After “the anti-linux args” thread (It probably should have been the anti-linux desktop thread). I though it would be nice to see if anyone has something positive to say about linux. If you have any negative comments post in the so mentioned thread. I’ll start of the thread.
The nicest part about linux for me is the configurablity. I have much more control over my system and desktop. It was very easy to set a cvs, ftp, webserver that is infinitely configurable.
I also find linux to be incredibly stable. I can run my computer without ever having to restart, reboot just to wipe out some obscure bug.
I also believe that unix programmers in general have better programming skills when it comes to system daemons. Windows programmers seem to have problems writing daemon programs that run for all users (Windows packet writing software has been really bad but is improving).
Well that is my view of the world 
So did you want to discuss or just praise linux blindly?
Kev
I can’t think of anything nice to say about it Except it’s free.
Cas 
/me thinks Cas wants to provoke another flamewar
Just to add something useful, here are some of the things, which are nice on Linux in my opinion: free (as in freedom), free (as in free beer), stable, scalable, secure (at least relative to Windows), good interoperability, good integration of free software, good scripting abilities, easy updates, future proof, offers choice, complete control over system, extremely configurable.
At least it is somewhat open. Compared to for example Sun Java and Microsoft Windows or any Microsoft compiler (Although, not everyone can contribute to the kernel).
It reduces vast amount of stupidity, because the lazy ones will not be able to use the good distros (debian, gentoo) and it also reduces ignorance of the operating system user. Some distros such as Mandrake and Fedora (bloated pieces of crap, imo) are more newbie friendly, but still viable solutions.
There is plenty of software availalbe. That is, software which is often better than Windows software. Considering the software is open, anyone can continue development. Linux is also perfect environment for Gnu Emacs, which in fact is the best Emacs ever also simultaniously being many other best things, ever.
Of course linux can have pitfalls. For example morons who install KDE without knowing that it is developed by 12 year-old morons. With the programming ability of an ape. However, good sollutions, such as Gnome can yield to awesome performance and hardware acceleration.
Open standards have other good sides, for example kOffice (KDE, omg!) lets you edit and create PDFs, currently not present in other bundle software.
The networking abilities of Linux are unquestionable. Whether it is better or worse than FreeBSD, is irrelevant as it is far more elegant and better solution compared to any Windows platform.
Linux in laptops is becoming a lot better. With the multitude of filesystems, a friend of mine prolonged his battery life about three hours by moving from Windows (lol) ntfs to another Linux specific filesystem, which is almost as fast, but requires less rpms.
The best thing of Linux, currently is that, it is pretty much retard free. People who want to install linux, want to understand how linux works and not just ask “HHEY WHERE DA MORRRPG CREATING TOOLS AT!?? YO PPPUaa!”
Also, its gnu. 8)
Oh yeah and it works with good C compilers. I don’t know about Java. I haven’t really thought about installing Java on my linux machines, because Java would probably break them. (As being Windows platform dependent: Sun wants to target masses, masses = windows, Sun wants to be like Microsoft, can’t be -> bitterness.)
Sun’s Java implementation on Linux rocks.
Cas
It’s no secret; I like Linux. I’ve never had the massive problems that other people have reported, indeed I’ve had many, many more problems with Windows. But I think I’m the exception! ;D
What with C#/.NET fighting Java/J2EE for enterprise apps, I’m surprised Sun aren’t more interested in Linux - it’s a platform that their biggest rival has no control over, as opposed to one which they control utterly. (I’m ignoring Sparc here - they operate in a different space.) It remains to be seen what will happen to the Java Desktop System, but I hope Sun really concentrates on it and makes it the huge product it could be.
Many people bemoan Linux’s poor graphics hardware support, but if Sun makes Looking Glass really popular, nVidia and ATI will rapidly improve their drivers and improve the installation thereof. If the general public begin to take notice, other vendors will produce drivers as well.
There are areas in which Windows really excels at the moment, like Windows Update, exotic/cutting-edge hardware support, games, ease of use etc, but I think Linux will eventually get there. I think Linux will still play catch-up for the foreseeable future as there’s no guiding authority, but we’ll see.
I demand competition in any market and free choice of your favourite OS, tools, apps, etc, so naturally I like the fact Linux is there and grows nicely. OpenSource software I use every day with pleasure. The day after TCPA I’ll use Linux, FreeBSD or MacOSX anway.
The commercial Linux distribution named Lindows attracts the usual users out there. Haven’t seen it in action but it looks nice and simple to use. What about Java games for it? Games aren’t a big issue on Linux yet (!), but maybe Lindows is different because of its different user base?
