-bit binaries. Meanwhile iOS has been 64-bit since iOS 7/iPhone 5S. iOS will also be the first to rip off the "64-bit or GTFO" bandaid. The game that made people start noticing their Android phones were rubbish? That latest Pokemon game, because it only runs on 64-bit devices, which most made before this year are not. 

 

Do you see where I'm going with this? You can not run Android binaries on desktop Linux distro's, despite there being x86 binaries. You can not even run Unity blobs from a mobile app on a desktop, of any sort unless the developer actually produced a binary for the OS with the assets tuned to the OS. There's all kinds of texture compression features that are supported on only one device that makes other devices run poorly.

 

Anyway I digress. There is no market for a Linux Desktop. Linux servers, yes. Linux-based IoT devices, absolutely. Apple is still the winner in the mobile space, because they're the ones making all the money in the mobile space, and Samsung/LG/Huawai/etc are making nothing on the device once sold, and Google has a hard time convincing anyone to pay money for it's services in the consumer space, they just have no commitment to anything other than google search, adsense, gmail and youtube. Everything else can be withdrawn without notice, and that makes people annoyed.

 

Kinda sucks that the only company that makes a big deal about running on Linux, is can't spare the resources to put a commitment to keeping features, like what is the actual upkeep cost that justified killing off Google Reader? I actually predict Stadia might only last about 2 years, and then people will go back to wanting to own their games once they see how much of a poor experience it is North America and Europe. It might survive in in East Asia, but it's still wishful thinking, and that's directly on Sony's turf.

 

Anyway, in case it hasn't been made abundantly clear. There is no Linux desktops, because there is no selling point to "Switching" and having none of your workflow come with you. You can switch to MacOS X, and at least all the most common Windows applications used in the Office exist there. 

 

If and When Microsoft decides it's viable to roll out Native Linux MS Office (perhaps on the same codebase used for OS X) then "a Linux Desktop" might get a strong re-evaluation, but as I've stated before, the only thing keeping people on Windows is the lack of any option to leave.

 

[wasab]

5 hours ago, Kisai said:

You can not even run Unity blobs from a mobile app on a desktop, of any sort unless the developer actually produced a binary for the OS with the assets tuned to the OS. There's all kinds of texture compression features that are supported on only one device that makes other devices run poorly.

Says the person who is scare of unix terminal and does not even realize the fact that macOS is itself an Unix operating system. 

 

I'm not gonna bother correcting your inaccuracies anymore, not worth it. You sound very much like an apple fanboy/fangirl by this point as well. 

[Bramimond]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

Yes you can, beyond the application developer changing the UI of the software over time but that is not unique to Windows. [...]

 

User State Migration Tool. I've migrated many hundreds, likely in the thousands of Windows computers over night and the user has not noticed any change at all and everything is exactly the same as before, we do leave a note saying their computer hardware has been upgraded.

Where can I learn this black magic of upgrading Windows 7 computers to Windows 10 without the user even noticing? My older colleagues swear it cannot be done without breaking things in weird and interesting ways that will only manifest themselves later on.

 

Like Excel is on my computer, when I have two window instances open. Every way I interact with instance A will affect instance B and vice versa, so closing instance A closes instance B and leaves me with no way to interact with instance A. I have no idea how a program could even break like that. If I actually needed Excel I'd have to reinstall the entire system to fix this, probably, as reinstalling just Office didn't work.

 

12 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

The PowerShell is decent, to be honest.

That was my first impression, too. I still think Powershell is pretty neat. But what I meant with terminal programs was, that on Linux, I have a full fledged file manager in the terminal (ranger), there's a music player (cmus), video player (mpv), image viewer (sxiv),... basically I don't need to leave the terminal at all to do stuff. And if websites hadn't become the abominations that they are nowadays, where you need various blockers just to make it kind of work, there would even be options for surfing websites from the terminal.

 

Spoiler

 

[Dat Guy]

2 hours ago, Bramimond said:

But what I meant with terminal programs was, that on Linux, I have a full fledged file manager in the terminal (ranger), there's a music player (cmus), video player (mpv), image viewer (sxiv),... basically I don't need to leave the terminal at all to do stuff.

You can do that on Windows as well.