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Legitimate Reasons To Not Use Linux

Today’s article is going to be something my regular readers wouldn’t expect as we discuss legitimate reasons to not use Linux. Like it or not, people have reasons not to use Linux. I’ll cover some of them that I think are more legitimate than other reasons.

I think I’ll link to these first:

Top 10 Reasons Why I Use Linux
Why I Use Linux
What it’s Like To Beta-test Linux, Specifically Lubuntu

I share those three links because I think it should be obvious that I’m a Linux fanboy. I love and use Linux because I think it’s the best operating system for me.

At the same time, I realize that Linux may not be your choice. I think there are some legitimate reasons to not use Linux. There are other reasons with less legitimacy (that is reasons based on fallacies) and we’ll avoid those in this article. Instead, we’ll cover reasons with legitimacy.

Legitimate Reasons To Not Use Linux:

I’ll cover the legitimate reasons to not use Linux that I can think of. After you read them, you can leave a comment agreeing with them or disagreeing with them. You can also add your reasons. If those reasons are any good (and I have both time and motivation) I’ll add them to the article. So, if you’re going to comment on an article, let this be one you feel especially welcome to do so.

#1. You rely on software that will not work with Linux.

This one is pretty basic. There’s software that will not work with Linux. Yes, it might work in Wine, but it may not work in Linux at all. This is the cold hard truth and if you need that software then you’re not going to be interested in moving to Linux.

#2. You’re heavily invested in Microsoft.

Let’s say that you use MSFT for everything, from office to desktop. Sure, you could switch. Linux has equivalents to almost everything MSFT offers. But, you pay for your Office365 and similar, you might use their gaming hardware, etc…

While you can switch, it may be harder than it would be for those people who are more software-agnostic. You simply don’t want to put in that effort. You simply don’t see a need to put in that effort.

This applies to Apple users as well. If you’re heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, you may not want to switch to Linux. It could also apply to BSD users, Unix users, etc…

#3. You play modern games.

Yes, many games are available on Linux. These days, we can install Steam and play thousands of games on Linux. However, you’ll find that quite a few games will simply not work with Linux. You’ll find that they won’t work with Wine. That’s just the sad case of affairs.

Perhaps you could get a console that you’re happy with and switch to Linux while not always playing the latest and greatest games? More and more games are being developed with Linux compatibility so this may change in time.

#4. You’re happy with Windows.

This one is similar to those who are invested in Windows. However, those people who are invested heavily in the MSFT ecosystem may not be happy, they’re just entrenched. This is for those folk who are just plain happy with Linux. They know the differences. They understand reality. Linux just isn’t something they’re interested in because they’re happy with Linux.

#5. You’re learning disabled.

I am not saying that the learning disabled can’t learn how to use Linux. However, a person may have invested enough time learning to use Windows and may not want to invest time and effort learning a new operating system.

Think of someone who is elderly and has learned to navigate the Windows environment. Maybe they have a little cognitive problem and they no longer retain things as well as they once did. Sure, they could learn to use Linux but they may have better things to do with their time.

Speaking of time…

#6. You lack the time to learn Linux.

Let’s face it, many people are now working two jobs just to pay the rent and have enough to eat. Maybe they don’t work extra jobs but have hobbies that take up their time. Sure, we have computer hobbies but they may have hobbies that don’t involve technology. There are any number of reasons why you simply don’t have time to learn to use Linux.

#7. You’re just not interested in learning to use Linux.

You’ve already learned enough about Linux. You know about all the various choices. You know how easy it can be to get into Linux but you just don’t care. That’s okay! It’s perfectly okay to not be interested in learning to use Linux. If you’re happy with proprietary software, that’s your choice. This entry is for the person who is aware of Linux, the ease of Linux, and just doesn’t care to learn.

#8. You have hardware that will not work on Linux.

It’s possible that you have hardware that simply will not work on Linux. No amount of goodwill and happy thoughts is going to change this. The hardware vendor doesn’t support Linux and has no plans to support Linux in the future. While that’s unfortunate, if you need that hardware to do your computational tasks then it’s perfectly okay to not use Linux.

This can also be true with ‘bleeding-edge’ hardware. If you’re interested in using (for example) the latest and greatest graphics card, Linux may not offer any support. It could be a while before you get even basic support for that hardware. The devs need to figure out how to make it work with Linux and that takes time.

#9. You do not own the hardware.

If you share the hardware with other users, they may not appreciate it if you install Linux. They may not be interested in that. Yes, you could use virtual machines and live instances run from an external drive, but many people don’t find those experiences satisfactory.

This is especially true if you’re still a kid. Your parents aren’t going to be all that happy if they go to use the computer only to find out that you’ve installed a completely different operating system. Instead, look for a second device that you can call your own. Until then, it’s okay to give Linux a pass.

#10. <Insert Your Reasons To Not Use Linux Here>

What did I forget? How many other reasons can you think of? I tried to cover as many reasons to not use Linux as I could think of. I’m sure there are other reasons, so now’s a fine time to add them as a comment.