Lindows invented this Click’nRun (CNR) system, so apprantly you (as a Lindows subscriber) can download software with a mouse click: free one and commercial one.
On http://www.lindows.com/lindows_products_categories.php they list 518 games currently. There’s titles like America’s Army, Quake (II), and so on, but also many independent games like the funny ThinkTanks from Garagegames.
Any experiences with Lindows and (Java) games? Free and commercial ones…
PS: LindowsOS 4.0 comes with Java Version 1.4.1_02, is it SUN’s ?
[quote]The day after TCPA I’ll use Linux, FreeBSD or MacOSX anway.
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…if your hardware allows it!
[quote]So did you want to discuss or just praise linux blindly?
Kev
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I am trying to say if you want to flame blindly there is a place for that to :
[quote]Jens thinks Cas wants to provoke another flamewar
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Hehe It’s called “damning with faint praise”.
Actually I think the latest 2.6 kernel appears to be a decent piece of engineering. But I despise all the GUIs, all the shells, all the filesystems, all the configuration tools, hardware support, most of the available software, etc.
Cas
[quote]The commercial Linux distribution named Lindows attracts the usual users out there. Haven’t seen it in action but it looks nice and simple to use. What about Java games for it? Games aren’t a big issue on Linux yet (!), but maybe Lindows is different because of its different user base?
Lindows invented this Click’nRun (CNR) system, so apprantly you (as a Lindows subscriber) can download software with a mouse click: free one and commercial one.
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Don’t know if this is really a great invention (you didn’t say this, but the Lindows people do). Lindows is just another Debian based distribution. If you click on the package probably “apt-get install $package” is executed (maybe with some eyecandy and surely without configuration). At least for me it’s not worth paying $5/month for it. I wouldn’t even use it, if it were free, because the commandline or other package management tools are usually faster and easier to use. I don’t think Lindows is a choice, if you are already use Linux.
The good thing is that Lindows seems to fill a gap. Lindows makes a lot of choices for the users instead of letting them choose, so the user doesn’t have to know anything. They make it easy to install commercial software by packagaging it. There are PCs with Lindows preconfigured that are usually cheaper than Windows PC. And they have a lot money they spend for improving Open Source projects.
I don’t see any reason, why certain games should run under Lindows, which don’t work elsewhere. See http://www.tuxgames.com/ for some commercial games.
[quote]PS: LindowsOS 4.0 comes with Java Version 1.4.1_02, is it SUN’s ?
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Blackdown always has Debian packages, so they probably take this one.
Well I despise the 8 (at least) different ways to do 3d with java ;D(ducks).
Come on, the java people are not that much better
[quote][…]
The best thing of Linux, currently is that, it is pretty much retard free. People who want to install linux, want to understand how linux works and not just ask “HHEY WHERE DA MORRRPG CREATING TOOLS AT!?? YO PPPUaa!”
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Hmyea… yawn 
It’s simple: people want to use their PC to do stuff, therefore they pay for the hardware, the software and install em. They do the stuff they have to do, the stuff they want to do, watch tv, talk with someone from the opposite sex, learn cooking/japanese/how to juggle 12 raw eggs… at at the very end of the list - just below “reading the bible” - you can see “reading man pages”.
The way you put it is just plain silly. Do you know how your CPU works (in detail)? No? Well, you shouldn’t use a PC at all then… you just have to be totally retarded (::)). Or could you fix the electronics of your car with a soldering iron? No? Well, better don’t drive then - you are a dangerous threat for your enviroment
DISCALIMER: This is ONLY my personal opinion. It does not necessarily agree with the opinions of my employer.
So to me the best thing about Linux is… its Unix for the masses.
Not that most of the masses want or need Unix BUT when I was a young man… (putting on my grizzled old timer button and rarranging my false teeth) … Unix was only found at Universities and large corporations. To run it took machiens costing upward of a million dollars and a Unix license (for anyone but a university) ran in the tens of thousands of dollars.
And this was a shame because Unix is great for alot of R&D type things. It was multi-tasking when PCs werent (and still multi-tasks better then windows), it supported Sockets when otehr OSes didn’t (and still does that better then Windows too.) A Unix YOU could get for FREE and install on a cheap computer was and still is revolutionary and I think we at Sun have a lot to thank Linux for in terms of making more then just back-end specialists and academics aware of what a Unix can do.
Would I run it as a desktop? No. To be honest I hate X (what a thing for a Sun person to say). Its over-kill and too dman expensive to run for a one-person machine with a with local frame buffer. (OSX OTOH is a brilliant Unix desktop IMO.) Would I run it as a commerical server? No. Solaris is a better Unix for server work.
