Andrew Lisy's Blog

If you're a power user but haven't yet given Linux a shot, you should definitely try it out. Here are 10 things that you will love about Linux over Windows or OS X. [caption id="attachment_116" align="alignright" width="300" caption="MythTV turns your computer into a media center"] [/caption]

1. Linux can be customized far more than Windows or OSX, so your system can be set up to do exactly what you want it to do. In college, I had a spare Pentium 3 computer lying around that I wanted to use as a frontend to my media server. I didn't care about (or want) a desktop or anything other than a media player that would play my files fullscreen. Since I had a wireless keyboard but no mouse and no remote, I wanted everything to be completely keyboard-driven. There were a few options from a "nice frontend" standpoint, most notably MythTV. However, since I wasn't recording shows and I didn't care so much about a fancy interface (I was fully happy with doing everything from command line since its easy enough to browse folders and play files), I settled on Ratpoison for the window manager. I set the system to boot up to a full-screen command line with a large font, and did all browsing from the command line. When I wanted to launch a file, I used mplayer set up to launch full screen. As a result, I could very quickly play a large variety of files without any GUI hassle or slowness.This was a special use, but it goes to show that Linux can be tailored in a nearly infinite number of ways. Want a large, cushy GUI? Try KDE. Want something barebones? Try XFCE or Fluxbox. Want to create a server and stick it in the closet? Just leave off the GUI -- everything can be done command line. Choose what servers and services you want installed and what you want to run in the background. Finally, perhaps the best part -- if you build a system using a distro like Gentoo (my distro of choice), you know and have control over everything going on. That's power.
 
2. You can chain together basic system services to create your own custom software routines. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to wake up each morning to a different song from a playlist of about 100 songs that I had on my computer. When I got up, I wanted to first hear a random song from the playlist, then listen to current business headlines and weather read to me as I got ready. With Linux, setting this up was pretty basic. See my other blog post Talking Linux RSS Alarm Clock if you're curious how I strung together several off-the-shelf components to create this app in only a few minutes.
 
3. You can custom-configure the OS to run well on even your old, underpowered computer. [caption id="attachment_117" align="alignright" width="200" caption="SSH clients like TouchTerm allow you to administer your machine from anywhere, even a cell phone"]
   
   [/caption] The newest versions of Windows or OS X will run painfully slow on a computer that is more than 3 years old. This is because Vista and Leopard have become extremely bloated because of "features" like enhanced visual effects, indexed search and always-on spyware and virus protection. Visual effects are nice, but you certainly don't want or need them when you're using older hardware for basic tasks. Spyware and viruses are much less of a problem on Linux than on Windows, so you can get away without running any protection software on Linux (provided that you update they system regularly). Indexed search is one of the better features and almost worth the cycles it takes; however, if its an older computer, its nice to be able to forego this. Granted, you can turn off or lessen the effects of any of these three, but your system will still not be as peppy as it could otherwise be. With a stripped down Linux install, your old Pentium II can run basic apps with plenty of speed.
 
4. The system is fully accessible remotely, even over the slowest connection -- even from a cell phone!With Windows, you only have control over the system remotely if you set up remote desktop, and even then, you're severely limited to where you can connect from because sending a full screen requires a pretty fat connection. OSX is a little better -- you can do the remote desktop, but you can also connect remotely over SSH, which only sends text and commands, so its a lot speedier. The problem with OSX is that most of the Apple software is designed to be used and configured through a GUI, so often there isn't much that you're able to do over command line. Almost anything in Linux is available over the command line, so when you connect remotely over SSH, you have as much (or almost as much) power as you have when sitting right at the desktop. If you regularly login this way, you can find applications that easily let you access your mail, play music (on the server computer) and even chat on IM all through the text-based terminal. Perhaps a special use, but its pretty convenient to be able to reboot your computer or restart your web server over your cell phone when you're in the next state and need to retrieve a special file.
 
