All right so have you ever asked yourself the question of why Linux and why programmers seem to prefer Linux? and why Linux just seems to be really hyped among developers?
This is a question that I’ve asked myself in the past and
especially before starting to use Linux and before starting to learn more about
Linux and so I figured as with like most of the videos that I make on this
channel that if I’ve had that question in the past then there's probably a
decent chance that you are having it or have had it too so that is the question
that I’ll be answering in today's video which is why Linux.
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So what is it that actually makes Linux really popular among
programmers well the answer is that there's actually lots of things but I’m going
to go through the major ones that I’ve found that are generally accepted among
programmers as like what makes Linux really great and from what I’ve found.
There's about seven things that programmers in general
appreciate about Linux so let's go through them the first one is security this
simply means that Linux tends to be a safer system so you won't need antivirus
software and viruses overall just aren't really an issue.
So it's a really secure system and you won't get bothered by needing to find and pay for antivirus software and then update that software and get notified by it etc. Linux just works and is safe the reason that Linux is really secure is because of the fact that the Linux operating system is open source this means that anyone who wants to can look at the source code for the system and if you aren't familiar with this concept then this may sound like it would be the opposite of safe since anyone can find vulnerabilities and create viruses for it or exploit the vulnerabilities really easily and that's not wrong anyone can do that and a lot of people do try to do this.
Linux is a really popular
But the thing is that Linux is a really popular operating
system as that means that there's so many people reading through the source
code every day and like looking for these vulnerabilities so that they can
patch them themselves because of the fact that they are actually using the
system themselves so they don't want these vulnerabilities there and so they
try to fix them.
So what ends up happening is that there's actually very few
of these vulnerabilities out there and the ones that are out there become
really hard to find because so many people are actually looking for them and
that also means that even if there are a few bad people out there looking for
these flaws and trying to exploit them in a bad way for every bad person that's
out there trying to find these flaws there's potentially like a thousand good
people out there looking for the exact same flaw and trying to eliminate it and
so.
That kind of results in a really safe system the second
reason is that Linux can improve your programming workflow the package manager
in Linux is a godsend for programmers in terms of efficiency if you want to
install something or use something new just type in sudo apt get
install whatever you want to use and then within a couple of seconds or
a minute or two you get it and you're ready to rock this is something that can
sometimes be painstakingly difficult in other operating systems.
So let's say that you wanted to install VLC media player
on your windows machine what you'd have to do is you'd have to first open up a
web browser of some kind then you'd have to find or like google search for VLC
media player find the right actual website to actually download it go to that
website press the download link start to download it run the exe file and then
choose whatever like installation location and then after you've done all that
you potentially also need to restart your computer.
For these like changes to take effect or for you to be able
to actually use the program now let's say that you wanted to do that exact same
thing but in Linux all you'd have to do is open up a terminal window and type
in sudo apt get install VLC and hit enter and then you're done.
Making sure to get it from the right source so you won't
accidentally get the wrong thing or malware as a programmer we usually work
with lots of different technologies and we're installing things constantly to
get things to work so making the process of installing stuff as easy and safe
as possible is really important and Linux does this really well.
If you're actually writing and if you're writing a code in
python the copilot feature offers documentation lookup so you don't have to
constantly google search function signatures and call patterns with kite you
can actually write code up to 18 faster and who doesn't want to write code
faster right so I highly recommend that you download kite and try it out,
it's completely free and supports up to 13 programming
languages and 16 ides so just give it a go I know that you will like it because
I love it the third reason is no rebooting.
This is neither possible with mac OS nor with windows and is
something that in think is really important because of the fact that as a
programmer we tend to install lots of different things and so the ability to
just be able to install something without them having to
reboot the entire machine for those changes to take effect
is something that I think is really important when doing research for this
video I found an article on KaliTut that talks about why Linux is often used
for servers and this no rebooting point was one of the reasons according to the
article why Linux is used for servers.
