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Opening up the debate that has been going on for years! Which operating system (OS) is better? This question has the ability to create endless discussion with proponents of every OS that think the one they use is best. It will in general also become quite a heated discussion. This post is some thoughts on my reasons for using my OS of choice.

Before I get into the reasons I will say that if this post starts getting comments and it turns into a flamewar I will turn off comments to this post. I would love to see reasonable comments with the reason you use your favorite OS but don’t bash anybody elses choice or reasons.

The list of operating systems I have used that I have a reasonable level of proficiency with (I can use it for everyday tasks, but may not necessarily do these tasks in the most efficient manner) are:

• Windows 95,98,2000,XP
• Linux
1. Red Hat
2. Mandrake now Mandriva
3. Slackware
4. Debian
5. Ubuntu
6. Kubuntu
• OpenBSD
• FreeBSD
• Irix
• Mac OS X

Currently I’m running my main computer as a dual boot Kubuntu Linux and Windows XP machine. I log into Windows about once a month so the majority of my time is spent in Linux. As you can tell by looking at the list, I’ve used many different Linux distributions over time and a few different Unix variants. This is my OS of choice. Using a quality Unix-like OS.

I’m not one of those uber-nerds that looks down on those that do not use a Unix based OS. If using Windows works for you that’s great. If a Mac suits your needs better, all the power to you. You have your reasons and I have mine. Very briefly I’m going to give you my top 5 reasons for using Linux.

Reason 1: Power of the command line interface. I like having a nice GUI but I’m a user that prefers to keep my hands on the keyboard. Moving a mouse around is a waste of time most of the time. You could have easily completed most of these tasks in a fraction of the time from the keyboard. The power of the basic system tools included with every Linux distro is vastly superior to that on Windows. If you understand the shell and how to combine the different tools you can very quickly get even complicated tasks done. Sure Windows has a CLI (Start->Run cmd[Enter]) but it’s not very useful. The only CLI tool I ever use on windows is ipconfig.

Reason 2: Better transparency. Because Linux is an open source OS and most Linux software is open source the code is available for anybody to read. This leads to more secure software that has fewer bugs. One complaint I’ve heard from new Linux users is that they are constantly being asked to update their system. In my opinion this is a good thing. I would rather install a security update every single day then have some company wait for three months and release an update that fixes 20 security issues. But they only do this once a week. In that week if the vulnerability has been found somebody could easily exploit my machine. Having the code readily available for everybody to pore over, also helps in that people can create patches to improve performance. The OS kernel itself is open source and by reading you can learn to understand how everything works.

Reason 3: Less resource intensive. I currently run an old computer as test server that runs Apache, PHP, and MySql. Granted it is not running any kind of desktop software so it’s strictly command line in the shell. This computer has a 1 GHz processor with 256MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. I’ve run a few tests on it with server requests and in testing it holds up quite well to around 20 simulataneous connections. Try that on Windows XP running the Apache webserver. In fact I know I can’t even run Windows XP on it without anything else.

Reason 4: More control. During my years as a computer science student I was taking such classes as “Fundamentals of Operating Systems”, “Assembly Language and Comptuer Architecture”, and “Systems Programming”. At the time I had just started using Linux as my main operating system and had only a very simplistic knowledge of how it worked. I decided to create a Linux From Scratch system. This helps you learn how the internals of a Linux based system works from the kernel up. Once you understand some of these fundamental principles you begin to have complete control over your system. You know the capabilities of it on software level as well as the hardware level (which you can get from reading hardware specs and running benchmarks). If you use any distribution afterwards you know which parts of the system are extraneous and not necessary for you but are in the distribution because the majority of users will need those parts. This is control over your system.

Reason 5: Better and more logical configurability. In a Linux system you have your /etc directory which contains files to configure almost every part of your system. Most configuration is done with simple text files. I don’t need to remember a command such as regedit to edit my registry. I open my favorite text editor (perhaps a future post) and open the file that I need and edit it. And when I’m done unless I’ve made a change to some very basic kernel level service I don’t even have to reboot. If I decide to change a configuration on my Apache server I can just issue a restart or reload command to Apache and the new configuration will be in place.

Some of the other reasons that I won’t go into detail with that have convinced me to use Linux are the choice in desktop environments. If I don’t like the way the GNOME behaves on my computer I can switch over to KDE or perhaps a simple window manager such as XFCE. Then there is the mindset of Linux developers. They don’t assume that they know the best way for you to run the application. They leave many of these options available to you to configure. Almost every one of my reasons leads to a much higher learning curve. But in my personal opinion this leads to a more powerful environment once you get past the learning curve.

Please provide comments as to the reasons you use whatever operating system you’ve chosen to use. But please don’t flame another commenter for their choice or their reasons. If this happens I will close the comments to this post.

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