Thread: Landy's n Linux

There is lil ol me, with an Acer laptop setup as a server running Mandriva\KDE. And a nice new 64 bit Athlon at 3.8 Gb and 1 Gb memory about to get a new install of Solaris 10.

And JDNSW, don't know his distro, but he mentioned the Konquera browser in a post, so I know he is a KDE man.

Any other Landy owners like the security and stability of the Linux system?

Shorty.

Currently running Suse 10.1, previously Mandrake 9.2. Dual boot Windows 98, mainly to run a scanner whose manufacturer is excessively secretive and my accounts - too much trouble to migrate them.

Linux has the main advantage that it is almost totally immune to viruses (they exist, but none have ever spread, although why not is subject to some discussion) and inherently safer from other types of attack than Windows. Generally tends to be a lot more reliable as well. Because of the fact that the source code is open to anyone who wants to look at it there is far less dodgy programming than in commercial software and problems are likely to be found and fixed far more rapidly. It almost never crashes, and rebooting is never needed, and you never need to reformat your hard drive. In dual boot systems Linux can read and write to the Windows partitions so that you can, if you keep "My Documents" on a Windows partition, use them with either O/S

The drawbacks are that some hardware is poorly supported - usually because the manufacturer neither provides drivers for Linux nor allows anyone else to do so. Upgrading and installing additional software is often a lot messier, but the operating system as distributed includes a wide range of software meeting most users needs, although this usually means learning to use software that is slightly different to use than the Windows equivalent. For example, the Gimp is comparable to Photoshop, but very different to use. There are far fewer games that run on Linux, so if your main computer use is gaming, it is not for you. But the main drawback(?) is that it is not Windows.

Linux is far more varied than Windows - strictly speaking the name only applies to the kernel or basic operating system. Linux is usually supplied as "distributions" each of which is an assembly of the kernel plus hundreds of applications packaged together. There are two common (plus half a dozen other) user interfaces (KDE and Gnome), one looking a lot like Windows, one a lot like a Mac (Mac OS-X is actually a very close relative of Linux and getting closer).

Currently the most popular distribution is Ubuntu, which is bankrolled by Mark Shuttleworth as a serious alternative to Windows for developing countries, probably followed by Suse and Mandriva, but there are literally hundreds of distributions, most of them designed for specialist uses, although there are dozens of general purpose ones. There are several distributions aimed squarely at commercial users, notably Red Hat and Suse. Although the software is free, distributors make their money by providing support - but most home users can get support from other users or the on-line community if they want to. Some distributions are compiled from source code on the computer they run on, so that the system is optimised for the hardware actually being used. Most common distributions come these days on DVDs that are bootable to run the system from the DVD so that you can try it without any commitment.

Linux runs most large servers such as Google, and also runs almost all supercomputers, but can be configured to run (without most of the bells and whistles) on almost anything, including the computer you had to upgrade because it would not run Windows XP. (It cannot be installed on some older laptops that do not allow access to the boot sector of the hard disc).

John