(08-26-2013, 12:03 AM)chmod Wrote: Apple are very good at telling their customers what they want rather than letting them make the choice themselves especially with the iThings! you could quite easily make your Linux desktop look similar to OSX with a bit of themeing for example an Xfce desktop will give you a launcher bar at the bottom that you can add commonly used applications too similar to the launch bar on the OSX and a bit of tweaking along the task bar and window styles will give you that look you want and then you have the best of both worlds

(06-06-2013, 11:06 AM)chmod Wrote: Greetings HC, when I look through the forums I see a lot of newbies asking questions like "A lot of you guys use Linux, why do you prefer it to Windows?" today I will attempt to answer that question with some comparisons.

The file system

Windows uses the NTFS file system which due to the way it writes data gets fragmented putting more strain on the disk and slowing the system down.

Linux uses the EXT4 file system which has very little fragmentation meaning you do not have to waste time de-fraging your hard drive EVER and it will continue to run without slowing down, and allows all characters for filenames.

The EXT4 file system is capable of handling huge files with single files of up to 16TB and can read volumes of up to 1EB (Exobyte).
Disk checks using EXT4 are much faster than NTFS as unused disk space on the EXT4 system is labeled as such and subsequently skipped rather than checking it anyway

A typical Linux system is also partitioned so that the main OS files reside on one part of the disk and your other files are contained elsewhere meaning if you manage to break one of these you can repair it without touching the other.

Keeping up to date

Updating your system in Windows is a pain there are the automatic Windows updates but I personally find them annoying, having to restart every time some patch is installed is time consuming and counter productive, and that's only the OS updates to update the software on your system you have to manually open up each application and then check for an update, download the update and then apply it.

Linux approaches things differently, all of the software on your system can be downloaded and installed automatically with one click, or with a simple command if you wish to do it with the terminal, what's more Linux has no registry so there is no need to restart or even close an application while you update simply close it when you're done and the next time you open it you are using the new version. The only update that requires a restart is a kernel update.

Security

For anyone who has ever booted a Windows machine, you will know there are viruses and other malicious programs out there designed to mess with your system of steel information from you. I am not going to tell you there are no virus' for Linux because there are, but they are not really a threat and never will be. Those of you who say virus will become a problem if Linux (or mac for that matter) becomes mainstream, that's not strictly true and heres why:

I cannot find any up to date statistics on this but an article I read dating 2003 stated that there where about 60,000 known viruses for Windows and around 40 for Linux, the date is not important it's the stats we are interested in a ratio of 1500:1 is a considerable gap. These figures will have changed but the fact remains that there are far more threats targeting Microsoft's OS than any other operating system

When you log into a Linux system you do so as a normal user, as apposed to windows which automatically make the first account and administrator and in order to get admin (root) privileges in Linux you must in fact log in with a special account called root which requires a password therefore a virus will not have the required permissions to cause any harm, furthermore its not a case of just double clicking on an executable you must first manually set the program to have executable permissions then log in as root and run the program before it can do any harm as apposed to simply double clicking it and ignoring any UAC message that pops up.

The other reasons Linux is far safer than Windows is the way it installs software, the vast majority of applications you will need on a Linux system can be downloaded and installed directly from a software repository which has been set up by the vendor of your distribution to hold packages directly from the softwares creators so, as well as being faster and easier it is guaranteed not to have been messed with because they are digitally signed and checked at the time of installation, so even if the repo's have been hacked and a package gets replaced with a malicious version the signatures won't match and the package manager will reject it.

Software is open source you can view the source code of the applications you want to install you ca see exactly what it's going to do without even running it, and even if you don't know what you are looking for thousands of other people will which means instead of relying on the vendor to fix bugs anyone can in fact do it making patch times much faster and then your desktop will then alert you of an update and security hole closed.

You are not tied to one application to do any one task, this means that writing an exploit is a pretty pointless exercise as you are targeting a specific program and version which you can't guarantee how many people are using, the same goes for OS level exploits you would be very lucky to find multiple machines running the same kernel, patch sets etc so you would practically have to custom write each exploit for each target, a huge waste of time, and the issue would be picked up reasonably quickly by the army of developers who would release a patch and make that exploit useless.

