ask a linux question, stay for the mythbusting

[cleverlymadeup]

ok this came from another thread about linux. i do know from the forums there's a LOT of misconceptions and misunderstandings about linux and the unix family as a whole. so i figured i'd do a topic where the nice *nix users on here can answer some questions and also bust some myths about the os itself

some of the fun myths are

"not enough people use linux so there's not virii for it because it's not worth the time"

FALSE - first off a virus can NOT exist very well in a linux environment and that's because of the way it's designed, most people do not do everything as root and therefore can't write to the vast majority of virii can't spread being the user's home directory and can't propagate and spread

"it's not worth the money to attack it, so that makes it secure"

FALSE - the thing is a lot businesses, including a certain gaming magazine, use linux to run their web servers and perform web transactions, so to exploit linux is a rather lucrative business. would you get more money out of ebay, banks, google or amazon or would you you get more money out of your neighbour down the street? my money's on the multimillion dollar company

"video games don't run well on linux"

FALSE - all the id software games, Neverwinter Nights and the UT series all have native linux ports made by the developers themselves and actually run very well and in some cases better than the windows version. the thing is there's not a lot of games for it because developers won't make them

"linux is hard to use"

FALSE - anything you are unfamiliar with seems to be hard, japanese can be a very hard language to learn unless you have a base to go off of

"it's too confusing to develop for as there's too many versions"

FALSE - yes there are many distributions of it HOWEVER they all behave in the same manner, the best way i can ever use to describe them is like different models of the same car and in some cases you just change the model year as well.

"windows is better for servers"

FALSE - if you've ever run a high load server you will know that nothing beats the *nix family in it's ability to be a server and several of servers acting as failover, which windows still doesn't do. the most widely used, by far, webserver is apache which is a *nix based one, Oracle, which is the best database out there, has always run on *nix systems natively and they just bought Sun Microsystems.

just to put it into perspective slashdot, digg and fark all run off of a *nix based servers, they are also have VERY high traffic and i'm sure Virgil can tell you horror stories of surviving a slashdotting or the digg effect once or twice and if you think it's to survive that, it's not it takes a lot to stand up to that amount of traffic, especially if you're on the front page of either page or in some cases both front pages at the same time. the saying "i watched my server go down in flames" is actually real and has happened. although there is a handy article on how to survive it [http://www.kev009.com/wp/2008/12/bulletproof-your-server-to-survive-digg-slashdot/] which explains how to do it


and now onto some of the fun stuff with it

i'll post the links and not embed it but here's some fun with the desktop

enlightenment aka e
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10kg2aSB8q4

compiz fusion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRWLfY7hMgQ

kde
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArWqq2SsFeA

gnome and beryl 3d
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=684OLRsTrrs

and finally windows aero vs beryl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ

so does anyone have any questions, i'm sure me or one of the linux users here would be able to answer your questions

the first one i will answer tho is if you want to try it out, download a livecd of ubuntu, you don't need to install anything, just pop it into your drive and boot off the cd/dvd rom drive and you can run linux

actually here's a list of them
http://www.livecdlist.com/

 

[Novajam]

I've got a question.

"video games don't run well on linux"

FALSE - all the id software games, Neverwinter Nights and the UT series all have native linux ports made by the developers themselves and actually run very well and in some cases better than the windows version. the thing is there's not a lot of games for it because developers won't make them

You've mentioned that those games will run on Linux, but they only represent a small portion of all the games on the market. How many games designed to run on Windows (and I suppose, Windows applications in general) can be run on a Linux OS like Ubuntu, and if yes, do you have to do anything special to get them working like use WINE or an emulator?

