WHY PROGRAMMERS PREFER LINUX

 

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. That is a question that i've asked myself in the past and especially before starting to use linux. 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.

What is it that actually makes linux really popular.,

The answer is that there's actually lots of things but i'am gonna 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 eight things that programmers in general appreciate about linux. They are given below:

1.SECURITY

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. It's 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 is that linux is really secure is because of the fact that the linux OS is open source. This means that anyone who wants can look at the source code for the system. If you aren't familiar with this concept then this may be 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 but the ting is that linux is really popular. That means 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 try to fix them and so that ends up having less of these vulnerabilities.

2.PACKAGE MANAGER

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 just type in sudo apt-get install whatever you want to use. You will get it and you're ready to rock this is something that can sometimes be painstakingly difficult in other OS.

First of all you need to install a package manager in mac os and windows if you want to have a good reliable on and just  doing that can be a difficult task for a beginner with linux that just doing that can be a difficult task for beginners with linux that just comes pre-installed.

3.REBOOTING

The third reason is that no rebooting, this is something that in windows after installing a software ostly you will have to restart but in linux there is no rebooting required. In fact linux it's to the point where you can update the entire operating system without having to actually reboot and this is neither possible with mac os nor with windows and is something that i think is really important because of the fact that as a programmer we tend to install lots of different things. So the ability to just be able to install something without having reboot the entire machine for those changes to take effect is something that i think is really important.

This is why linux is often used for servers and this is 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.

4.LINUX HAS MANY DISTROS

The fourth reason is that linux actually comes with a ton of really powerful programming tools pre-installed things like grip, wget, cron, and a lots of other things that once you learn how they work can be extremely powerful tools that again can help you improve your workflow. There are many pre-installed tools that comes with linux and it also depends on like what specific distro of the linux you choose because certain distros come with certain extra tools like kali linux comes with a lot of like hacking specific tools and so.

5.TASK AUTOMATION

The fifth reason is that, task automation linux is almost built for automation of tasks i experienced linux users who also know how to code rarely need to do anything twice because of the fact that linux lends itself really well for automation a pretty common thing 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 automat a task you may find yourself doing three things in a row every morning, with linux it's very easy to write a quick little script to automate all of these tasks with a simple chrome job or something like that there are lots of pre-installed tools like we talked about in a previous point that lend themselves really well to automation.

6.PEERFORMANCE

The sixth point is performance and no linux is not necessarily faster than any other operating system but it is very lightweight for an os and is compatible with pretty much any machine you can find you can run linux. Almost anything so this means that you can very often take an old laptop that is virtually useless because of being so slow and install linux on that machine and all of sudden breathe new life into that a machine that was impossible to work with before is now all of a sudden working really well.

7.SHOWS ERROR MESSAGES

The seventh point is a bit of an odd one but its that linux actually provides you with useful error messages this may sound a little bit weird or whatever bit it is really important because with windows and mac os what you can often find yourself struck with is an error message along the lines of like oops something went wrong.

It is not useful because like googling that and like finding the actual answer to that question is really difficult because lots of different other people had the same error message for lot 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.

8.CUSTOMIZABLE

The eighth point is that 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 and i think that this is something that programmers tend to care about a lot like customizations and making your evnironment.

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.

CONCLUTION

There really aren't that many things that you can do on linux that are impossible to do on other operating systems, especially if compared with mac os bit the overarching theme is ease of use as a rule it's easier ot 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 is that i like to give here is that you should probably try out linux first in a virtual machine and then see what 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.