I am not saying Linux is impossible to exploit/hack, just that it is so much harder it's not really worth the effort.

As added security most Linux distros give you the option to encrypt the HDD upon installing adding to security

Customization

If you think you can customize your Windows machine, check out Linux as well as being able to select wallpapers and themes you can do so much more

The first and most obvious one is the sheer number of distributions available each have there own theme's and come bundled with different software, I'm not going to go over all of them because I simply don't have time.

Then after you have chosen your distro you can chose your desktop environment such as gnome KDE etc again lots to chose from each with their unique features so have a look at a few and choose one you like the look of.

Still not to your liking? Not a problem each piece of software on your machine has a config file which you can edit and tweak to get the look you want and if that's still not enough for you the vast majority of software for Linux is open source so under the GNU license you are free to modify the software to look and act exactly how you want it to, and under the same license you can then share that with friends family or the rest of the world. So as you can see the possibilities are endless.

Still not convinced? did I mention you get all this for free?

And that ladies and gentlemen is why Linux is better than windows

(06-20-2014, 12:03 AM)BlueCat Wrote: Very nice thread, @chmod But, I will always be a windows user simply because Linux is too 'confusing' for me.

(06-20-2014, 12:06 AM)chmod Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:03 AM)BlueCat Wrote: Very nice thread, @chmod But, I will always be a windows user simply because Linux is too 'confusing' for me.

That's part of the excitement, dive into the unknown and learn what you can from the experience I would recommend everyone to at least try it after all it can be booted from a DVD/USB and is free there is literally nothing to loose, if you don't like it just eject the media and reboot back into Microshit Winblows :troll:

(06-20-2014, 12:12 AM)BlueCat Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:06 AM)chmod Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:03 AM)BlueCat Wrote: Very nice thread, @chmod But, I will always be a windows user simply because Linux is too 'confusing' for me.

That's part of the excitement, dive into the unknown and learn what you can from the experience I would recommend everyone to at least try it after all it can be booted from a DVD/USB and is free there is literally nothing to loose, if you don't like it just eject the media and reboot back into Microshit Winblows :troll:

I have to say, I would boot Linux on my computer, but half of the screen is cracked so when I reboot, I don't know the button to press to boot it up.

"Microshit Winblows " Your just jealous :troll:

(06-20-2014, 12:15 AM)chmod Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:12 AM)BlueCat Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:06 AM)chmod Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:03 AM)BlueCat Wrote: Very nice thread, @chmod But, I will always be a windows user simply because Linux is too 'confusing' for me.

That's part of the excitement, dive into the unknown and learn what you can from the experience I would recommend everyone to at least try it after all it can be booted from a DVD/USB and is free there is literally nothing to loose, if you don't like it just eject the media and reboot back into Microshit Winblows :troll:

I have to say, I would boot Linux on my computer, but half of the screen is cracked so when I reboot, I don't know the button to press to boot it up.

"Microshit Winblows " Your just jealous :troll:

I run linux as my main OS by choice, I have a windows 7 machine that gets booted about once every 4-6 months.

Finally protip: If your screen is that bad maybe you should replace it lol

(06-20-2014, 12:19 AM)BlueCat Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:15 AM)chmod Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:12 AM)BlueCat Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:06 AM)chmod Wrote:

(06-20-2014, 12:03 AM)BlueCat Wrote: Very nice thread, @chmod But, I will always be a windows user simply because Linux is too 'confusing' for me.

That's part of the excitement, dive into the unknown and learn what you can from the experience I would recommend everyone to at least try it after all it can be booted from a DVD/USB and is free there is literally nothing to loose, if you don't like it just eject the media and reboot back into Microshit Winblows :troll:

I have to say, I would boot Linux on my computer, but half of the screen is cracked so when I reboot, I don't know the button to press to boot it up.

"Microshit Winblows " Your just jealous :troll:

I run linux as my main OS by choice, I have a windows 7 machine that gets booted about once every 4-6 months.

Finally protip: If your screen is that bad maybe you should replace it lol

Saying that do you know the bootup button for LinuxMint 17? I already have it on my usb all it needs now is to just to be booted.

I would but fuck paying £90 for a new screen