Why I Use Linux

Last Updated on August 9, 2024 by David Both

I use Linux for many reasons.

Flexibility

Flexibility means the ability to run on any platform, not just Intel and AMD processors. Scalability is about power, but flexibility is about running on many processor architectures.

Wikipedia has a list of CPU architectures supported by Linux¹ and it is a long one. By my automated count there are over 100 CPU architectures on which Linux is currently known to run. Note that this list changes and CPUs get added and dropped from the list. But the point is well taken that Linux will run on many architectures. If your architecture is not currently supported by Linux, with some work you can recompile it to run on any 64-bit system and a few 32-bit ones.

This broad-ranging hardware support means that Linux can run on everything from my Raspberry Pi² to my television, to vehicle entertainment systems, to cell phones, to DVRs, to the computers on the International Space Station³ (ISS), to all 500 of the fastest supercomputers back on Earth⁴ and much more. A single operating system can run nearly any computing device from the smallest to the largest from any vendor.

Stability

Stability can have multiple meanings when the term is applied to Linux by different people. My own definition of the term as it applies to Linux is that it can run for weeks or months without crashing or causing problems that make me worry I might lose data for any of the critical projects I am working on.

Today’s Linux easily meets that requirement. I always have about a dozen computers running Linux at any given time and they are all rock solid in this sense. They run without interruption. I have workstations, a server, a firewall, and some that I use for testing and they all just run.

This is not to say that Linux never has any problems. Nothing is perfect. Many of those problems have been caused by my own misconfiguration of one or more features but a few have been caused by problems with some of the software I use. Sometimes a software application will crash but that is very infrequent.

I have had some problems with the KDE GUI desktop over the years and it has had two significant periods of instability. In the first of these instances which was many years ago around the time of Fedora 10, KDE was transitioning from KDE 3 to the KDE Plasma 4 desktop which offered many interesting features. In this case most of the KDE-specific applications I used had not been fully rewritten for the new desktop environment so lacked required functionality or would just crash. During the second instance the desktop just locked up, crashed, or failed to work properly.

In both of these cases, I was able to use a different desktop to get my work done in a completely stable environment. In the first case I used the Cinnamon desktop and in this second instance I used the LXDE desktop. However, the underlying software, the kernel and the programs running underneath the surface – they all continued to run without problem. So this is the second layer of stability; if one thing crashes, even the desktop, the underlying stuff continues to run.

I currently use the Xfce desktop and like it very much.

Scalability

Scalability is extremely important for any software, particularly for an operating system. Running the same operating system from watches, phones (Android), to laptops, powerful workstations, servers, and even the most powerful supercomputers on the planet can make life much simpler for the network administrator or the IT manager. Linux is the only operating system on the planet today which can provide that level of scalability.

Since November of 2017 Linux has powered all of the fastest supercomputers in the world.⁴ One hundred percent, 100% – all – of the top 500 supercomputers in the world run Linux of one form or another, and this is expected to continue. There are usually specialized distributions of Linux designed for supercomputers. Linux also powers much smaller devices such as Android phones and Raspberry Pi single-board computers. Supercomputers are very fast and many different calculations can be performed simultaneously. It is, however, very unusual for a single user to have access to the entire resources of a supercomputer. Many users share those resources, each user performing his or her own set of complex calculations.

Linux can run on any computer from the smallest to the largest and anything in between.

Security

Security is a critical consideration in these days of constant attacks from the Internet. If you think that they are not after you, too, let me tell you that they are. Your computer is under constant attack every hour of every day.

Most Linux distributions are very secure right from the installation. Many tools are provided to both ensure tight security where it is needed as well as to allow specified access into the computer. For example, you may wish to allow SSH access from a limited number of remote hosts, access to the web server from anywhere in the world, and email to be sent to a Linux host from anywhere. Yet you may also want to block, at least temporarily, access attempts by crackers – the bad guys – attempting to force their way in. Other security measures provide your personal files protection from other users on the same host while still allowing mechanisms for you to share files that you choose with others.

Many of the security mechanisms that we will discuss in this course were designed and built in to Linux right from its inception. The architecture of Linux is designed from the ground up, like Unix, its progenitor, to provide security mechanisms that can protect files and running processes from malicious intervention from both internal and external sources. Linux security is not an add-on feature, it is an integral part of Linux.