And I do know that Wine Is Not an Emulator

 

[cleverlymadeup]

You've mentioned that those games will run on Linux, but they only represent a small portion of all the games on the market. How many games designed to run on Windows (and I suppose, Windows applications in general) can be run on a Linux OS like Ubuntu, and if yes, do you have to do anything special to get them working like use WINE or an emulator?

that's easy much like a Mac, anything designed to run on windows can't run on linux, however there are many ports or similarly functioning programs for linux and some like openoffice, firefox, thunderbird and opera that are fully cross platform and not "cross platform" because they run with a WINE wrapper

best way to describe it is saying "why won't the transmission for the honda intergra work in my dodge caliber" sure they're both cars but both are very different cars

 

[cleverlymadeup]

I have one question:
Why would I want to bother with switching?

ease of use, that's actually another myth that it is hard to use, i switched to a linux system over 10 years ago and i found it rather easy to configure and that was with the hardest and most unforgiving distro at the time, slackware. it does take a bit of reading and knowing what you're entering, ie "what is the name of your computer" or "what is your ip address" or similar things, tho most distros now are pretty easy to install

there's configurability as well, if you watch those videos you can see the many different ways to configure your desktop

stability and lack of reboots, i've had linux or unix machines that have been turned on and running for over 2 years without needing to reboot, including things such as security patches. you only need to reboot if you add/change hardware or you recompile the kernel. anything that goes wrong you turn off the service and then restart it

 

[ViolentlyHappy91]

I'm a linux user myself (Ubuntu) so i'll ask this for everyone else.

I'm comfortable with good old malfunctioning windows, it's doing everything just fine for me. Is it worth changing over if I'm not going to do anything differently and run into a few problems because i'm used to using windows?

 

[ThrobbingEgo]

"not enough people use linux so there's not virii for it because it's not worth the time"

FALSE - first off a virus can NOT exist very well in a linux environment and that's because of the way it's designed, most people do not do everything as root and therefore can't write to the vast majority of virii can't spread being the user's home directory and can't propagate and spread

Uh, no. I'm a linux enthusiast myself, and that's simply not true. The way a virus works is that it has to not only infect your computer, but spread from your computer to another computer. How many people on your email friends list run the same OS as you if you're running some oddball linux distro? Probably not many, or as many as your friends who run Windows. This means that a true virus, not a trojan or a worm, would have a harder time spreading from computer to computer. And why would a hacker even bother hijacking a small network of linux computers when they could hijack a larger network of windows boxes? Hackers don't (all) create zombie networks for fun, they hijack them so they can use your CPU cycles to spam emails addresses and run DOS attacks. If you aren't going to be able to create a large enough network, it's not worth it.

If blocking root access is all it takes to make your computer secure, Vista would be impenetrable (what, you think the UAC is for show? The reason so many people were put off by vista - you're not an administrator by default anymore). The thing is, there are always exploits.

Linux is great, but it's not like someone flashed the image of Jesus to your hard drive.

 

[Trivun]

I have one question:
Why would I want to bother with switching?

ease of use, that's actually another myth that it is hard to use, i switched to a linux system over 10 years ago and i found it rather easy to configure and that was with the hardest and most unforgiving distro at the time, slackware. it does take a bit of reading and knowing what you're entering, ie "what is the name of your computer" or "what is your ip address" or similar things, tho most distros now are pretty easy to install

there's configurability as well, if you watch those videos you can see the many different ways to configure your desktop

stability and lack of reboots, i've had linux or unix machines that have been turned on and running for over 2 years without needing to reboot, including things such as security patches. you only need to reboot if you add/change hardware or you recompile the kernel. anything that goes wrong you turn off the service and then restart it

Is there anything that you can add to that to make me want to switch? Despite what you've already said I have to agree with Kukul here, as I'm a happy Windows user and I've always used Windows, the only problems I've ever had with a PC to date are hardware problems given my family PC is pretty damn old. I've been using Vista on my laptop for almost a year now and it's been fine all that time, and it would take something really special to make me want to switch from Windows to Linux. You'll need to try a bit harder to sway this user

 

[Grype]

Despite the penguin facade, isnt linux essentially for people who feel that xp (not vista, now that is bull) isnt good enough for them, surely anyone who has windows and is happy with it has no need to tech-up theyre system with additional gadgets which they'll never understand. What im trying to say is, isnt it for techies?

 

[ViolentlyHappy91]

I'm going to at least attempt to end it now.

