 Why do I use Linux as my desktop operating system rather than Windows? Well, I think the main reason that I use Linux as my operating system is because I want customization, flexibility, reliability, stability, security. I want the freedom that Linux gives me that Microsoft Windows just doesn't give the user. Windows is very freedom-restricting where Linux by its very nature is is liberating. It gives you all the freedom to do whatever it is you want to do with your computer. And I think that's the biggest reason why I choose to run Linux. Today, I wanted to highlight some of the differences between Windows and Linux. And this is mainly geared toward those of you that are Windows users. You've never used Linux, but you're thinking about switching to Linux. I'm going to show you some of the differences between the two operating systems. For those of you that have used both Windows and Linux, you know probably the biggest glaring difference of those two operating systems is that Windows is very locked down. There's hardly any customization options. It's not very flexible at all. You know, there's very little that you can change about the operating system and the little bit that you can change with Windows, there's some customization options, but they either require payment or they require a registration because they want personal information from you, such as a name, email address, etc. They want to datamine you and then sell that information to other companies to make money or for Microsoft to use that information themselves to serve you ads. And I think that is a horrible way to do business. One thing, you know, if I wanted to move this taskbar here, the bottom panel here, I go to taskbar settings, I'm assuming, and you need to activate Windows before you can personalize your PC. Why do I need to give Microsoft some personal information about myself before I can move the panel from the bottom to the top, for example? That makes no sense. Maybe I want to, I don't know, change the wallpaper. Let me go to personalize. I'm assuming I can find some settings in there for the background and colors and things. Yeah, you need to activate Windows before you can personalize your PC. Basically, until I activate an account until I create a Microsoft account and give them some information, which I don't want to do for privacy reasons, for security reasons, I don't want Microsoft to really know anything about me. But they force you, right? There's no reason Microsoft needs people to create an account to move the panel from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen. They're doing that basically to trap you into giving them personal information again so they can data mine you and then sell that information or use that information for them to try to sell you products. By contrast, Linux lets you do whatever you want to do with the operating system because Linux is not trying to tie you into its own ecosystem. There's not one corporation behind everything. All of the programs for the most part in your typical Linux distributions are free and open source software. They're not data mining you in any way, so they're not trying to profit off of getting your personal information and then selling it to other people. This Linux distribution I'm showing here is Manjaro. This is Manjaro with the KDE Plasma desktop. If I want to customize it, I can. There's nothing stopping me. As a matter of fact, they make it very easy to do whatever you want to do. For example, I want to move that panel from the bottom to the top and I can do that and then let me let me exit out of that and now I've moved the panel. Nobody tried to prevent me from doing that. Nobody said, hey, no, you can only do it this way. You must run your desktop this way or you know, we'll give you a few customization options, but we want a few bucks from you or we want some personal information. That's not the way Linux operates and if I wanted to change the wallpaper, there's nothing stopping me from doing that. Maybe I want to change to that really nice bit of abstract art there. So customization, flexibility, the operating system is yours. I can strip out anything I want to out of Linux operating system. If I don't like this panel, I can remove it. If I don't like the entire desktop environment, the entire suite of applications that came installed on this, I have the flexibility. I have the power to remove it. Nobody prevents you from doing anything, even destroying your operating system, permanently breaking it. You have that power in Linux where Windows is so locked down. There's certain programs you can't remove. There's certain things that Microsoft just doesn't allow you because technically Microsoft, you don't own your copy of Windows. Technically, you're renting your copy of Windows where in Linux, you actually do own the operating system. You own your software that you have installed. Another thing you'll notice as far as the difference between Microsoft Windows and the Linux operating system is file paths and file names. So let me open up Windows file explorer here. And the file paths in Windows, oddly enough, involve backslashes such as C colon backslash and then you know program files backslash and et cetera, et cetera, you know, going further down the file system path. Why is it using backslashes? I have no idea. It's been that way since the beginning of time, dating back to DOS, but Unix and Unix like operating systems use forward slashes and file paths and that's much more normal saying I think that's what most computer users kind of expect. Also, file names are a little different in Windows. For example, I'm going to create a new text document here and I'm going to call it derrick.txt all lowercase and then I'm going to right click