Linux and why you should use it

For many years before I got my first Mac I was an avid user of linux, when I first got to uni I had one of those little netbooks with no power and even less ram. This thing was terrible, 4gb of ram, 500gb hdd, 766p screen, dual core 1.2ghz celeron, I mean this thing struggled to have a chrome tab open. It was running windows 7, sort off. It would sit at 3.5gb of ram at boot up and opening chrome from cold boot took around 3 mins. There had to be another way, as I was to poor to afford anything, especially when I had gotten this for free, I set out on a quest to make this netbook not completely useless again. At this point I had heard of linux, but I had never seen it, never used it, so I thought why not give it a shot. Loaded up Ubuntu onto a usb, went through the installation. WOW, boot up was only around 30 seconds, this is incredible. Start opening up things, then checking the ram usage, wow this thing can actually run things. This ubuntu setup had me going all throughout my first semester of uni, then I met a guy who also loved linux, we hit it off. He introduced my to the wonderful world of window managers. These little beauties replace the traditional desktop environment of ubuntu say their unity environment and replace it with a completely stripped down and lightweight tiling window manager. This is extremely light on system resources as i would never go over 2gb even using chrome, the main bottleneck would be the cpu. This little netbook while terrible was good enough to get me through my first semester at uni. I was amazed at how Linux can turn even the worst hardware into something that can actually do something. With Windows 10 becoming more and more popular there will be more and more people who can’t stand the way it does its updates and for me this is one of the biggest reasons not to use it. The simple fact is Windows has no idea how to do updates, it completely takes over your system to install the smallest of patches, this is stupid! Who decided this, or maybe they didn’t because it truly seems like one of the stupidest decisions. I can't tell you how many times I’ve been working and Windows decides I need to do an update right now. However, on linux it's the complete opposite, you can do any update, no matter how big or small and continue to use your system. I once didn’t update a system for the better part of a year, there was over 200 updates for the core system and all its other programs, (I forgot to mention, when you install a program in linux it is added to a list of all the programs installed and with one command you can update everything on your system, pretty neat!). This update took about 40 minutes and not once did I have to stop using my system, it even upgraded the core kernel up 3 versions with no interruption to my workflow. For this reason alone I have come to really love linux. There are about a thousand more reasons to use linux but just know that all your programs you use each day can either be run through a windows compatibility layer called wine or there will be an open source alternative. Don’t wait, take the plunge today, either install it on an old machine or in a virtual machine and have a play, once you get over the initial learning curve you will begin to love it I promise!

Errol Hassall.