Closure:

So, I figured I’d write a different article. This time, I wrote about legitimate reasons to not use Linux. Frankly, there are legitimate reasons why a person may decide to not use Linux. I suspect many people could use Linux who do not currently use Linux, but there are legitimate reasons why they may choose not to.

So long as they’re making an informed and honest decision, I think that’s just fine. I’m perfectly okay with the fact that other people don’t use Linux. I’ve never lost a minute’s worth of sleep over the fact that people use software that I don’t like. I don’t even invest the time to argue with them. I just hope that they’re making their choices from an informed position and that they know the reality and benefits of using Linux.

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Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #23

Today’s article is just a meta article, an article that I fail to write every month. The more astute readers of this site will see the #23 and realize how bad I am at keeping to a schedule. Writing meta articles isn’t fun. Writing meta articles doesn’t result in sharing valuable information. These meta articles cover the state of Linux Tips. That’s it.

So, things are going well… Things are going very well from many perspectives. Things are going better than ever!

Why not just throw some data…

For the past year or so, I’ve used a browser extension that helps me write better. It also has a weird feature that sends a weekly message that lets you know how you’re doing. I’ve not yet shared that data, so let’s share that!

Some Meta Stats:

This is just for the past week…

I wrote more than 91% of the rest of the users.
At the same time, I was more accurate than 73% of their users.
For better or worse, I used more unique words than their other users at 93%.

Amusingly, I used about 3500 unique words in the past week and that’s somehow enough unique words to stand out. I didn’t think my vocabulary was that expansive, but I’m constantly assured it is.

Anyhow, my “tone”, as determined by the plugin…

I’m 19% informative.
I am also 17% assertive.
Then, I guess I’m 13% direct and 10% confident.

I have no idea how they came up with those numbers.

Anyhow, there are some writing stats. Keep in mind that I write for more than just this site. I write a lot of text elsewhere.

Some Site Numbers:

So, we’ve seen some income in sponsored articles, which is nice. Not relying on Google is okay. It’s less income than Google was, but at least you’re not currently wading through ads. We may have ads again in the future, so we’ll have to wait and see. If you don’t want to see ads, you can always donate. 🙂

We’re currently averaging over 1,000 visits per day. I’ve noticed that we surge ahead and then sort of taper off. It’s like we have some record-breaking months and then we slowly taper off just a little. Then, we have new record months. Last month was not a record-setting month but it was still well over 1,000 visits per day.

Most of my traffic comes from the United States – which would be expected.
You tend to visit for 228 seconds each time you visit.
The average viewer is using Chrome, Chromium, or a Chromium derivative.

These are the most popular pages:

How To: Remove AppArmor From Ubuntu
How To: Convert JPG to PNG
How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server

Those change around a little but they seem to be the most common.

For the record, most of my traffic comes from Google.
That’s followed by DuckDuckGo.
The next is traffic from Linux.org.

About 92% of you are using Linux already.
Less than 4% of you are using Linux.
Just about 3% of you are using a Mac.

So, those numbers make perfectly good sense. Getting good numbers from your statistics isn’t an easy task. Various stat applications excel at different things. But, those numbers are fairly similar to what I see elsewhere.

Closure:

That’s right. This was just a meta article. Things are going okay, or at least way better than I ever expected. I don’t have any sponsored articles lined up so we’ll have to see how that goes this month. I’ve changed my policy quite a bit, letting folks know that I can be flexible. So, we’ll see what happens.

Is Your Storage Drive An SSD Or An HDD?

Today’s article aims to answer a simple question, simply is your storage drive an SSD or an HDD? This is not something most folks will have trouble knowing, but it’s still something worth knowing how to do. After all, you never know when you’ll be attached to a remote computer with disks of different types.

And, yes, due to expense and sizes, HDDs still exist and are still in use all over the place. Not everything has been converted to an SSD.

We’ve relied on spinning media for quite some time. We used this in hard disk drives. They were the norm for many years. SSDs (solid-state drives) are more common in end-user computers these days. If you can, you might even have an NVME SSD which is exceptionally fast.

We’re only going to use one command in this article, so it will be quite short. That’s not a bad thing. Not every article needs to be all that long.

We’ll simply be using the cat command. We’ve used this command many times in the past because it’s a handy command to use!

cat:

The cat command is a command used in the terminal. We want to read a file and cat is the correct tool for the job. The cat command reads a file and sends the output to the terminal. You won’t need to install anything.

Let’s check the man page (with man cat) to see:

cat – concatenate files and print on the standard output

See? If we want to read a file to the terminal, this is the correct tool for the job. Again, you won’t need to install anything.

An SSD Or An HDD:

Like oh so many articles, you will need an open terminal. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, let’s see if you’ve got an SSD or an HDD.

First, identify your drives with this command:

lsblk

lsblk

Now, ignoring the partitions, you can run the following command:

cat /sys/block/<drive_ID>/queue/rotational

1	cat /sys/block/<drive_ID>/queue/rotational

So, for example, you’d run this command:

cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational

1	cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational

And here’s an example output:

$ cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational
0

1 2	$ cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational 0

The zero means that it’s an SSD.

