Linux advantages

[Melissa]

I was just wondering what advantage does Linux really have? I converted from windows to Linux and can't see the point. I'd rather just stick to my Mac :P thanks!!

[Bill]

There are many advantages. Otherwise, there would not be so many Linux users. If you do not see advantages, you are not doing it right.

What Linux distro are you using?

[Microsuck]

Yeah, what distro are you using? It's also a choice of free and open source, scalable, and very customizable, or not.

[Melissa]

Personally I didn't set it up myself so I have no idea what any of you are talking about lol. All I know is I'm using mint on my old dell. I find it slow and can't see any advantage at this point. Just wanted to know if anyone had any suggestions for add ons?

[Melissa]

Sorry for my cluelessness but I've never used it before last week.

[Melissa]

I'm usually on my Mac. I just wanted to speed up my dell and people were telling me Linux was better than windows so I decide tO give it a try.

[KenJackson]

I have to use Windows at work and am constantly annoyed and disgusted by it.

One very big annoyance is that keyboard focus seems to frequently get switched away from the window I'm typing in, so my keystrokes are lost until I notice and switch it back. For example, when outlook pops up a notice that I've received email, I often press ALT-TAB to switch look at the email. When I'm done I either press ALT-TAB once to go back one app, or ALT-ESC to put Outlook at the bottom of the stack. Either way, if I were on Linux, I would be right back where I was with my editor having the focus, ready-to-type. But Windows? Often I end up with NO WINDOW having the keyboard focus. What earthly good is that? When would I EVER want nothing to have the focus? Worthless.

Another annoyance is that Windows has the weakest command shell, CMD, on earth. I MUST install Cygwin to stay sane. But as a result, I work in a world with two different ways to specify the same filepath: C:\cygwin\home\ken\text\myfile.txt and ~/ken/text/myfile.txt. Cygwin has a cygpath executable that simplifies dealing with this, but that means I have to write little wrapper scripts to deal with all non-cygwin executables, and I still sometimes end up with confusion. If Windows had a decent shell, I wouldn't need Cygwin, but that's not going to happen.

Another is flexibility and freedom. Does Microsoft offer any way to grep its .doc files? On Linux (and Cygwin) I can use antiword to output just the text with no formatting crap and pipe it into grep to look for the name or word I'm searching for. I can even pipe that result into the clipboard on Linux or Cygwin and paste it into any app.

Windows doesn't even have grep. It has find (very different than GNU find), but it's a poor substitute. I can't get any work done without grep.

[Bill]

Personally I didn't set it up myself so I have no idea what any of you are talking about lol. All I know is I'm using mint on my old dell. I find it slow and can't see any advantage at this point. Just wanted to know if anyone had any suggestions for add ons?

If Mint is running slow on that computer, then I see two possible reasons.

1. The disk is still in the computer, so you are booting to the disk instead of the hard drive. If this is the case, there will be an icon on the desktop that says Install or something like that. Take the disk out and restart the computer.

2. You need a lighter distribution because the computer hardware is outdated. In this case, try Puppy Linux. Download the .iso file and burn it to a CD. Restart the computer with this disk in place.

[Melissa]

...... *facepalm** OMG TY Bill....my disk was in my computer :S wow that was embarrassing lol

[Melissa]

I think ill just go back in my shell now lol. @ ken I have to use windows at work too and it drives me nuts. Like I mentioned above I love my mac but my little Dell netbook looked lonely and since I hat windows I decided to give Linux a try