and I'm going to create a new text document. This time I'm going to call it derrick.txt with Derrick and all caps. And I can't create that second file because file names are not case sensitive in Windows. They see Derrick lowercase and Derrick all caps as the same file name. And again, that's really strange to me. I don't know why Windows is that way. Again, it's legacy reasons it's always been that way. And by contrast in Linux, typically file paths are going to be separated by slashes. So if I wanted to change a directory here into downloads and I did pwd to print the working directory, the full path to that directory is slash home slash dt slash downloads was your standard slashes your forward slashes no weird backslashes. Let me get out of the terminal. I'm going to go to the file explorer here inside manjaro and I'm going to go to the downloads directory. I'm just going to create some new empty text files. Once again, I'll create derrick.txt and then once again, I will also create Derrick and all caps.txt and you see now these are seen as two different files, which of course is what you would expect. So it's just something as a minor gripe between Windows and Linux. Does it really matter? No, but obviously when you're moving from Windows to Linux, you should know the differences in how they handle both file paths and file names. Another big difference is the shells that are in these operating systems. So in Windows you have the power shell. Let me open that up and I don't really know much about the power shell. I'm not much of a Windows user. The last time I used Windows full time as a desktop operating system was way back in the XP days, but I'm assuming I could do a ls, a list command, or dir directory command. It's actually the same command. It's probably an alias for each of them here in the power shell, but that's the power shell for Windows. In Linux, the standard shell in most GNU slash Linux operating systems is going to be the bash shell, and that's the case here inside Manjaro. If I run the command echo, and then dollar sign shell all caps, you can see the default shell is slash bin slash bash, the bash shell. And I could run your standard ls command, the list command. I could do ls space dash al. That's the long form list command. The bash shell is really, really powerful. One of the things you really need to learn when you switch over to Linux, it's not necessary, but it's so powerful you really should learn how to use the bash shell and especially how to do simple bash scripting. One of the things you need to know about is redirections and piping. So if I pipe something, piping is basically taking a command like the ls, la command, and then doing the pipe symbol behind it, meaning take the output, and then put that into this next command. For example, I could do the alt command here, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to print a certain column of information here in alt, and I'm going to print column, I don't know, column eight. And I get that particular column from the command that I ran earlier, because I passed the ls command, I piped it into alt, and then printed the eighth column. So that's really cool. You could also do some redirections. For example, if I wanted to take the output from that ls dash la command, I could redirect that into a file, I'll call it test dot txt. And if I did an ls, you see I now have this file, test dot txt, and if I catted it, which is going to print out the contents of that file here in the terminal, you see that test dot txt actually just contains the output from that ls command. We just took it and redirected it into that text file. So the bash shield, really, really powerful shield, and it's one of those things you probably should spend some time learning if you want to become a Linux power user. Now let's talk about the graphical user interface, the GUI, the desktop environment on these particular operating systems. Windows has a very easy to use desktop. It's very simple, very user-friendly. Anybody can figure out how to use this thing, mainly because of the lack of customization. You know, Windows always looks like Windows, it always functions like Windows, where Linux, you know, has a million different possibilities, you know, between the various Linux distributions. Windows is always Windows. It always has this weird-looking menu with the squares in it. That's very strange, but if you just started typing something, like, I don't know, the GIMP, which I installed here in Windows, I tried to install as much free and open-source software in my Windows virtual machine here as possible, because I don't want to use the proprietary solutions. And the GIMP takes a long time to load here inside Windows. That's very strange, because it only takes a couple of seconds for GIMP to launch inside Linux. All right, and the GIMP finally loaded. I'm just going to close that. Yeah, it's very strange. Well, it took almost 30 seconds for that thing to load, but the Windows user interface is very friendly, very easy to use. If you've got your standard panel at the bottom, you've got your standard start menu on the bottom left, you know, you can right click on the desktop to get a little information. You have desktop icons, you can actually put stuff on your desktop. Now, in contrast, the graphical user interface of a Linux distribution can vary. It can be as simple and user friendly as Windows, or it can even be more simple and user friendly than Windows. It can also be completely bare. You can actually strip away the graphical desktop environment completely and have nothing but the command line only on a Linux distribution. That's common with server distributions, but for typical desktop Linux distributions, I would say ease of use. Linux