Hello, Windows buffs and Mac people, greeting:
You are seriously misled and misguided as a group. You are told that this new thing-- this new fad called "Linux" (and no, you don't pronounce it like "line ucks." Its "lynn-ucks.") is just an ugly command line prompt thing that geeks use to hack the Internet. Nonsense. Complete and total half-truth! Yes, the non-GUI (Graphical User Interface, or the pretty interactive pictures you see) command line is an option, and some people use and/or prefer it. On the other hand, very few people use the actual desktops (the Linux with a GUI).
There is a need for Linux in the world. It is popular among the servers which make the Internet work-- most of them run Linux. Linux can remain on for years without restarting. Windows still has to evolve in order to not have to restart after every install and every update. Linux just immediately applies them after they are installed.
When you have Windows, you are a target for virus distributors. You download something form the internet, and click on accept because you don't care and you are in a hurry. You probably have a virus. When using Outlook, you read something in your email from someone you don't know or from someone who doesn't know that they are infected in which the email contains a seemingly harmless Word document. Little known to you, viruses could reside in the macros. It would be better to just ditch this operating system if getting viruses gets old. If you decide to stick with it, then you most definitely have to have some kind of anti-virus. Windows is notorious for allowing pretty much anything to have root access, even viruses. You give them permission once, you give them permission forever.
When you have a Mac computer, and it is having problems, you can't do anything about it yourself. The security is out of your hands, and you have no idea how to fix all your software problems. In other words, if you have a problem, you have to take it to the store and pay money. Many of apple's apps cost money. They also get viruses, contrary to popular belief. No operating system is completely immune.
There is reason to switch to a Linux desktop. First of all, it is free. You don't have to buy it, and it never comes with viruses when you get the *.iso (disk image files) off of a Linux official site such www.fedoraproject.org. Linux will work on may PCs and some have made it work on Mac computers. It will work on your poor discontinued Windows XP computer, and make it up-to-date in security. You can save more of that green stuff people use for a trading medium. You can even burn the disk to a usb, then reuse the usb for something else. People can even get Linux to work on a Chromebook with 3rd party software with allows the computer to take on a fuller potential. Chrome OS is another derivative of Linux.
Linux also restricts everything to a non-root authority. Only the person knowing the root password can allow major changes, good or bad. Linux will do what you tell it to do, and nothing else. It can install through the terminal (command prompt) and can answer the "whoami" command. You can run more things through the terminal simply because it makes more sense to use the terminal that way. You are such a hard target to hit-- there are so many distributions of Linux and so few users-- that you are not susceptible to viruses. The root-restriction and small target theories are not the only way Linux is not susceptible, but there are software repositories from which many apps are made available to you. There are also other ways to convert packages from something like *.deb to *.rpm using the package "alien."
You can also run some Windows programs in Linux using WINE (Wine is not an emulator). However, games may not install or work the best. You can get Microsoft Office 2010 on Linux using PlayOnLinux and the installation file, but Outlook does not work. You can use Thunderbird and LibreOffice instead. There is also an automated mail-checker called Popper, which lets you know that you have mail and from whom it came. You don't even have to have a browser or mail client open. You can even set a sound to play whenever you have mail.
When using Linux, don't run any strange symbols in the terminal. And don't do anything extremely dangerous or stupid. Having NoScript (www.noscript.net) and adblocker plus on firefox sure helps keep away the viruses. Nobody really has had a problem with viruses on Linux.
Sincerely,
~Hinata~
No comments:
Post a Comment