Linux is good for those who want to use it.
Windows is good for those who want to use it.
Mac is good for those who want to use it.

Take the switch if you have the desire, you can always change back. There are a lot of pros and cons for any switch. Stick with what you're happy with.

 

[cleverlymadeup]

Uh, no. I'm a linux enthusiast myself, and that's simply not true. The way a virus works is that it has to not only infect your computer, but spread from your computer to another computer. How many people on your email friends list run the same OS as you if you're running some oddball linux distro? Probably not many, or as many as your friends who run Windows. This means that a true virus, not a trojan or a worm, would have a harder time spreading from computer to computer. And why would a hacker even bother hijacking a small network of linux computers when they could hijack a larger network of windows boxes? Hackers don't (all) create zombie networks for fun, they hijack them so they can use your CPU cycles to spam emails addresses and run DOS attacks. If you aren't going to be able to create a large enough network, it's not worth it.

actually it IS true, there's actually a few things that are very wrong here and i'll explain them

first off with the spread of virii

when you download a file it must either be downloaded as an executable file, most of the time it's not, you must manually chown u+x /path/to/file in order to run it, that's not always the case but there are many instances it is

now if it tries to write to the /usr/bin directory or change files in anything being your home directory it will get access denied, ie stopping trojans and malware cold in their tracks.

if you've set your security up correctly, any file that does get past that will have to make sure they are set to be run from your group, most distros have gotten in the habit of creating a group named after your user name and therefore a lot of stuff can't be run at that point.

and as for hijacking larger networks, the "hackers" you describe are mostly script kiddies. the real guys target stuff like businesses because they can steal financial info and then sell it for money, you can't get a lot of that stuff from windows users

If blocking root access is all it takes to make your computer secure, Vista would be impenetrable (what, you think the UAC is for show? The reason so many people were put off by vista - you're not an administrator by default anymore). The thing is, there are always exploits.

Linux is great, but it's not like someone flashed the image of Jesus to your hard drive.

the UAC is a failure because m$ has built in backdoors that are rather easy to circumnavigate and disable any warnings. they did that because it was asked to be put in there by vendors but the bad guys know about it too, there are also other ways thru m$ programs to bypass the UAC because the m$ program is a trusted one.

what they should have done is actually built better security into it instead of tossing a bandaid on it after they realized their mistakes

 

[Grype]

Despite the penguin facade, isnt linux essentially for people who feel that xp (not vista, now that is bull) isnt good enough for them, surely anyone who has windows and is happy with it has no need to tech-up theyre system with additional gadgets which they'll never understand. What im trying to say is, isnt it for techies?

I'd have to argue that thinking "Eh, Windows is good enough" rather holds back operating systems in general. The greatest advantage of Linux is probably its open-source model, which obviously benefits technical people the most, but also allows for quicker bug fixes, et cetera.

What do I want to do with my computer?
-Post on the escapist
-Shoot imaginary terrorists and conquer the world
-Do my history coursework

Windows does them all, Linux im sure does them all and more. Do I want more? nah
Main thing is my computer came with Xp, if it had come with Linux I would be happy with that but theres no need to change to another op to do the same things that I can already do.

 

[NeonZombie]

So... Linux looks pretty

IM SOLD

but seriously ill stick to windows until they get more gaming compatability

 

[randommaster]

I didn't see this up yet, so here it is: http://xkcd.com/456/

Anyways, my experience with Linux has been good, apart from it crashing whenever I bring up a web page with too many images. Apparently, there is some unstated limit that it will handle, and after that, I have to restart a frozen computer. It's really annoying when your computer freezes because someone just HAD to put up a giant facepalm picture.

 

[ThrobbingEgo]

*Snip*

I didn't say they were hijacking people's networks, I said they were setting up zombie networks. Think folding@home, but nonconsentual and for spam instead of good.

And, trust me, if Linux was everyone's platform of choice, they'd be targeted instead. It's not like the black hats would just pack their bags and gave up if everyone switched to linux.

Here's an article from 2004: http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/40730 Found it trough Google, first site that came up for "Linux vulnerabilities."