Why Linux is Terrible

Can you tell me why Linux is terrible?

Linux is the free version of Unix, created by Linus Torvald.

Free is good. Well, sometimes is.

The company supported versions of Unix come with customer support. The best support you’ll find on Linux are online forums populated by hackers and hacker wannabes.

Does that mean my Linux is going to get hacked?

Quite the opposite; hackers keep finding the smallest security holes and race to be the first to fill it.

Then I don’t get why that’s a bad thing.

This is like the fancy kitchen appliance that does wondrous things in the hands of a chef. If you aren’t a chef, it ends up being a complicated nuisance that is hard to use the way you’d like to use it.

Linux is supposedly good because it uses few resources like memory and CPU capacity.

Perhaps, but it is hard to find main line software applications like AutoCAD or Pro-Engineer to run on Linux, while running that software on the system can take advanced computing skills.

So you have to be a hacker to run some engineering or scientific software on Linux.

Just about. Or you run the generic free and open source version that come with the scientific distribution and end up with software packages no one had heard of.

Kind of like the free competitor to Matlab that isn’t compatible with Matlab, so you can’t do work for a company that runs Matlab.

I don’t know anything about the application, but there are probably several free alternatives, just like there are multiple free alternatives to Photoshop.

But none of them has the market share of Photoshop or Matlab, few have nearly as good documentation and all of them are a fraction of the Linux market.

I understand that means that any alternative to tools like Matlab or Photoshop or Pro-E is going to have a small user base, meaning you’ll have to find ways to convert the files or search for collaborators who use those tools.

Or scramble to find a way to run the mainline software on the system, if it doesn’t have a Unix or Linux compatible version.

And that’s what is so terrible about Linux.