Comment by Joe Clark on "5 Reasons Why I Chose Linux Over Windows"

Comment5 Reasons Why I Chose Linux Over Windows

Joe Clark

Full-stack developer specializing in healthcare IT

Mar 23, 2019

I love Linux, but even now in 2019, it's so painful to get stuff up and running in it. Dependency hell, even with all those systems (apt-get, yum, etc.) designed specifically to avoid that. I spent hours and hours just recently trying to get some pen-testing suite (don't remember which one) installed that I just gave up. Not worth my time. I don't have that kind of time available every time I want to install something. Yes, I see this on Windows on a rare occasion, but so much more often on Linux. Then there's VPN... ok, don't get me started. But I still love Linux. Go figure.

Ilgıt Yıldırım

Full-Stack Developer

Mar 25, 2019

I agree, Linux is not plug & play hence you sometimes spend time to figure things out. Although if you are experienced Linux user, this time gets a lot shorter / you will have such problems a lot less.

As for VPN point, it is extremely easy to set up and use. Then again, your linux flavor might be different.

L2TP/IPSec VPN is very painful to set up. I just walked through the process for THREE HOURS on Linux Mint 19.1 over the weekend, and could not get it to work with our work VPN. I've had similar issues on other flavors of Linux with varying degrees of success. Why this isn't baked into the kernel is beyond my understanding. Openswan (deprecated), Strongswan, libreswan... I mean really? How many libraries do we need that just don't work, or make configuration really quite painful? I shouldn't need to know the low-level details of the configuration to make it work. And the error messages that are so incredibly vague that can't even begin to point you in the right direction (even in syslog), well, I think you get my point.

Like I said, I love Linux. I've used it for years. There's tons of great stuff about it. I won't stop using it. But until it matures to the point where things actually work out of the box, there's no way I can make it my everyday OS. I don't have time to deal with stuff like this every time I want to do something that should be trivial.

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