is as easy to use as Windows. Typically, you have the same traditional kind of paradigm where you have a panel usually at the bottom or the top of the screen, sometimes on the left hand side of the screen, and then you have your traditional kind of menu system here where you click on a menu and you've got your categories of applications and you click on a category and then it lists all the applications in that category and then you just launch something. For example, the Firefox web browser, which is probably the most popular free and open source web browser on the planet. It may actually be the most popular free and open source piece of software on the planet. Let me close out of Firefox. Now let's talk about installation, the installation process because I've done some Windows installations in the past and I've done hundreds, many hundreds probably Linux installations over the years and I would say the installation process for both Windows and Linux for the most part is very easy. The one thing I would say is that although the Windows installation process is very easy, typically everything's kind of automated, you know, screens just pop up every now and then telling you to wait while we do this and that, you know, it takes a little time with the Windows installation. So it's a little longer to install Windows than most Linux desktop operating systems, but just just a little bit. It's not too bad. Linux typically these days many of the popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Mint and Manjaro which I'm looking at today, many of these distributions you can get installed in 10 minutes or less on modern equipment with decent specs. We should also talk about the reliability, the stability of the software. Windows is definitely the least stable of the two operating systems. Linux has a long history of being stable and reliable. That's why for decades Linux has been the de facto standard operating system that runs servers because on servers you have to have stability. Let's think about the internet. All the websites you visit, they're running on web servers. Almost all of those web servers are running Linux. Why? It's because it's stable. That's why Linux has always dominated the server market and Windows really doesn't have much of a presence in the server market at all because it's just not a stable operating system. As someone that used Windows way back in the day, you know, back in the late 80s, 90s, early 2000s, I can tell you that the operating system has always been kind of a crash vest. I mean, we all remember the days of constantly having to control alt delete to reboot the system because something's freezing up. You got your blue screens of death and all of that where in Linux, I've never had an experience like that where things were just crashing all the time. You were constantly having to reboot. That's typically not the case in Linux. If for some reason you install a Linux operating system and something is horribly wrong and you know something bad is happening, you have a hundred other Linux distributions to choose from. Install one of those just in case it's a situation where that particular Linux distribution just doesn't work with your hardware. You can find one that will work with your particular hardware. With Windows, there's only one Windows, right? If it's not working for you, oh well, you're stuck with it. So let's talk a little bit about software availability. So if you're talking about who has the most programs available that will work on that operating system, who wins? Microsoft Windows wins, mainly because of proprietary commercial software. Because the big software companies that create these proprietary pieces of software that they want to sell and make a profit on, they target of course the most users and the most users of an operating system that's going to be Microsoft Windows, right? Linux, there's just not enough of us for them to profit off of. So we don't have much commercial proprietary software available on Linux. Most of our software is free and open source software, where we dominate that area because there's a ton of free and open source software out there. Pretty much every piece of free and open source software runs on Linux. Most of the time they develop it, they target Linux, right? And the developer uses Linux. That's why he's creating free and open source software because he likes that ideology, that model. Many pieces of free and open source software that I use on a daily basis are not available in Windows. So I know people love to complain, oh, my Windows programs don't work in Linux. Well, guess what? Many of my Linux programs, they don't work in Windows. It works both ways. When you run Windows, you run Windows software, meaning software somebody wrote to run on Windows. That's all you can run on Windows is Windows software. When you run Linux, you have to run Linux software. That means somebody wrote that piece of software to run on Linux. You can't complain that, you know, this piece of software doesn't work on this operating system. You just have to use tools designed for that operating system. So there is going to be some change. Some of those programs you used on Windows, you're going to have to use different programs to accomplish those same tasks on Linux. And the last major difference between Windows and Linux is in terms of privacy, security, and especially freedom. So I'm going to hit the start menu here inside Windows 10, and I'm going to search for ULA, End User License Agreement. That's Microsoft's End User License Agreement. Now I guess it's going to do a web search here. Maybe I needed to be more specific. Let's actually do Microsoft ULA. Let's see if we get some better search results. I'm assuming it was using Bing