5. Its free, and you can try it without reformatting a computer. Check out a LiveCD like Ubuntu or Knoppix, both of which will bring you to a full-fledged Linux desktop as soon as you pop in the CD/DVD and reboot the computer. They allow you to get a very basic feel for the system without having to remove or disturb the existing OS underneath. Knoppix especially has a huge suite of applications that let you test out several programs for any given use without having to worry about downloading or installing them
 
6. Installing, maintaining and upgrading your software is a snap.Modern Linux distros (short for distributions) have very advanced package managers, which are programs that handle the search, installation, and maintenance of all of the programs on your system. Gentoo uses a system called portage, which downloads the source code for all the applications, compiles it, and installs it. This is a bit slower than just copying over pre-compiled binary packages, but [in theory] results in software thats exactly tailored for your PC. Ubuntu uses a system called apt, which is much faster than portage because all of the packages have already been compiled. In either case, finding an application is a quick command away, and installing it is only a few more keystrokes. When it comes time to upgrade, another few keystrokes can update an individual program, only system files, or every program on the computer. This is heads and shoulders above the OSX or Windows way of doing it, where you need to browse the web for a file, download it, and then go through the setup routine.
7. Linux is great with networking. Sharing files across a network? Want to set up your own web page and serve it to others? Want to connect automatically every time to other shares that people have set up, and have them seamlessly integrated into your file structure? Linux has industrial strength support for a variety of networking applications, such as Apache for web serving and Samba, NFS, scp, and a variety of other protocols for filesharing. Many of these are a click away from installing on a major distro, and can be seamlessly integrated into your files. While OSX does a pretty good job at this sort of thing, support for these services on Windows is spotty and incomplete, especially on the home versions. For example, if you have a music directory shared on Windows that you connect to using SMB (Samba), you can just set that share to appear in your home directory as /home/user/music, so it looks identical to any other directory in your system and can be manipulated and used by other programs just as easy.
 
8. Almost all of the best software for Linux is free! Just about anything you want to do with Windows is relatively easy to do with Linux, and chances are someone has written some very good free software to do it. In fact, I've found that software for Linux tends to be better-written and more powerful in many [most?] cases than its Windows or Mac counterpart. The reason behind this is that there is a huge network of software developers that use Linux, so when there is a glaring omission application-wise on Linux, the community is quick to step in and fix it. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, it is relatively easy to string together tools with Linux, so often application development is quick because application C makes use of applications A and B in an efficient way. Here is a [very, very brief] list of great free software on Linux:- Firefox [same program as Windows and OSX] - Amarok [music manager, syncs with an iPod. Comparable with iTunes, has some other interesting features] - KWrite [text editor, far more powerful than Notepad] - AbiWord or OpenOffice [word processing and office software, comparable to MS Office] - EasyTag [MP3 tag manager, very powerful for getting your songs tagged and named properly] - KAlarm [alarm clock program, can set alerts, timers and alarms on a one-time or recurring basis] - Pidgin [IM application, connects to AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Lots of cool plugins] - The Gimp [Powerful image editing program, comparable to Photoshop]    These are some of the applications that are free and useful to get going on a day-to-day basis. You'll find that a huge amount of specialized programs exist, and are free, to do things like photo management, backup, games, etc.
9. LiveCDs exist for countless specialized uses, so advanced applications are just a disk image away Because Linux is so modular, any type of system can be built around the core. For desktop users, this typically includes a nice desktop graphical environment, a web browser, a word processor and a media player. However, not all computers and configurations need this much in terms of user applications.When I was in college, I wanted to be able to compile software on Gentoo faster by using a cluster of computers to break up the workload. The good news was that there was an abundance of powerful computers on the network (namely, my friends' machines). The bad news was that none of them had Linux or the software needed to compile over the network. The solution was distccKnoppix, a LiveCD that came pre-setup with the DistCC compiler software I needed. After downloading and burning a few copies, I went around and rebooted the computers around me into the LiveCD environment and was soon compiling on 5 separate computers.
   
