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Reasons why I switched to Linux. Full time!

Gautham Prakash on June 03, 2020

Hey there. It's my first time on #dev.to community. The reason why I wrote this blog is to let you all get a glimpse of why using a free and open ...
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John Johnson Okah

Ever since I ditched Windows, I have so fallen in love with Linux.
To be honest, it makes me feel cool 😎 as a coder. But the best part is whenever I step into my terminal, I feel like I have superpowers, cause I could do a whole lot there.

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Nicolus • Edited

But the best part is whenever I step into my terminal, I feel like I have superpowers, cause I could do a whole lot there.

I don't know when you made the move, but Powershell is incredibly powerful and Object Oriented. The only drawback is the fact that it's more verbose than bash (which is imho better for writing scripts, but less convenients for short one liners) but it's a really good shell.
The new windows terminal is also shaping up to be pretty good.
So really you can have superpowers with the terminal in windows, it's just that most windows users don't bother to learn Powershell.

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Gautham Prakash

It's not about the shell at all. Window in simple term frozen with B.O.D several times, forced updates and all those chaos. True, Powershell is so powerful and even PowerPoint from Microsoft is so powerful that you could literally do programming URL with it. I love some Microsoft stuffs but not Windows 10. That's all.

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Nicolus

Sure, I was specifically replying to John's comment about his favorite part of Linux being his terminal (I edited my comment to make it clearer).
I'm not trying to start a "Linux vs Windows" argument ;-)

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Gautham Prakash

You have a point. Cheers.

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

That's the real fun.

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manish srivastava

Desktop: If you want Rich experience, windows / Mac is solution. Not everyone look for 'Rich Experience' . If you okay with terminal, go for Linux desktop.

Server: If you want 'Rich Experience' go for Linux. If you are lazy go for windows server

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riidom

While the Windows and Mac desktops are not bad (I used a Mac for half a year in an internship ages ago, and use Windows at work when I'm in office), I consider the Linux desktop even better, tbh.

Example virtual desktop:
The implementation on Mac I find confusing (but then it was my first contact ever with virtual desktops so maybe my fault).
On Windows they are a little half-assed (one-dimensional layout only, if you want to sort applications, you cant drag from one VD to another AND from one monitor to another at same time).
On Linux (KDE in my case) I don't experience any flaws with the implementation.

Example keyboard shortcuts:
Windows is a disaster here. I wanted to change some shortcuts so they are more like my linux system at home, but no way. Either you "download some suspicious tool that will also check for malware" or you "do these easy 11 steps in Windows registry and better don't mess anything up!"
If shortcuts are configurable on Mac, I don't remember.
On my Linux PC, I can configure basically every shortcut.

The console may be better in Linux but I use it not very often (if so, mostly from within VS code).

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Maciej Cieslik

Windows console isn't that bad today, you have cmd, powershell and if you work with git, you have git bash. Powershell is mostly for system admins, but it can replace windows file explorer and is as powerfull as linux bash (but in a different, windowsy way). I like linux more though.

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manish srivastava

RDP client is different story. Anyway, My reply says 'Rich Experience' . Linux is wonderful . Out of 20 super computers all are Linux.

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riidom

Ok, maybe I misunderstand the term "rich experience" here. And I don't get the relation to Remote Desktop at all, tbh.

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manish srivastava

RDP has reference of Virtual Desktop in your comment :)

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riidom

Oh I see, but I mean actually something completely different.. like this: howtogeek.com/197625/how-to-use-vi...

The term must be doubly-defined then :)

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manish srivastava
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Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Personally, I've always found Linux to provide a richer experience than Windows or Mac in terms of the desktop environment. So have most of my computer repair clients, many of whom are (or were) computer illiterate.

Desktop environment is only ever 100% personal taste and subjective opinion.

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Gautham Prakash

Very well said.

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Shaiju T • Edited

😄, Nice, But Windows is very user friendly. The UI is very easy to use. Many enterprise uses Windows for development. Does anyone use Linux in work ?

