I really dont understand the purpose of linux..

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excuse my ignorance, I was just over on reddit and was reading the linux sub and I dont get the fascination. I have used Ubuntu and Linux mint in the past, now to me they are watered down OS’s when compared to Windows and I cant see why someone woukd chose Ubuntu over Windows 10 (providing cost isnt a factor). The fact its got such a massive fan base, leads me to believe I must really be missing something here, there must be something really special about linux that I just dont know about.. ????

 

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Linux is a pretty capable OS on many levels, why dont you understand the importance of it ?

You understand importance of Mac OS X ? Which is basically BSD, not so different from Linux.

You understand the importance of Android, which is basically Java + Linux.

You understand the importance of IOS which is a cut down embedded OS, Linux can be cut down and run as an embedded OS, in fact its on many routers, network appliances, embedded devices.

The most important role for Linux is in the data centre, where its run on servers. Generally its run "headless" meaning there is no WIMP interface.

A lot of breakthrough tech also comes to Linux first. Containers for instance started on Linux.

41% of web servers run Apache httpd on linux, and 20% run Nginx on linux. Linux literally runs half the internet, and its not just web servers, its also DNS, Mail servers, search engines, etc.

I expect you think Linux is not so good as a desktop OS, but that isn't its main use, and really its not bad as a desktop OS, just not as full featured as Windows.

When you have a server farm with thousands of servers, dealing with onerous windows licensing is unwelcome not just costly. Windows typically charges per core and so do many windows applications. Linux servers can have 30+ cores, having software that doesn't charge per core becomes very important.

Windows also has some weird quirks, the WIMP design means all processes must have a 'desktop', even services that run in the background and are non interactive. Linux is simply more efficient in headless mode than windows in general.

Linux can be customized and locked down far better then windows. This has changed recently with minwin and webserver windows builds but its still lacking.

Ultimately an OS typically provides various functions :-

Memory management
Scheduling
Process Security
File-system support
Device Drivers
Network Stack
System Applications

Linux does this and allows developers and administrators to focus on their specific problem without limiting them.

 

Thanks @dmarsh this is useful.

 

I would say my company runs 90% of their workloads on Linux (RHEL), my previous company ran 95% of it's infra on CentOS, it's a tighter, more secure and uses less resources than Windows and were it not for the lack of Linux ports for the games I play I would still be using it now (yes, I know WINE but it's still not as good as native Windows support).