This is something that they touch on in a part of the
article where they talk about the fact that Linux is built for stability and
reliability many Linux servers on the internet have been running for years
without failure or even being restarted the fourth reason is that.
Linux actually comes with a ton of really powerful
programming tools pre-installed things like grip wget corn and lots of
other things that once you learn how they work can be extremely powerful tools
that again can help you improve your workflow this is a point that's highly
individual and it really depends on your specific use case.
because there's so many pre-installed tools that come with Linux
and it also depends on like what specific distro of the Linux you choose to go
with because certain distros come with certain extra tools like kali Linux for
instance comes with a lot of like hacking specific tools and so going
through all of that would be an entire like standalone video series and i may
do that in the future but i don't i won't do that for now.
what I will do is I will send you to an article that I found
on Ubuntu pit where they go through some of the most commonly used tools
in Linux and what they're really.
Linux community
In the Linux community is something referred to as
one-liners which is often used to refer to short little scripts that you write
to automate a task you may find yourself doing three things in a row every
morning as you start up your computer maybe you always open up Spotify to play
a certain playlist and then you open up your latest project that you're working
on and then you open up
often take an old laptop that is virtually useless because
of being so slow and install Linux on that machine and all of a sudden breath
new life into that a machine that was impossible to work with before is now all
of a sudden working really well there are more performance benefits of Linux
like the reliability of the systems and other things like that but i feel like
this is like the major one like being able to revive a dead.
Computer is something that's really useful i think and it's
also really like environmentally friendly because it means that your laptop
running Linux will last you so much longer than one running mac os or windows
okay so number seven is a bit of an odd one but it is that Linux actually
provides you with useful error messages this may sound a little bit weird or
whatever but it is really important because with windows and mac OS what you
can often find yourself stuck with is an error message along the lines of like
oops something went wrong.
it's not very useful because like googling that and like finding the actual answer to that question is really difficult because lots of different other people had that same error message for lots of different things but with Linux instead what you'll get is a full readout of the actual processes and you'll get like proper you'll actually see what actually happened and that means that it's way easier to actually google that and find an answer to your specific problem and that is something that's really important especially for programmers when you're running into these errors constantly now this also comes with a caveat that a beginner might not find that much help from these error messages at least.
because of the fact that i don't think that it quite belongs
in the seven points i don't think that it's a good reason to choose Linux over
windows and mac OS but i do think that it's a reason that a lot of Linux user’s
kind of like to use.
so i wanted to include it in the list anyway and so point
number eight is customization and the thing about Linux is that you can pretty
much customize anything and because of the fact that it's open source you can
essentially like it's limitless because you can write your own customizations
for it so you can really actually customize everything.
I think that this is something that programmers tend to care about a lot like customizations and making your environment your own so i think that is something that's really important to programmers but like i said i don't think that it's a reason to choose Linux over mac OS or windows it's not an actual benefit it's just like appearance benefits i guess there could be like benefits of it where you set up the environment to be more productive for you because you can customize certain things
but overall i don't think that it's a major point to why you should choose Linux over windows and mac os but yeah it is a really interesting point and once you start going down the rabbit hole that is like Linux customization you'll quickly realize that you can spend an entire lifetime there all right so in conclusion there really aren't that many things that you can do on Linux that are impossible to do on other systems
especially if compared with mac os but the overarching theme
is ease of use as a rule it's easier to do what you want to do on Linux than it
is to do on other operating systems so should you switch to Linux the answer
that i like to give here is that you should probably try out Linux first in a
virtual machine and
then see what you think of it and then you can kind of go
from there because that's what i did that's how i got started i started out
with a virtual machine and then after a while i just found myself spending more
and more time there than i did in my main os and especially for like
programming related tasks that
was just so much smoother to do in Linux than it was to do
in my main os at the time and so that's kind of my advice that's how i would go
about it and um yeah that's it for this one i hope i was able to answer the
question of why programmers tend to use Linux over other operating systems and
uh yeah that's it for
this one i hope you enjoyed it i hope i'll see you in the
next one.
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