Why Linux Is Better for Programming

Have 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. This is the question that I'll be answering in today's article which is why Linux? 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.

Why Linux is really great:

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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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.

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 it 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 it is really important when doing research for this article 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.

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.

Number five on our list is task automation Linux is almost built 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. 

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 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.

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.

So this was today's article I hope you enjoyed it and now I'll see you in the next article.