   Lots of other great LiveCD systems exist: MythBuntu turns your computer and TV into a media center, gOS creates a very simple cloud-computing enviroment built on Google Applications, Redwall Firewall turns a spare computer into a logfile-rich firewall for the network. Tons of other CDs exist for every other conceivable use from network attached storage (NAS) to kiosk-style arcade games. The old computer that was sitting in the closet collecting dust can easily be reborn in many different ways with a LiveCD install. Check out The LiveCD List for an extensive listing of LiveCDs.
 
10. New and cutting-edge features come very quickly to Linux because of the wide network of smart programmers all over the world.Since Linux is a collection of software made by programmers all over the world instead of simply an OS packaged by one company, you can have new developments on your desktop in days or weeks by simply updating your system instead of waiting years for the next release. Furthermore, the sheer number of different minds working on the problems creates a multitude of choices for any given application.For example, in the media player area, Amarok incorporates sophisticated music analysis and fingerprinting technologies that help identify your music and suggest music that you might also like. Similar features are now trickling down to iTunes, but Linux has had them for years. Users that were interested in incorporating information from databases like Last.fm could do much more quickly by using software in Linux than they could waiting for mainstream apps for Mac OS and Windows.Desktop environments like KDE 4 and Gnome are constantly pushing the envelope in user interface technologies and new features come every day that improve the experience and add functionality. Of course, not everything is a slam dunk, so some degree of willingness to test out cutting-edge technology is required, but for those that like to be at the forefront of new tech, Linux is the place to be.

I was home the other day, and like every techie that goes home for Christmas, I was enlisted to fix the family computer. "Its too slow -- that kaleidoscope thingie keeps spinning" [can't you tell we have a Mac]. I took a look, and the issue isn't really the computer itself so much as the 4+ years of application buildup slowing down the machine and a new version of OSX (upgraded to Tiger from I believe OS X 10.2) which undoubtedly eats up more cycles than 10.2.  If I spent a few hours uninstalling and cleaning, or worse, reformatting, I could definitely speed it up dramatically...but why? What she and millions of other PCs sitting in dens, kitchens and family rooms around the world need is an extremely stripped down OS which would run only the barest of basics -- in her case, it would be only Firefox, since she gets her emails though gmail. Conceivably, the 1% of other stuff that she does could be handled though another, more fully functioning computer. What is needed here, and what I hope to build at some point given a bit more time to play around with the stuff, is a bare bones LiveCD that loads itself fully into memory and provides only a browser in an attractive and friendly format. I know there are distros like Damn Small Linux and others that begin down this road, but even those are too much for what I envision -- a sort of set-top box for the internet. It needs to look decent (I installed a Ubuntu LiveCD and her first comment was 'eww, whats that ugly brown color on my desktop') and be completely free of other icon clutter -- no dock, maybe a basic clock, no desktop icons, no media players, no email clients, etc. Finally, the icing on the cake would be this -- you plug in a flash drive, and that becomes your home directory. Again, this is something other distro's have attempted, but none have perfected (that I know). The way this would work is as follows: plug in the flash drive, boot up linux. On the first boot, if the flash drive isn't formatted as ext3, give the option to format (this is dangerous because you would have to be sure its not a hard drive with Windows and data on it, but that can be surmounted). On subsequent boots, the /home/username structure would exist, and all Firefox settings and preferences would be saved to the flash drive. The best thing about this would be that the volatile aspect of the OS would mean that a fresh, fast computer is never further than a reboot away. If the window manager was something very lightweight (XFCE, etc...or even Ratpoison started up with Firefox maximized...hmmmmm), it could run very well on even the oldest of hardware. People that don't use computers often wouldn't have to worry about breaking the system, kids could use it without corrupting anyone's data (since everything would be on a flash drive anyways) and geeks like me could enjoy Thanksgiving without having to perform a brain transplant on an aging iMac. Interested to hear if anyone has made more progress on this than I've seen...