If you are thinking of switching away from Windows or just thinking about what options you have for different Operating Systems (OS’s) you should ask yourself one question “What is Linux?”
I could get all technical with this topic and tell you how Linux is a kernel and how Linus Torvalds is the father of Linux, blah, blah, blah… But instead I’m going to try to keep it simple and to the point to help you or anyone else figure out if switching to Linux is the right move for you / them.
What differentiates Linux?
There are many things that make Linux different than, say, Windows. Linux (as in the kernel) is free and I don’t just mean free as in beer I also mean free as in freedom of speech. Linux is a open source operating system that if you’re savvy enough you could also help contribute to and better the project. Though I will attempt to explain this in more detail in another article.
Linux is more flexible and can be configured in virtually any way you would like to see it. Where-as in Windows or MacOS a user can only change what the developers have allowed. This is something I personally like about Linux. We may touch base on this in a future article of this series also.
Decentralization, developers are not associated with a single entity. As I stated before Linux is open source so anyone can be a developer (provided you know the correct programming languages) while Linus Trovalds is the father of Linux and his foundation maintains the “vanilla kernel” there are several other organizations that have various improvements and modifications for the vanilla kernel.
When you think of Linux, what do you think of?
As we have discussed, Linux is the kernel so where does the operating system come from, this is where we get into distributions or distro’s your distro is going to determine how your system looks, acts, etc. There are many distro’s out there some being Arch, Debian, Gentoo, RedHat, openSUSE, and many others, and on top of that you have distros that have been derived from the named ones. If you think about it you have a lot more freedom and choice with any Linux distribution. Mainly when you think about it a distribution is a collection of packages working together. We may cover distro’s more in-depth in a future article to this series.
So you’ve made the switch to Linux now you’re wondering, how the heck do I get support for this darn-fangled computer thing? A good place to start is right here on The Computer Crowd, but there are tons of resources out there and most (if not all) distros have their own communities where you can ask your questions. Personally I do a lot of trial and error (and I learn new things every day).
I personally use Linux every day as my main computing platform and since I made the switch fully over a year ago I haven’t looked back.
