The evo­lu­tion of Linux has inspired peo­ple like myself to give it a try – and per­haps like a strong nar­cotic – now I’m hooked. Dis­cussing Linux is far more com­pli­cated than many in the com­put­ing world want to rec­og­nize and the rea­son for this com­plex­ity stem from Linux’s her­itage as a secure and sta­ble enter­prise server oper­at­ing sys­tem. The truth is most peo­ple don’t need an enter­prise server oper­at­ing sys­tem and they cer­tainly don’t need the tra­di­tional com­plex­i­ties asso­ci­ated with them. So, when I talk about Linux’ evo­lu­tion I’m talk­ing about it from a gen­eral user stand­point, not a server admin­is­tra­tor want­ing to play with it on my every­day workstation.

 

More on Linux His­tory (for those of you who really want to know).

 

At the very core of Linux devel­op­ment sits two extra­or­di­nary char­ac­ter­is­tics that truly sep­a­rate it the more pop­u­larly used sys­tems avail­able from Microsoft and Apple. One, is Linux itself a sys­tem inspired by UNIX, and the sec­ond char­ac­ter­is­tic is based on the open-source devel­op­ment phi­los­o­phy that con­tin­ues to drive Linux devel­op­ment. The rea­son I cite 2 pri­mary char­ac­ter­is­tics is because the Mac OS X oper­at­ing sys­tem is also a Unix-based oper­at­ing sys­tem, but they are based on a “closed source” devel­op­ment phi­los­o­phy, not open source.

 

The ben­e­fits of open-source are quickly evi­dent in Linux. Let’s start with the look and feel of Linux.

 

Graph­i­cal User Inter­face (GUI)

The GUI is the eye candy and pri­mary user inter­face to com­puter. It’s the icon you click with your mouse to get a file to open… the menu you nav­i­gate to find your music player to lis­ten to music… and in a world dom­i­nated by Microsoft Win­dows and Mac OS X most peo­ple can’t imag­ine there’s another choice, but in real­ity, open source GUIs inspired Win­dows and Mac, and Linux offers a mul­ti­tude of graph­i­cal inter­faces to cre­ate a com­fort­able user experience.

 

The three most pop­u­lar desk­top envi­ron­ments are GNOME, KDE, and Xfce.

 

For Linux purists, or peo­ple who rather work in a ter­mi­nal instead of a graph­i­cal inter­face, at the very core of every Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion sits the ter­mi­nal. As users become more com­fort­able using Linux, even the most new­bie user will find using the ter­mi­nal to do cer­tain things faster and eas­ier than click­ing win­dows – but for 99% of users, every­thing they’ll need will be avail­able in the GUI.

 

 

Live CD

The Live CD is an inter­est­ing and fab­u­lous con­cept. It allows a user (that’s you) to down­load a Linux Dis­tri­b­u­tion, Burn it on a CD or DVD, restart your com­puter and using the disk use Linux. It’s a fan­tas­tic way to try a Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion with­out the has­sle of actu­ally installing it. From my expe­ri­ence you’ll lose some of the pretty fea­tures like win­dow wig­gles when you move win­dows around, but out­side the lose of occa­sional eye-candy, you get the chance to see how the oper­at­ing sys­tem works.

 

 

Soft­ware Repositories

Linux being open-source has an enor­mous library of FREE soft­ware that allows you to do pretty much any­thing and every­thing you can imag­ine. Best of all, you don’t need to search for it, it’s all avail­able in ONE place using the repos­i­tory. In Ubuntu 9.10 they’ve added a menu but­ton that makes FINDING IT and INSTALLING IT as easy as two clicks.

 

Viruses and Spyware

A lot of peo­ple claim that the rea­son you don’t find Viruses and Spy­ware on Linux (or Mac) is because of a lack of pop­u­lar­ity. How­ever, the REAL rea­son is how Unix-like oper­at­ing sys­tems (Linux and Mac) man­age file per­mis­sions and access thereby cre­at­ing a near nat­ural bar­rier from the dam­age of a virus or the intru­sion of spy­ware. They can exist within Linux but nei­ther both are harm­less to a Unix-like oper­at­ing system.

 

Mem­ory & Resource Usage

Win­dows is a mem­ory and resource hog – and always has been. It’s as if Microsoft cre­ates their oper­at­ing sys­tem to work on the tech­nol­ogy of tomor­row and not so much for today. Linux is effi­cient from the start. For one, when it installs, it cre­ates a swap drive for oper­at­ing sys­tem write/read operations.

 

Cre­at­ing a swap drive instead of just using a page file as Win­dows does elim­i­nates hard drive frag­men­ta­tion, a real prob­lem with Win­dows (I believe this may be solved in Win­dows 7, although I’m not sure). Mem­ory allo­ca­tion in win­dows is a prob­lem too. Mem­ory allo­ca­tion and usage has always been a pri­mary strength of the Mac line of oper­at­ing sys­tems since day one and this did not change when they upgraded to a Unix-like sys­tem. What does this trans­late into as a user. Faster sys­tem responses; pro­grams open faster, close faster, oper­ate mul­ti­ple pro­grams faster, less mem­ory induced errors (the BSOD), and all this adds to high sys­tem stability.

 

It Just Works

To be hon­est, this is a recent occur­rence. I remem­ber try­ing out Open­Suse a years back and I couldn’t get my wire­less card to work on my lap­top… I spent a week look­ing for a dri­ver to no-avail. I finally had to just give up. I now have Linux installed on 3 com­put­ers in my house and I’m plan­ning on installing Linux on a friends com­puter here soon because she’s been hav­ing a lot of virus issues and let’s be hon­est, Virus pro­tec­tion soft­ware is A LOT of resource over­head and really slows down older computers.

 

These days, you put that LIVE CD in your com­puter… restart and right from the get go it’ll rec­og­nize every­thing. In one install I did on my pri­mary work­sta­tion it found a RAID card I DID NOT want to use, get­ting it to NOT use it actu­ally proved to be a big has­sle, but I’ll dis­cuss that one at a later time.

 

In Clos­ing

I use Linux for 80% of my com­put­ing needs. I works faster, bet­ter, and I like the way it looks and feels. How­ever, I still need to use Adobe Illus­tra­tor and Dreamweaver for a lot of projects. Linux may have an alter­na­tive, but I just like the way Illus­tra­tor and Dreamweaver work so I don’t change. This means, I still need Win­dows – So I vir­tu­al­ize it. Mean­ing, I have Win­dows XP installed in a pro­gram called Vir­tu­al­Box inside Linux and open Win­dows like a pro­gram. And sur­pris­ingly, Win­dows actu­ally works just as fast viru­tal­ized on my com­puter as it did natively.

 

And because Linux is FREE, why wouldn’t you try it. You’ll be pleas­antly sur­prised how far Linux has evolved.

Tags: benefits of linux, linus evolved, linux, new to linux