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

This question depends on several things, like the type of firm you work in, the projects you work on and also the region. Most system administrators, networking engineers, devops guyz and cool startups prefers to use Linux as their main OS since it make real sense to develop stuff in a system [local linux] to deploy in the server [server linux].

Do checkout OS like Pop!_OS , Zorin or Linux-mint and tell me how the UI feels.

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Simme

Most system administrators, networking engineers, devops guyz and cool startups prefers to use Linux as their main OS

Says who? As someone said earlier, you would probably benefit a lot from not making as many assumptions about others.

Stack overflow's annual developer survey, which probably is as close as we'll get to the truth, tells a different story:

developer os distribution

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

They might use windows ...I don't know but more often than not they are SSH into a linux shell. So in some sense they use linux for work more than Windows even though in reality they are stuck in Windows. Do note stackoverflow is not the entirety. And by the way things are turning around.

Thanks for the feedback.

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Mahesh K

Putty is not Linux Shell. Also Powershell does allow SSH support through WSL if that's what you meant. Windows may not be useful for many reasons but a lot of reasons explained here mostly reiterated or rehashed by recent convertee being sold on typical benefits. In reality the customer to which we are selling the products can't even use Google Spreadsheet properly selling them anything outside Microsoft Office is pain.

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

It's the way the society is built. That they can't leave without it. By the way I didn't meant putty as such rather all the other services like GCP,HEROKU and everything. You have a point though. But in the start of the article I wrote why it's best for people in the tech domain.

I'm no R programming expert, but just try to run a R script with 10000 print statements in Windows and the same thing in Linux and let me know.

Thanks for you comments

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Mahesh K • Edited

I already have run R and other data science tools on Linux. In fact I am one of the Ubuntu nerds you may find me in comment section. Why ubuntu? Because I find it easy to train Clients to use it compared to say KaliLinux or ArchLinux to a slow Windows user who asks me how to press Print button on New version of Office 2019.

I am in no way anti-linux camp. It's just that lately I have been seeing the "anti windows" articles and the toning has been such that Microsoft is out to get you. That dinosaur age is long gone, Bill gates is retired, all the aged Tech giants who were strong capitalists have been put down by the Communists in tech. Windows has made ammends with Linux and UNIX and hence the WSL birth. The toxic vibe from the Linux to Windows needs to low down is what I feel. That's why I feel the migration from Windows towards Linux should be done on case by case basis and not to put every tom.dick and harry to Linux who will literally struggle in some cases.

My 2 cents.

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gauthamp10 profile image
Gautham Prakash

Hmmm... in some way that is the true. I agree.

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Julio Chrisostomo

Nice article!
I've been working with Ubuntu since 16.04 (I only use LTS versions) and it is my main OS. Before Linux, I used Windows 7 and macOS and can agree with you about performance. We have a monolith system and the startup is 50% faster than macOS. And building an android app on Linux is really fast too.

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Gautham Prakash

Cheers to Linux. Appreciate your feedback @jchrisos

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Gautham Prakash

No Rob. It's not about talent here. I would rate me as an average guy in the tech world. But the important thing here is that you all are so fixated on either Mac or on Windows from your childhood that your mind refuses to learn something entirely different. In-fact the Mac OS terminal is as useful as the Linux terminal because, Mac is Unix based.

In a real world scenario, it would be like taking 100 push-ups a day. Everybody could do this if they practice for a month but only few do it sincerely for the long run and they get all the benefits.

It's no nice to hear a genuine feedback from user like you.

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Thomas H Jones II

Been using Unix systems since the late 80s (college) and Linux since 1992. Similarly, I've been making my living on UNIX since the mid 90s (Solaris, Irix, AIX, HP/UX, UNICOS ...at least a dozen more) and almost exclusively Linux for the last ten years (primarily RHEL and CentOS).

To be honest, I still prefer having a Windows for desktop usage, especially with Windows 10 (build 2004). Between free, full virtualization solutions like HyperV (included in Windows 10) and virtual box, thin virtualization solutions like Docker Desktop, features like WSL (the Ubuntu app is nice if I don't feel like firing up HyperV or Docker Desktop) or even third party tools like CygWin, I have all the local development options I need. Plus, Windows 10 added application sandboxing in the 2004 build, so you can run your box pretty damned securely (and, yes, while Linux has long had security sandboxing by way of SELinux, damned few people seem to know about it and even fewer bother with it).