Freedom

Freedom has an entirely different meaning when applied to free open source software (FOSS) than it does in most other circumstances. In FOSS, free is the freedom to do what I want with software. It means that I have easy access to the source code and that I can make changes to the code and recompile it if I need or want to.

Freedom means that I can download a copy of Fedora Linux, or Firefox, or LibreOffice, and install it on as many computers as I want to. It means that I can share that downloaded code by providing copies to my friends or installing it on computers belonging to my customers, both the executables and the sources.

Freedom also means that we do not need to worry about the license police showing up on our doorsteps and demanding huge sums of money to become compliant. This has happened at some companies that “over-installed” the number of licenses that they had available for an operating system or office suite. It means that I don’t have to type in a long, long, “key” to unlock the software I have purchased or downloaded.

Our software rights

The rights to the freedoms that we have with open source software should be part of the license we receive when we download open source software. The definition for open source software⁵ is found at the Open Source Initiative web site. This definition describes the freedoms and responsibilities that are part of using open source software.

The issue is that there are many licenses that claim to be open source. Some are and some are not. In order to be true open source software the license must meet the requirements specified in this definition. The definition is not a license – it specifies the terms to which any license must conform if the software to which it is attached is to be legally considered open source. If any of the defined terms do not exist in a license, then the software to which it refers is not true open source software.

I have not included that definition here despite its importance because you can go to the web site previously cited, or you can read more about it in my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins.⁶ I strongly recommend that you at least go to the web site and read the definition so that you will more fully understand what open source really is and what rights you have.

I also like the description of Linux ⁷ that originally appeared at Opensource.com and that we’ve reproduced here. Opensource.com has a long list of Linux and open source resources⁸ that you should also check out.

Longevity

Longevity – an interesting word. I use it here to help clarify some of the statements that I hear many people make. These statements are usually along the lines of “Linux can extend the life of existing hardware,” or “Keep old hardware out of landfills or unmonitored recycling facilities.”

The idea is that you can use your old computer longer and that by doing that you lengthen the useful life of the computer and decrease the number of computers you need to purchase in your lifetime. This both reduces demand for new computers and reduces the number of old computers being discarded.

I have written about how Linux can keep old computers running and out of landfills or recycling streams. One of my recent articles about this is How Linux rescues slow computers (and the planet).⁹ It discusses one of my computers that has a BIOS date of 2010 so is about 14 years old.

I now have an old Dell I am working on that has a BIOS date of 2005. I used the system’s Dell system ID and that showed me that it was built in August of 2005 so it’ will be’s 19 years old. You can see the specs for this system which are pretty minimal.

#######################################################################
# MOTD for Fri Jul 12 03:14:09 AM EDT 2024
# HOST NAME: 		intrepid.both.org 
# Machine Type: 	physical machine.
# Host architecture: 	X86_64
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# System Serial No.:	CYQ3B81
# System UUID: 		44454c4c-5900-1051-8033-c3c04f423831
# Motherboard Mfr: 	Dell Inc.          
# Motherboard Model: 	0F8098
# Motherboard Serial: 	..CN1374058I00TQ.
# BIOS Release Date: 	05/24/2005
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# CPU Model:		Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
# CPU Data:		1 Single Core package with 2 CPUs
# CPU Architecture:	x86_64
# HyperThreading:	Yes
# Max CPU MHz:		
# Current CPU MHz:	2992.598
# Min CPU MHz:		
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# RAM:			3.132 GB
# SWAP:			11.131 GB
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Install Date:		Wed 24 Apr 2024 10:59:56 AM EDT
# Linux Distribution:	Fedora 40 (Forty) X86_64
# Kernel Version:	6.9.5-200.fc40.x86_64
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Disk Partition Info
# Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
# /dev/mapper/vg01-root  4.9G   85M  4.5G   2% /
# /dev/mapper/vg01-usr    30G  7.6G   21G  28% /usr
# /dev/sda1              974M  435M  472M  48% /boot
# /dev/mapper/vg01-home  4.9G  1.8G  2.9G  38% /home
# /dev/mapper/vg01-tmp   9.8G  2.2M  9.3G   1% /tmp
# /dev/mapper/vg01-var    35G  8.3G   25G  26% /var
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# LVM Physical Volume Info
# PV		VG		Fmt	Attr	PSize	PFree
# /dev/sda2	vg01	lvm2	a--	160.00g	67.00g
#######################################################################

It has a single 3GHz Pentium 4 processor with Hyperthreading so the equivalent of 2 CPUs. It originally had 2GB of DDR 533 RAM so I added 2 GB for a total of 4GB which is the maximum amount of RAM supported by this system.

