praka123
left this forum longback
Get the Facts Straight
Posted on June 11th, 2008 in Uncategorized by SnowCrashv5
Linux is the best kernel there is, and the OSes built off of it are the best around. Period. There, I said it. Normally if I was to write an opinionated piece about Linux, I’d explain the history of Linux, the importance of open source and open standards, and ramble on and on about the benefits of it’s lack of cost, but that’s not what this is about, and usually this site strays away from opinion but I couldn’t resist this time.
While LinuxHaters (a Linux hating blog, ran on a Linux hosted service) is grabbing a bunch of attention lately by carrying the flag of Microsoft’s FUD in a rather explicit way and while the atmosphere on certain social sites are becoming extremely anti, it’s time for a rather extensive but to-the-point reminder why Linux, may not be the most popular, but never the less, is the most flexible, secure, fast, free (as in freedom and beer), well supported OS on this planet. All of us “Linux geeks” must believe in the power of this kernel, the toolset built around it, it’s GPL license, and the OSes built off it, for some reason right? So lets get down to business and see what this little OS does for the world.
Microsoft may have many products: Windows Mobile, Vista, XP, the Xbox, the Zune, various server solutions, etc.. but do they all have the same code base? At the very least the Linux kernel is at the heart of all the following projects. Unlike other OSes, or even kernels, Linux’s strength is the sheer number of architecture’s it can run on (PowerPC, SPARC, x86 32 and 64bit, Alpha, just to name a few. ) So by no means are we displaying the power of a company to develop (or purchase what someone else developed), but the power of the technology itself. The only little kernel that could.
*tuxtraining.com/2008/06/11/get-the-facts-straight/
Posted on June 11th, 2008 in Uncategorized by SnowCrashv5
Linux is the best kernel there is, and the OSes built off of it are the best around. Period. There, I said it. Normally if I was to write an opinionated piece about Linux, I’d explain the history of Linux, the importance of open source and open standards, and ramble on and on about the benefits of it’s lack of cost, but that’s not what this is about, and usually this site strays away from opinion but I couldn’t resist this time.
While LinuxHaters (a Linux hating blog, ran on a Linux hosted service) is grabbing a bunch of attention lately by carrying the flag of Microsoft’s FUD in a rather explicit way and while the atmosphere on certain social sites are becoming extremely anti, it’s time for a rather extensive but to-the-point reminder why Linux, may not be the most popular, but never the less, is the most flexible, secure, fast, free (as in freedom and beer), well supported OS on this planet. All of us “Linux geeks” must believe in the power of this kernel, the toolset built around it, it’s GPL license, and the OSes built off it, for some reason right? So lets get down to business and see what this little OS does for the world.
Microsoft may have many products: Windows Mobile, Vista, XP, the Xbox, the Zune, various server solutions, etc.. but do they all have the same code base? At the very least the Linux kernel is at the heart of all the following projects. Unlike other OSes, or even kernels, Linux’s strength is the sheer number of architecture’s it can run on (PowerPC, SPARC, x86 32 and 64bit, Alpha, just to name a few. ) So by no means are we displaying the power of a company to develop (or purchase what someone else developed), but the power of the technology itself. The only little kernel that could.
- Supercomputers - as of 2007 Linux ran 85% of the worlds top supercomputers. Only 6 ( 1.2% ) were Windows based. .4% were Macs, and the rest are various flavors of BSD and Unix. *www.top500.org/stats/list/30/osfam
- Clusters - Whether you are a company or research facility needing a high powered clustering solution, or a kid in his basement with a bunch of old computers laying around, Linux/Unix easily can cluster these machines together with efficiency that no other OS has really achieved; notably, a Beowulf cluster. The ability to use cheap off-the-shelf hardware together with open source software makes Linux an ideal platform for supercomputing. Linux clusters are either: “Beowulf” clusters, “MOSIX” clusters or “High-Availability” clusters. Cluster types are chosen depending on the application requirements which usually fall in one of the following categories: computational intensive (Beowulf, Mosix), I/O intensive (supercomputers) or high availability (failover, servers…). In addition to clusters, there are two related architectures: distributed systems (seti@home, folding@home, Condor…) that can run on computers with totally different architectures spread out over the Internet; and multiprocessor machines (those, like the SGIs are much superior to clusters when memory needs to be shared fast between processes). (Source)
- On the Server - I don’t need to explain much here, Linux was built to be a server (database, application, web, email, etc) first and foremost and has some major corporate backing from Dell, HP, IBM, as well as paid professional support from the Linux makers themselves, Redhat, Novell, and Canonical, among others. Apache, PHP, and Mysql (all open source in their own right) provide the most popular stack on top of Linux and are used heavily creating the web as you know it today.
- Desktops - Linux takes up about 1% to 3% of the desktop market, depending on where you get your numbers. The faux-fear of having to know the command line still works against its adoption as well as the availability of proprietary software solutions being natively available for Linux. That being said Linux on the desktop works fine for many and has its strong points. On most Linux distributions you can install 100 pieces of software in 102 clicks. You can upgrade from one version to another without wiping your drive clean, and again only clicking 2-3 buttons. Linux is mostly free of viruses and someone being infected with one is rather rare. Spyware in a Linux system is almost non-existent. The need defrag your hard-drive is gone due to smart file systems that do their best to not fragment your hard-drive. You can install the OS and most of the software you need in under an hour with user-friendly distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, etc.. You no longer have to go hunting for codecs and drivers, apps like CodecBuddy and Restricted Device Mangers aid you installing proprietary necessities with ease. For the more advanced, you can customize a system to specifically fit your hardware with only the bit you absolutely need with systems like Gentoo. You have a ton of choices when it comes to any problem you may need a solution for, and most of those solutions are as legally free and the OS itself, including office suites, graphics manipulation, audio and video creation and editing (see Ubuntu Studio ). There are scientific specific distributions ( SL ), educational distributions (Edubuntu ), and many more that have software sets that cater specifically for your usage of that machine.
*tuxtraining.com/2008/06/11/get-the-facts-straight/
well very good article. I love Linux more than Windows if only i wud be able to play ALL windows games in it......tsk..tsk.......all wud have changed. I have dual-boot, Ubuntu 8.04 and [nagged
