I have an assignment for school, and I need to get some opinions about Linux as an operating system. 1. What are some of advantages of Linux compared to other operating systems? 2. With all its advantages, why do you think Linux isn’t used more widely? Thanks in advance! Bob
Lol, you're asking mnsubaru to do your homework? You've met some of these knuckleheads in person, right? carry on
My assignment is "get some opinions about Linux" and thats what I'm doing. None of my friends are really techy...and Ive seen some pretty techy convos go on around here.
He's right. Also, there is a lot of stuff to install. The novice can make a disc with everything they'd need on it, and it will install like windows (ubuntu linux comes to mind here) and then go. But then that brings us to the reason why it's not used more widely. I used to have a gentoo box with no GUI, just XWM and eterm to do everything. XWM made it pretty and gave me 8 desktops to put all my **** onto. Otherwise, all of my programs were command-line initiated. But I haven't used linux regularly in 4 years... so I don't know jack anymore, please bear with me. Linux is an OS designed for networking. It's made for servers. It's not made for much else. Sure, you can get gimp (photoshop clone), openoffice (word clone) and email programs (I forget what I used to use for email on my linuxbox), you can use AIM and Firefox ... but the main reason why I switched back to windows is that you can't play many games on it. MacOS did a great thing when they released OSX. They integrated everything the mac can do into a unix backend. So if you want the fine-tuning of command line, you can use it. Now, you can play steam games on Mac. This is a step in the right direction. So, opinions on linux as an OS, it's great, if you use it for what it's designed for. I didn't do much networking so I never really had much of a use for the machine itself -- save bragging rights
1) Linux is good in that anyone can write code for it and add features and applications to it whenever they want. 2) The problem is, as powerful and open as Linux is, unless you're able to code for it, you are going to be severely limited in what you can do with it. Another issue is that while there are tons of scripts and applications for Linux, alot of them are written by regular Joes that don't have any obligation to continue writing code or updating and bug fixing their code. In the workplace, you don't want to implement code on a computer that you aren't going to receive support for. Linux is basically only as good as the person using it. It all depends on the user. If you are a basic user that doesn't do anything out of the ordinairy, Linux is fine, as there are distros that can be installed and just used without much setup. Anything beyond that level of use requires knowledge of Linux. And if there is something you want to do with your computer that you can't because there isn't an app for Linux, then you have to write one... It's hard for Linux to compete against Windows and OSX in the desktop market because there are millions of applications out there that do what you need with minimum computer knowledge required to install and use it. ....ALSO, what Aegis said...
Be more specific. What are the advantages of a hammer over a screwdriver? As far as my personal opinion, it's just another tool to use (or not) to accomplish my goals. We're getting to the point where OS choice is damn near commoditized. Macs have become much, much better at interop and taking off the training wheels. Microsoft is becoming increasingly open and is shifting more and more resources towards consumer products instead of relying on it's corporate clients for bread and butter. Linux distro's are getting more and more user friendly every day. For my professional purposes there are a lot more factors to total cost of ownership and metrics for proving an appropriate cost/benefit ratio. Training staff up on not-windows is expensive. Sourcing enterprise contracts for not-windows is expensive and the talent pool is much smaller. Install base is also a huge concern. Rolling out any kind of core infrastructure change in a decent sized enterprise is ridiculously expensive. It's hard to justify that kind of change unless the enterprise REQUIRES something that can only be reasonably had on the target platform. There just isn't that much that mac/win/linux can do that the others can't. Not anymore.
1. Stability. 2. I think it's used plenty where it fits. While there are several types of linux with nice GUI's, they still require some command line knowledge. Also this:
Thanks for the input guys. What was said should be enough to get me to where I need to be. John, I have sufficient amount of info with what was said above, thanks anyways though!
