Windows & macOS can't do this, but Linux can!

Linux based operating systems aren't perfect and yes you can quote me on that but that doesn't mean they're inferior to Windows or Mac OS as a matter of fact there are plenty of things that you can only do on Linux and not on these other operating systems So today we're going to take a look at the things Linux can do that Windows and Mac OS can't and if I missed anything let me know in the comments and I'll let you know about our sponsor thanks to linote for sponsoring this video linode is my favorite solution to run a Linux or gaming server it's what I use to run my own nexcloud instance and my own only office server the interface is super easy to use they are affordable they have tons of documentation online and they have one click Deployable servers for a ton of applications or games like pie hole pie hole is a DNS sinkhole that filters out requests to add serving domains basically it lets you block ads and improve Network performance it lets you actively monitor every DNS request made on your network and block requests as they come in and you can deploy it in one click only nodes so you can ensure I stay poor and to get you started linode is giving you a hundred dollars of free credit to get your own Linux server or gaming server running to get access to that just click the link into this description below so to begin with we have ultimate portability as in you can literally grab your hard drive or SSD from your computer plug it into another completely different PC and still enjoy a fully functional install with all your files applications and configs since the drivers for all the hardware Linux supports are in the kernel you don't depend on what the manufacturer has pre-installed on your computer and you don't have anything to install either when you move your disk to another PC okay maybe you'll need to install the NVIDIA drivers if your old PC didn't have an Nvidia GPU and your new one does but that's about it compare that to the experience on Windows where you would have to install the drivers for the new motherboard CPU Wi-Fi or Bluetooth adapter sometimes even ethernet adapter GPU and more your current Windows install might boot on a completely different computer but it won't be functional and chances are your license key will also not work because Microsoft knows your hardware and thinks you're just trying to cheat them from a juicy license and on Mac well you can't even remove the hard drive at all since it's soldered into the device in almost all of their computers and it has been that way for a long while it might seem like a stupid Advantage but it's really not it's invaluable time saved when you move to a new computer and if your current computer is also completely dead you have nothing to worry about the second thing is the ability to replace parts of your operating system with others that fit your needs better Windows and Mac OS are one size fits all operating systems they are designed to provide a good enough experience for everyone but this will never be as well suited to your needs Than A system that you picked and tweaked to your liking and again it might look use useless on paper but it's called a personal computer it cannot be personal if your operating system is the exact same as your neighbor even though your use cases are completely different so on Linux you can pick a distro that fits your needs out of the box but if even that isn't completely perfect you can replace components get another file manager get a different Window Manager change the init system so you have more control over how your computer starts and what it runs you can pick the file system that fits your needs best if you need a Workhorse without any fancy stuff X4 if you need automatic snapshots better FS or ZFS and if you think about it this modularity is the reason the steam deck runs Steam OS not Windows yes valve could have paid a Windows license for each of their steam decks the price would have been like 25 bucks higher all their competitors use Windows it's doable but valve understood it was better to have an OS tailor made for gaming even at the cost of not having a 100 game compatibility Aya Neo recognizes that as well as they're working on their own OS to replace windows on their handhelds and if Windows or Mac OS fit your needs perfectly then that's awesome but if it doesn't you'll have a much harder time making it fit to your exact use case than with Linux third we have the live USB or Live CD this is something only Linux based operating systems can do you slap a reasonably sized ISO onto a reasonably sized USB drive and you boot from it and you get a fully usable system not only can you try before you install which is crucial when you're deciding what will run on your PC but you can also have a distro that only runs through a live USB like Tails which means your whole system is in your pocket and you can boot it from any computer you want well as long as the BIOS hasn't been locked and you can access the boot order to make the computer boot on that drive and not on its own hard drive Windows does not have a live CD it's installed or nothing and Mac OS also doesn't have it although they don't care because you're not supposed to install Mac OS on anything else than a Mac and yes for Windows I know things like live 11 exist but they are not official they're very probably not legal at all as I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to redistribute modified Windows systems and I wouldn't try these tools on any computer of mine another big Advantage Linux has over Mac OS or Windows is its ability to run on Old Hardware like very old Hardware have you tried running Windows on a 10 year old computer or even older the latest still supported version of Windows good luck without spending time building a custom ISO to deep load the OS and crossing your fingers for drivers to exist for your old hardware and that specific version of Windows on a Mac it's even less doable the latest version of Mac OS supports at most the Mac Pro from 2013 and that was a very powerful expensive device when it's released in the UK they even tried to sell one of these 10 year old computers for 5 000 pounds refurbished and that was last week all other supported Macs are 9 years old or younger other than that you can't do it on Linux no problem bigger distro that's lightweight and Android your old computer like it was new you'll get patches security fixes the very latest applications if you want them and your system will run fine Linux will not transform a potato PC into a full-on AAA gaming computer but at least you can have the latest OS on a very old computer which you can't on Windows or Mac OS fifth thing you can do on Linux but not on Windows or Mac OS is driverless printer support on Linux printers are detected automatically and work out of the box no driver CD to try and fit in your computer that doesn't have a CD drive anymore no need to download anything from the internet you plug your printer in and you print or even better it's detected automatically over the network