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Gautham Prakash

Wow great information.

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Sm0ke

This is one of the best articles I've read here on Dev, in the last few months. Thank you!

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

Thank you @sm0ke . Appreciate it.

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Bhupesh Varshney 👾

A gread read 🔥
I love how Lenovo recently decided to ship all their PC/Laptops with Ubuntu 20 LTS, it will be a major push if people start adopting it.

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Gautham Prakash

Great. Is that so? I love to own a better Linux supporting laptop. Currently I use an Acer Swift-3.

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Bhupesh Varshney 👾

I think this may take time, you can read it here

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Gautham Prakash

Cool. Great new. Fingers crossed.

 
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Gautham Prakash

Yah..I know preferences and all. Different people like different things. But I don't find myself sitting on Windows anyone. I'm fed up that's all. I like Mac OS very much. It's user-friendly as well as productive.

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Ranieri Althoff

In the past, using i3 on Arch Linux, I had a fast booting system with complete GUI support in under 150 MB of RAM used :) 400 is already a lot here.

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Gautham Prakash

Most user don't like to use a window manger like i3. The screenshot was from Bodhi liunx/ Openbox I guess...I don't remember. Though true in every sense we can even create an alpine build with tiling wm which uses about 80mb ram. Yes even 400mb is a lot in Linux terms.

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Ranieri Althoff

The possibilities are endless.

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Gautham Prakash

That what I love about it and sometimes hate it also. Which one is better i3 or awesome?(interm of performance). Curious why you use i3.

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Ranieri Althoff • Edited

I have no experience with Awesome, but I had a friend that used it. i3 seems simpler to set up and Awesome seems more powerful to tweak. After that. both would use sub-1% of CPU at most, and everything feels instant.

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Gautham Prakash

Cool.

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Tirta Keniten

Nice article, bro!

I've been using Ubuntu since 2013. Because I couldn't afford Windows.

I'm a web developer and I feel like Ubuntu is enough for me to get my jobs done. I'm the one that smile when my company attacked by ransomware.

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Gautham Prakash

Appreciate it brother. Yah. It's lame to pay up and still use crappy stuff.

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Khoa Huỳnh

Another thing to consider for developers is because sources can be compiled and executed on Linux much faster.

I agree with you on this but i saw this on ArchWiki:

mongodb(AUR) - builds from source, requiring 180GB+ free disk space, and may take several hours to build (i.e. 6.5 hours on Intel i7, 1 hour on 32 Xeon cores with high-end NVMe.)

Building from source with appropriate flag can boost performance and make it more stable but sometimes the cost is too high and we can just use a prebuilt binary version.
Anyway, i love Linux because it gives us more options to suit our needs

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

I'm not entirely sure. But AUR packages takes more time because of the fact that may be only .deb packages are available and the package manager tries to convert it into source to recompile it again?
I have tried FDM from AUR and it take a lot of time and space compared to the official .deb package.

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Nishan Shetty

I think Windows Subsystem for linux is great. It brings together the best of both the worlds. The recent improvements in performance have made it better.

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Gautham Prakash

Good one.

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Felix Terkhorn

Another great article!

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Gautham Prakash

Glad you liked it.

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edinhadzovic

first step done, now become pro in vim and you are going to feel like a real Superhero.

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Gautham Prakash

Glad you use vim.

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Paweł Kowalski • Edited

Linux is and will remain the best ecosystem without debate for developers

haha :D

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

It make sense in every way to develop most types of softwares using Linux because, it's the bleeding edge for programming.

Though you could use Windows or Mac OS too. But learning a platform like Linux will help you good in the long run.

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Maciej Cieslik

I love Linux, but in work I need stable affinity studio apps, and I really don't have time to even test how it works, maybe someone tested it?

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Gautham Prakash • Edited

Yah true. As I mentioned studio apps and work specific apps are situations were #Linux is a no-go.