for the search results, which of course is a horrible search engine. That's Microsoft's own search engine. I know why they use it. Oh my goodness, it's going to default to Bing here, and it's also going to default. Is this Internet Explorer? What browser is this? Even though you guys see I have Firefox installed, I'm pretty sure I set Firefox to be the default browser. It still opens up Bing inside of Edge because so much of the operating system is tied to Microsoft and they're trying to make money off of all these products. I'm going to go ahead and say that the piece of software was pre-installed on a computer from the manufacturer. Say I got Windows already pre-installed on a computer that I bought, so I'm going to search for Windows, because every ULA will be slightly different. Let's select a version Windows 10, and then let me select a language, English, and then so this is a standard license that you agreed to when you use Windows and most of the other Microsoft products. This is not a free and open source license, of course. This is a proprietary freedom restricting license, meaning you don't actually own your software. I believe somewhere in here it basically says something to that effect that basically Microsoft retains all rights to the software on your computer. They can look at anything you do on your computer. They can see everything you're doing on the file system. They can read all of your data. In terms of privacy and security, Windows is an absolute nightmare, and most people don't read the ULA. Some of the restrictions here, you're not able to use or virtualize features of the software separately. You can't publish or copy, rent, lease, lend the software, so you can't loan your Windows to somebody else. You can't transfer the software. You really can't change the software. You can't reverse engineer, decompile. You can't look at the source code. They don't want you to know exactly what is going on inside the source code, because inside the source code, if you could look at it, you would see that Microsoft is spying on you. They're logging all your keystrokes. That way they know everything you're doing on the machine. They don't want you to know that. That's why it's closed source proprietary code that you're not able to actually inspect. Other interesting pieces of the license is that Microsoft isn't responsible for any any damages that, you know, like some of their weird updates do, right? So if you have one of these forced Windows 10 updates, you didn't update it. Microsoft chose to update that machine for you, and it permanently breaks your machine, and you lose important data that cost you money, like real-world money. You can't sue Microsoft. That's not their problem. That's your problem. You agreed to this license, and guess what? You are not able to sue in court in front of a judge or a jury. If you have some issue with Microsoft, you can enter arbitration with Microsoft, but legally they say that you've given up all of your legal rights to actually take them to court for anything by using Windows. By contrast, Linux and most of the software on your Linux distribution are actually licensed under what we call free licenses. Free as in freedom, not free as in cost, although most of them are also free as in cost as well. But when we talk about freedom and we talk about free software, we're talking about licensing and software that allows you the freedom to do whatever it is you want to do with that software. So this is the free software definition here, the four essential freedoms. So what are we talking about? We're talking about software that allows you to run the program as you wish for any purpose. We don't care what you do with this software. It's yours. Do whatever you want to do with it. We don't care who uses it for what purpose. Also, you have the freedom to study how the program works, so that means I can look at the source code. That way I can see what it's doing to me. And you also have the freedom to redistribute copies, so I can make a copy of it. Give it to a friend or a family member. We can share the software. And finally, you have the freedom to redistribute your modified copies of that. So I looked at the source code. I saw some things I could change, you know, things I needed, things I wanted removed. So I edited this piece of code, this software. I changed it. Now I want to redistribute it. I have the freedom to do that as well. So this is what we're talking about when we're talking about freedom. Linux is ultimate freedom where Windows, you are not free at all. You are not using Windows. When you are using Windows, you're actually being used by Windows. So those are just a few of the differences between Windows and Linux. There's a lot of differences between Windows and Linux, but those are some of the ones that are really obvious when you first switch. I know they were obvious to me when I first switched from Windows to Linux many years ago. So hopefully this video will help those of you that are thinking about making that transition come on over to Linux. I think you'll like it. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Absi Gabe, James Mitchell, Paul Wesse, Kami Allen, Chuck Kirk, David Dillon, Gregory Heiko, Mike Erion, Alexander Peace, Archon Fedor, Polytech Raver, Red Prophet Scott, Steven and Willie. These guys. They're the producers of this episode without these guys. I couldn't do what I do. I also couldn't do what I do without each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. These names on the screen right now, this ever-growing list of names. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to help support me, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. It's just a t-shirt, guys. Don't take it too seriously.