and then you print well unless your distro is open Soother because this apparently does not detect the printers automatically for some reason but everything else does not so on Windows you will need to install drivers to get anything resembling a good quality print or a scan either the manufacturer will have a CD in which case I hope you can use that or you'll have to hunt online through cryptic websites to find the exact model among 200 different ones that have almost the same serial number Mac OS might also work without installing specific drivers but the support is not as wide as what Linux offers in my experience they have something called AirPrint for Network printing but if the printer isn't compatible you'll need to install the drivers manually on Linux this is a huge Time Saver it's super easy super convenient and yeah other operating systems are just not as good on that front and you also avoid all the crappy software that printer manufacturers generally bundle with their drivers next is the well-known UI and ux customization Windows and Mac OS can not be customized visually not out of the box not more than light or dark theme and an accent color if you want to change the icons the general theme the layout of the desktop you can't if you want a taskbar on Mac OS and the start menu you can't if you want a global menu on Windows you can't and yes you can use third-party utilities but their gen generally paid they're often buggy they might be completely insecure and they will use resources on top of what the OS already provides because you can't really fully disable it with Linux all major desktop environments let you change how your system looks or Works yes even gnome with extensions and themes you can have a radically different experience than the default do you want your taskbar at the top of the screen with the menu on the right and the clock in the middle sure do you want to copy the Mac OS layout yep use KDE do you want to have a deconstructed top bar with completely independent items you can do it if you want a different theme for your desktop you can different icons different fonts different cursors anything you want and even if sometimes on Linux you will need to use a third-party tool they are all open source so you can be pretty certain that it doesn't do anything weird to your system or a lot of people would already have warned everyone body to stay away the Linux Community will warn you to stay away if an app writes logs that are more than 2 kilobytes because that's bloat so believe me if an app collects data or tries to hijack your system in any way you will know about it next is the absence of vendor lock-in on Linux you're free to move to anything else whenever you want once your distro is end of life and won't receive any patches you can upgrade for free to the next version or if you don't like that new version you can also just decide to change distributions entirely on Windows once your system is end of life you have to accept to use the new one and pay for it if you missed your shot at getting the free update before orb you can keep using your old system unsupported and have problems with it viruses Trojans and the like well I guess that's also a strong possibility even with the latest up-to-date version of Windows and on Mac OS you can decide not to update but you lose all the benefits of the new features of your other Apple devices which might get an update and does not work correctly with your older version of Mac OS and its older applications on Linux you can even buy extended support to keep a distro alive and patched even when the distros developer has abandoned it for example Ubuntu has Ubuntu Pro which is free for everyone up to five machines and will give you 10 years of support for Ubuntu LTS including 25 000 packages on Windows you don't get that and the software you might want to install will just stop supporting your OS entirely if you're on Windows 7 or 8 prepare to say goodbye to steam in early next year here but I guess you already said goodbye to Chrome this year so you're used to it now oh and there's more you can apply updates without rebooting your computer on most distros unless it's a kernel update and even for that there are live patching solutions that let you patch the kernel without rebooting you can also decide not to update at all if you want your OS will never force you on Linux you can install most of the software you want right out of the box without hunting for it online be it an application or library on Mac OS the Mac App Store doesn't have libraries and has very few apps and on Windows the Windows store doesn't either and sure you could use Homebrew on Mac or winget and chocolaty on Windows but they don't have nearly as much stuff as your average Linux distros repos they are not pre-installed and their command line only on Linux all of this can be done graphically or with the command line you decide and everything in the repos is actually maintained and supported by your distro which is not the case for these third-party tools on Windows or Mac OS if you want the best command line there is without having to install a subsystem or a third-party tool Linux is your only choice if you want to run your system without an antivirus you can own Linux you maybe also could on Mac OS but you better make sure you Don own download software outside of the official websites of the developers so there you go a nice list of things that Linux can do that other operating systems just can't and of course it doesn't mean that Linux is always better than Windows or Mac OS that's not the case so let me know what you think and what I missed in the comments but what I didn't miss is the inclusion of this segue to our sponsor if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it maybe it's time to look at a manufacturer that actually makes devices that run Linux out of the box instead of Manufacturers that never cared about Linux and only ship Windows tuxedo is based in Germany but they ship to most countries in the world they make laptops and desktops that run Linux the parts have been specifically picked to run Linux and they have a huge range that should suit every price point and every need whether it's for gaming for an affordable laptop or workstation you decide they have it there all very customizable and all the laptops are openable repairable and upgradable so if you need a new computer and you want to run Linux and you want to support linux's development click the link in the description below and get yourself a tuxedo computer so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't there's always that thumbs down button that you can click but let me know down in the comments why and if you really enjoyed the 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Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 305,095

Keywords: linux, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, opensource, linux tips, distro, linux for beginners 2023, linux tutorial 2023, linux vs windows

Id: TuPO-eAMy4I

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023