Naturally, I installed Linux on it just to see how it would work. This old computer works just fine with the most recent version of Fedora. So yeah – when I say that Linux keeps old computers running, it is absolutely the truth. Linux keeps these old computers safe from malware and bloatware which is what really causes them to slow down.

Linux prevents the planned obsolescence continually enforced by the ongoing requirements for more and faster hardware required to support upgrades. It means I do not need to add more RAM or hard drive space just to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system.

Until it died I had an old Lenovo ThinkPad W500 that I purchased in May of 2006. It was old and clunky and heavy compared to many of today’s laptops but I liked it a lot and it was my only laptop. I took it with me on most trips and use it for training. It had enough power in its Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz processor, 8GB of RAM, and 300GB hard drive to support Fedora running a couple virtual machines and to be the router and firewall between a classroom network and the Internet, to connect to a projector to display my slides, and to use to demonstrate the use of Linux commands. I used Fedora 37 on it, the very latest at that time. That is pretty amazing considering that this laptop, which I affectionately called vgr, was a bit over 12 years old.

The ThinkPad died of multiple hardware problems in October of 2018, and I replaced it with a System76¹⁰ Oryx Pro with 32GB of RAM, an Intel i7 with 6 cores (12 CPU threads) and 2TB of SSD storage. I expect to get at least fifteen years of service out of this new laptop.

And then there was my original EeePC 900 netbook with an Intel Atom CPU at 1.8GHz, 2G of RAM and an 8GB SDD. It ran Fedora up through Fedora 37 for ten years before it, too started having hardware problems.

Linux can most definitely keep old hardware useful.

Data

Another aspect of longevity is the open source software that stores data in open and well-documented formats. Documents that I wrote over a decade ago are still readable by current versions of the same software I used then, such as LibreOffice and its predecessors, OpenOffice and before that Star Office. I never need to worry that a software upgrade will relegate my old files to the bit bucket.

Resist malware

Another reason that I can keep old hardware running longer is that Linux is very resistant to malware infections. It is not completely immune to malware but none of my systems have ever been infected. Even my laptop which connects to all kinds of wired and wireless networks that I do not control has never been infected.

Without the massive malware infections that cause most peoples’ computers to slow to an unbearable crawl, my Linux systems – all of them – keep running at top speed. It is this constant slowdown, even after many “cleanings” at the big box stores or the strip mall computer stores, that causes most people to think that their computers are old and useless. So they throw them away and buy another.

Linux eliminates those problems.

It’s fun

Yes, that’s right. Linux is fun!¹¹

Most users and SysAdmins like myself find it fun just to use and explore. We are always finding new tools and programs to try out. To us, that’s fun.

But there is another kind of Linux fun. Linux is also fun for many gamers. Steam, arguably the most popular game platform on the planet, uses Linux for it’s Steambox gaming console. They’ve also released SteamOS¹², a Linux based gaming operating system for which there are thousands of Linux titles¹³.

There are also many other games for Linux. Search “games for Linux” to find long lists of native Linux games as well as games for the Proton platform which has been ported to Linux. This search also shows long lists of Steam games for Linux as well.

1. Wikipedia, List of Linux-supported computer architectures, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux-supported_computer_architectures ↩︎
2. Raspberry Pi Web site, https://www.raspberrypi.org/ ↩︎
3. ZDNet, The ISS just got its own Linux supercomputer, https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-iss-just-got-its-own-linux-supercomputer/ ↩︎
4. Wikipedia, Top 500 [Supercomputers], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 ↩︎
5. Opensource.org, The open source Definition, https://opensource.org/docs/osd ↩︎
6. Both, David, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Apress, 2018, 311-316 ↩︎
7. Both.org, What is Linux?, https://www.both.org/?page_id=4679 ↩︎
8. Opensource.com, Resources, https://opensource.com/resources ↩︎
9. Both, David,How Linux rescues slow computers (and the planet), https://www.both.org/?p=2799 ↩︎
10. System76 Home page, https://system76.com/ ↩︎
11. Both.org, The real reason we use Linux, https://www.both.org/?page_id=844 ↩︎
12. Steam web site, SteamOS, https://store.steampowered.com/steamos ↩︎
13. Steam web site, Games for Linux, https://store.steampowered.com/linux ↩︎