But would I give my KID a Linux desktop to learn on? Abso-friggin-lutely. Would I put them in the schools for budding hackers to leanr on? Again absolutely. Would i teach a CS course using them as the dev environment? In a minute.
Linux has been and IMO will continue to be very important. But not as a real challenge to MSFT on the user’s desktop or Solaris on the commerical back end. I thin kthose are red herrings. The only real contender besides MSFT for the consumer desktop is Apple and OSX and I applaud them for sticking to what has been a very hard path to tread. On the back end, now that Linux HAS pushed the price of Soalris down to more ro less nothing, I don’t see any real competition in the near term. In teh far term, who knows. Maybe IBM will suprise us with a GOOD Unix some day Lord knows they have the brain power if they ever really set out to use it in that way.
quoteSo to me the best thing about Linux is… its Unix for the masses.
(…) because Unix is great for alot of R&D type things. It was multi-tasking when PCs werent (and still multi-tasks better then windows), it supported Sockets when otehr OSes didn’t (and still does that better then Windows too.) A Unix YOU could get for FREE and install on a cheap computer was and still is revolutionary and I think we at Sun have a lot to thank Linux for in terms of making more then just back-end specialists and academics aware of what a Unix can do.
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Nice explanation.
[quote]Would I run it as a desktop? No. To be honest I hate X (what a thing for a Sun person to say). Its over-kill and too dman expensive to run for a one-person machine with a with local frame buffer. (OSX OTOH is a brilliant Unix desktop IMO.)
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You’ve been the one who told us in a recent thread not to confuse the OS with the GUI! And you’re right. So let’s not do it again.
There’s no reason why in the future we won’t see a brillant GUI for Linux (or polishing of an existing one), probably X-free and so on.
OS-X is an OpenSource Unix with a great GUI on its roof plus a bundle of nice apps, so yes, you can have Unix on the desktop.
OS-X won’t compete with the MS market in the long term as long as you can’t install MacOS-X on a standard PC hardware I’m afraid. However why should Apple do this? Use unstable hardware? Let’s see.
Well, we’re a Java community. One of the main purposes of Java is or at least has been to make the OS/platform beneath “unimportant”! Use the OS you like - the (Java) apps are the same! I know, we’re not yet there, but one day maybe. For several developers it’s already reality (say, your main tools for 90% of the working day was a Java editor, a Java IDE, a Java CVS, a Java UML, a Java IM, a Java Office, …)
[quote]Would I run it as a commerical server? No. Solaris is a better Unix for server work.
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Many companies run Linux as commercial servers and their numbers increases. I’m not saying it’s better than Solaris. For many companies there’s this option: using Windows as server or using Linux as server. Many choose Linux.
I cannot understand all this X bashing. I absolutly love it. Even if it’s quite a resource hog for running emacs, a browser and some xterms. But hey, memory is cheap and I even boot KDE just to have a pager and the taskbar.
Of course, the client server architecture and network transparency of X comes with a price, but it’s the best feature of X. Imagine you are forced to use some crappy GUI like windows at work. Horror! Gone is your productivity! But you just need an Xserver for win32 and a remote login to a unix box to have your familiar desktop and all the apps you are used to back
I don’t understand the critcism of X in this context. Even if you don’t like some of its features, these are just technical details. It should not stop you from using Linux (if you don’t have other reasons not to use it). Btw. currently XFree has some license problems (new license is considered to be not GPL-compatible), so it’s possible that there will be other X-Server implementations or completely new implementations in the future. See http://freedesktop.org/ and http://www.y-windows.org/ for more information.
This is the pro-linux thread so I’d like to hear someone say something good about X? So far, all that’s been said is that it is good, with no justification (which is contrary to my long and painful experiences :()
NB the remote server stuff seems IME to be useless to (and not used by) the vast majority of users. Most people seem to find VNC (or one of it’s more advanced derivatives such as Tight) to do everything they would have wanted from the remote X, but about a thousand times easier to setup and to understand. It’s simple - I run VNC and I get a view on the desktop of the machine. I can have a private view if necessary, or I can have the view that’s actually displayed on the monitor (last time I used remote-X stuff this wasn’t an option?) which obviously can be fantastically useful.
I can also connect to any OS - windows, unix, etc - with the same simple system, the same client, the same GUI.
Since you can use VNC in real time even over a dialup connection, I’m wondering what’s left to make the X remote features anything more than a gimmick these days?
PS I only chose VNC for the above because it’s free; as far back as 10 years ago we were using the commercial equivalents for remote windows admin and they were fine. I guess these days PCAnywhere et al are considerably more advanced?