The Benefits of Using Linux Operating Systems

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 so let’s go [Music] oh and if you’re sitting there and you’re thinking where did he get that sick hoodie from you can get yourself one at calstore.com okay 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 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 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

Open Source Freedom: The Power of Linux’s Accessibility

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 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 and so what ends up happening is that there’s actually very very few of these vulnerabilities out there and the ones that are out there become

really 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

Enhanced Security: How Linux Protects Your Data

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 first of all you need to install a package manager in mac os and windows if you want to have a good reliable one and just doing

that can be a difficult task for a beginner with linux that just comes pre-installed and you’re ready to go and it also has a lot of packages already installed and set up all right so let’s take a really simple example here that kind of illustrates both point number one about security and also point number two about ease of use and just workflow in general 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

Reliability and Stability: Why Linux Rarely Crashes

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 the windows approach leaves a lot of room for errors to occur you could get to the wrong site and accidentally download malware or you could get to the right site but accidentally press one of the thousands of download now buttons that is actually an ad for something completely different

compared to linux where you just type it in and it automatically does everything for you 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 oh and while we’re on the topic this video is sponsored by kite kite is a free auto

Customizability: Tailor Linux to Your Needs

completion engine that uses machine learning to provide the completions which is what makes it stand out and also what makes it the best auto completion engine that i’ve used one of the most useful features is that kites completions are sorted or ranked by relevance instead of by popularity or by the alphabet this is possible because they’re using machine learning to provide the completions it means that you will get suggested completions based on the code that you’re actually writing and if you’re writing 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 something that i touched on in the previous point when i was explaining about how installing something in windows might

work and how at the end of that process you might end up having to restart the entire computer just to be able to work with whatever it was you installed and this is not the case with linux and in fact with 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 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 techmint 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

No Vendor Lock-In: Freedom from Proprietary Restrictions

restarted the fourth reason is that linux actually comes with a ton of really powerful programming tools pre-installed things like grip wget cron 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 but what i will do is i will leave a link in the description 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 useful for so if you feel like learning a little bit more about these tools you can check that out number five on our list is task automation linux is almost built

Improving Tech Skills: Linux as a Learning Tool

for automation of tasks i’m not an advanced user yet i’m still learning and exploring the wonders of linux but more 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 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 discord by the way check out our discord community link in the description 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 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 on 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 a sudden breathe new life into that a

Compatibility and Flexibility Across Devices and Servers

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 and 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

Community Support: Linux’s Strong User and Developer

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 not if they’ve never spent time in a terminal-like interface because for a beginner this can be very intimidating and just seem like a

bunch of text that all says the same thing but once you’ve spent some time in a terminal these error messages are super useful all right so secret point number eight this is one that i didn’t really want to include in the main seven points 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 users kind of like to use so i wanted to include it in the list anyway and so

Conclusion

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 and 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.