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As gamers, we are hardly choosing the platform favoured by those with similar outlooks. So I was wondering what is keeping everyone supportive and fighting for this platform?
For me the benefits are many and numerous, and much too diverse to list in one post. So instead I will share a little anecdote about what happened to me last Friday. My DVD drive has been on the blink for over a month, which has resulted in some strangeness. Every so often the Drive would complain and cause the system to recheck all of my IDE devices, which of course would cause the computer to lock up for several minutes. Last Friday this reached its climax. It somehow managed to get itself into a loop where it would repeatedly check on the IDE, which of course locked up my computer hard. Never do this if you do not have too, but this forced me to press the power button to hard shut down the computer.
When I booted up I was greeted with a file-system error, which is always a risk when you have to hard shut down you machine. If this was Windows with NTFS or, god forbid, FAT32, I would have been screwed, or at least in a much worse position. It was 2:00 in the morning and I wanted an easy solution. Luckily on Linux when utilising any version of the EXT file-system there is a simple command you use to fix your file-system woes, and that is "fsck". Ten minutes later I was booted back into my system with no file loss of any kind. Add this to the fact that in a recent Phoronix benchmark EXT4 on Ubuntu absolutely clobbered NTFS on Windows 7 in terms of performance and it truly was a proud moment to be a Linux user. The next day I took out the DVD and replaced it with an old CD drive we had lying around. I will be glad when I can get a DVD drive again, but our finances are rather short as of this moment so I guess I will just have to wait.
Anyway, what are your reasons for loving Linux?
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There are many reasons I like GNU/Linux...
It's FREE (both as freedom and beer, who can say no to free beer ? ;) )
It's different (it's not Windows...)
It's better in a lot of ways
it's more customizable
And the best of all - the community (starting to believe in humanity again).
For me it's the fact i can download it anytime for free, install it on as many computers as i see fit and do whatever the heck i want with it.
How fast it is being developed and released is a huge plus for geeks like me too, it's like a present twice a year :D
Mostly the update system and Software Center (AKA Add/Remove apps)
its pretty simple for me I value freedom above all else. Windows and OSX don't afforded me that freedom so it pretty much Linux or BSD for me.
I forgot to say that I'm fond of the customizations in here
-More libre software
-I love the command-line :)
-More instructive
-Can run well on old systems, scalability
-virtual desktops
-virtual terminals
-almost anything is possible, configuration in text files or source code available
-lots of choice, especially the possibility to choose window manager and desktop environment (+shell, but I haven't used it that much yet. Too lazy to customize zsh)
-less fear of malware
-MUCH faster login->usable time
-easier debugging (except for gdb crashes and limitations)
-better default text editors
There's probably a lot more, but that should do it. :)
What I don't like:
-Hardware issues (notably no suspend to RAM) :(
-missing games :roll:
-crashing, hanging (yes, it does happen sometimes and I find it difficult to debug)
-sound and graphics issues (white squares in case of non power of 2 textures... programming issue, but I have it in a lot of games...)
-wasting time trying to fix issues (although it's often instructive)
The fact I dont ever have to fix it from viruses and things! ^^
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For the most part I agree with KIAaze, though my only real major complaint with Linux at the moment is that I wish the free drivers were more powerful, but as I said in my guide on using Mesa this is improving rapidly. I would appreciate more games, but I am actually not that unhappy with what we have now, though I admit my tastes are rather eclectic.
When it comes to your last complaint though KIAaze, just be glad that you CAN solve problems on Linux. My brothers job is basically fixing Windows computers that bork (and some other more interesting things), so I can say with professional backing that if you have a problem you are mostly screwed when using Windows. On Linux, when you do encounter issues, there is at least something you can usually do about them.