“Linux desktop thriving”
well, sure, if you define “thriving” as a 3.37% share of the desktop market ...
“This difference between Linux and other operating systems has shown itself to me many times over the years”
Yes, the real difference is motives. Why was the code written? To simply work? or to simply make money by adding charges.
Yep... It’s yours not theirs. :)
The article makes no real attempt to give an explanation answering this. All we are treated to is technical jargon and some vague generalities that the article says in one of the headings is “Not the stuff for newbies”.
Here is an excerpt from a poster in an amusing Quora discussion that was on the same subject where people actually make an attempt to compare Linux with Windows.
Daniel Georgiev, Forbes 30 under 30, TEDx speaker, Founder of IrisTech.co Answered May 4, 2018
“Like everything Free, Linux is too complicated with no documentation and you need a doctor degree to install a text editor.
The only real advantage is that you don’t pay for it. Aside from this everything is well nothing special.
I won’t go into much details but here are some of the points which a lot of Linux users say always and the real truth.
Faster
Linux is faster because it’s just not backward compatible.
While Windows has tons of gigabytes unused data after update this is just to save your whole information from disappearing.
With Linux your PC just decides to crash one day and you lose all your files.
Viruses
There is no point to make virus for Linux, because it can’t even start on most of the distros.
It’s not like you can’t make a virus, but you need to make it and rewrite it for every kernel, because the ecosystem is so segmented that you will constantly get missing libraries and segmentation faults.
Customization
Most of the time limited options are better than huge customization because with great customization comes great risk of breaking everything.
Packages
Millions of different versions, millions of different commands and in the end of the day nothing works.
Software
These things are also bad from developer point of view and I’m talking from my experience here.
You just can’t make a high-quality software because you need to build it for every individual kernel and distro and for every distro version.
Even if your project is open source you need to add tons of external libraries and they start to crash after 1 or 2 months.
I have a build of my software Iris for every distro and every version and it still crashes on every new update which is like every month." from, https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-advantages-of-using-Linux-rather-than-Microsoft-Windows
You may think that Linux on the desktop is dead. It’s not...
Not quite a glowing endorsement.
If I was setting up a server I would use some form of Linux. I have virtual machines set up with a various forms of Linux to play around with. But I do not use them for serious work, like setting up spreadsheets, doing my taxes, photo and video editing, setting up PowerPoint presentations, designing objects for my 3-D printer. I do not even use them for creating written documents to share with others.
This is largely because most of the software that I use either have no equivalent packages in Linux, or the packages available have poor compatibility with the software being used by those that I collaborate with.
The other issue is familiarity with packages like Photoshop that I have been using for close to 30 years. There is no way that I am going to waste my time trying to become familiar with the features of a much more limited open source photo or video editor at this point in my life.
The operating system is really there to just make a stable platform to run the applications we use on. It is very irritating that Microsoft tries to make it much more obtrusive than it should be. But unfortunately the way things have evolved we are mostly stuck with the hand we have been dealt.
I tried Elementary OS and didn’t care for it. You’d better like it as it comes because you won’t find much of any settings you can change.
Ahem. The problem isn’t the OS here, it’s the user not having an image-level backup before a major upgrade. Trusting the OS to recover this for you is leaning on a mighty thin reed. IMHO.
Bump for future read.
Systemd is NOT Linux.
As recently as 3 years ago I rented a rack at a data center and 31 servers (mostly Supermicro 1U) in it. 30 of them ran CentOS and one ran Windows 2012 Server (customer requirement).
Over thirty years I have used SunOS, Solaris, Irix, BSDI, Free BSD, Fedora and Centos. I built a successful business using BSDI that cost like $900 for a license in 1994. People seem have forgotten how much money they used to charge for a server capable OS back in the day. That’s why FreeBSD and Linux were initially so successful.
Now I have one server running Windows Server 2016 a couple of Hyper-V instances running on it and the rest of the stuff is on Amazon’s EC2. It is very cool what they have done there. You bring a machine up with a mouse click when you need it. No more 30 machines in a data center.
And I am very impressed with what M$ has managed to do with PowerShell ISE. They are very very close to being the equal of C shell and tcsh and in some ways is already superior to them.
That said, my desktop runs Windows 7 and my laptop runs Windows 10. I know *nix like the back of my hand and I wouldn’t dare try to run any of them on a desktop or a laptop for business.