Things you love about Linux/Unix

humbert

I was listening to my free opensource music player (Rhythembox) playing a compilation of songs from OSX, Windows and Linux partitions but when I plugged in headphones and hit the multifunction key I'd assigned to increase the volume until it was maxed out and the volume was still a little low.

I opened a terminal using my chosen key combination and opened up alsamixer to check if there was something low. The shell opened on my laptop window so I flicked it over to the bigger external monitor and maximised it, again with preassigned keys. Finding the PCM channel low I bumped it up which fixed the problem.

20 seconds later I'm back listening my music, all the while imaging my windows partition with dd, readying it to be transferred to a new disk, when it stuck me how much I love Linux.

Yesterday, I was building osmocombb code and experimenting with their very cool opensource GSM stack, before that I was building code for a little avr circuit and before that I was building a native Android application using yet another toolchain.

I'm not saying it's better than OSX or Windows (7); I've both installed and I use them too for things Linux doesn't do well, but there really isn't much it can't be adapted to do.

Vim, sed, grep, find, xargs...what is it that sets Linux apart for you?

_blank_

I'm no Linux expert, and I don't understand half the post above.

I have a dual boot Linux Mint/Win7 machine.

I use a paid for streaming site for football.

Down in my mates house last week I hooked up my laptop, via HDMI to his 42 inch HD TV to watch a match that wasn't on Sky.

Using Windows the picture was pink and green, kind of like a negative, and turned itself off every fifteen minutes (luckily I'd arrived an hour before kick off).

Using Mint the picture was perfect, didn't turn itself off, and we watched the whole match without a problem.

********************************

On an older laptop, WinXP just stopped booting one day, so I installed Mint to that one, and it worked again. It was like a brand new laptop.

ntlbell

I just love wasting my life away manually recompiling/building kernels/building worlds because I have nothing better to do.

Yours.

Gentoo Ricer

PrzemoF

For me it's power of the commad line - that's something that cannot be overestimated.

ntlbell, I wish I have access to the source of the software I have to use at work. Some ass missed that a filtering option is going bananas is some simple cases - I've to use it 50 times a day. Licence for that software costs 10.000 euro per month per person.... :eek:

Compile & enjoy!

Johnboy1951

What I enjoy most is the freedom to tinker with anything that might take my fancy at any time ...... without being prevented, by some artificially imposed limitation.

I guess it is generally referred to as 'scratching an itch'.

That is priceless!

mach1982

PrzemoF wrote: »

For me it's power of the commad line - that's something that cannot be overestimated.
Compile & enjoy!

It the same with me , 9/10 times I find my self coming back to command line , it just quicker.

d'Oracle

I love that I was able to revive my laptop after a catastrophic HDD failure and loss of my Windows disk, without having to pay for a new version of windows.

Does this make me a bad person?

micko45

I love the fact that you can now, if it tickles your nerdy fancy, have a 2 node Unix cluster sitting in Vmware Server, sitting on Ubuntu.
A couple of years ago and you would have only been able to do it on mad expensive hardware.
Now, i can do it on my PC

Eliot Rosewater

I agree with PrzemoF - the command line gives Linux a lot of power.

Last summer I wrote a simple little shell script to check a ticketing website every 2 minutes, that then blasted music and loaded up the shopping cart page when tickets became available. (I didn't use it in the end, for ethics reasons!) It was simple to do - wget, sed, and some music commands - but I think it illustrates well how easy it is to get your computer to do what you want it do when using Linux. I find this missing in other operating systems.

I think the open-source culture makes it very transparent.

Khannie

I love that everything is configurable.

I love the power of the command line.

I love that it's built as a multi-user system from the ground up.

I love that it's secure.

I love that installing software is generally a one click process, that you can trust that installed software is not riddled with crap and that it gets automatically updated for you.

I love that it uses very little hardware compared to windows.

I love that it comes with SSH. Simply having a secure, socket based server installed opens up a complete wealth of possibilities.

I hated overcoming the learning curve, but by jesus was it worth it.

d31b0y

I love this guy.

croo

I love the choice it gives me.

I love feeling secure when I go on-line.