If we run this command against a drive that I know is an HDD (a plugged-in external HDD that’s used for backups and storage):

$ cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational
1

1 2	$ cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/rotational 1

The 1 means that it is a spinning HDD.

So, if you have both you can now distinguish between an SSD and an HDD.

Closure:

So, now you know how to tell if your device is an SSD or an HDD. This is something easily determined. If you have questions about your storage, this will help answer those questions. I’m not sure that I’d memorize this command, but it’s worth adding to your notes.

Monitor System Resources With “Resources”

Today is one of those days when I’d like to introduce you to new software as we learn to monitor system resources with “Resources”. That may not make much sense, but it will! The Resources application is a great option if you want a great way to monitor system resources.

I may do a few articles about monitoring system resources. That’ll be fun.

It’s probably important to mention that many of you will not have this in your default repositories. For those who do, it won’t be in the typical repositories but will exist because your distro ships with Flatpaks enabled.

That’s right. To use this article, you should read a previous article:

Installing Flatpaks In Linux

Once you get Flatpak installed and the FlatHub repository added, you can use a great application known as Resources.

Of course, your desktop distro shipped with a GUI resource monitor and it’s usually fit for purpose. However, this Resources application has a bunch of great features and it is easy to live with.

Another great thing is that this shouldn’t be a very long article…

Monitor System Resources:

Once Flatpak is installed, you might want to keep your terminal open. Yes, Flatpaks are large – but they have great features, including running in isolation and shipping with all their dependencies.

Most of you can open a terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. If that doesn’t work for you, you’ll have a terminal option in your application menu. It might be under the Administration sub-section.

With your terminal open, you can install Resources quite easily:

flatpak install flathub net.nokyan.Resources

1	flatpak install flathub net.nokyan.Resources

That should add Resources to your application menu. It will fall under the Administration sub-section. I’ve seen some distros not show newly added Flatpaks in the menu until after a reboot. If that’s the case, you can manually run Resources with this command:

flatpak run net.nokyan.Resources

1	flatpak run net.nokyan.Resources

Once you open the application, all will be revealed. Here’s an image:

Resources default screen. — This should be self-explanatory if you’ve monitored resources before.

One of the great things is that you can monitor applications that might have multiple processes – such as Google Chrome. You can also monitor processes individually, including closing those applications and processes.

Additionally, you can monitor CPU use, memory use, GPU use, and your various storage devices – including optical media. If you want to know read and write speeds on the fly, that information is available in an easily understood graphical tool.

That’s right… I’m covering a graphical tool today! Let it be said that a GUI is sometimes a good tool for the job and that the Resources application is one of those tools.

If you click on the hamburger menu near the top, you can also adjust your preferences. You can choose to display more information than the default and adjust how you’d like to read things like temperature values. It’s a pretty handy application.

Yes, you already have a GUI tool to monitor system resources but you can opt to use this one instead. It’s a pretty large file (or multiple files) but that’s to be expected with Flatpaks. So, get a coffee going while you wait for the application to install.

Closure:

So, there’s a GUI tool you can use to monitor system resources. It’s worth investigating. Some of you may like it well enough to switch to it entirely. Others may find they reach for it when they need more information than they usually have available on one screen. Either way, it’s a handy application and one worth knowing about.

Short: The Halt Command

Today’s article is intentionally short because we’re simply going to learn about the basics of the halt command. There won’t be much to this article, because there doesn’t need to be.

If you have a Linux system, you can access the halt command. The halt command is one of the commands used for power management but not one you’re likely to use. You’re more likely to run reboot or shutdown command.

Why the halt command? Well, it’s archaic these days. I really can’t think of all that many, or any really, reasons to use it. I’m told you can use this command for low-level maintenance but I’ve never been able to use that for anything.

The Halt Command:

Under the hood, when you issue the halt command, the operating system goes through a series of steps to ensure a clean shutdown. It stops all running processes, unmounts filesystems, and sends signals to devices and services to shut down gracefully. Once everything is properly shut down, it halts the CPU and powers off the system hardware.

If you check the man page (with man halt) you’ll see that it agrees with the above statement and is a tool for managing your power state.

halt, poweroff, reboot – Halt, power-off or reboot the machine

While there’s more to the command, we’ll just cover the basics. So, press CTRL + ALT + T and open your default terminal emulator.

Or not… You only want to run the halt command when you need the command. It will shut everything down and that’s not something you necessarily want to do while reading this article.

The syntax is quite simple:

halt

halt

This will halt all the processes and leave the computer running. To completely turn it off, you’ll need to use the power button.

You can also try this command:

halt -p

halt -p

Now the -p is handy. After halting the computer, it will initiate a shutdown.

Then, you might find this a bit handier…

halt --reboot

1	halt --reboot

If it’s not obvious, the --reboot flag will reboot the computer. This means you needn’t use the power button for anything. It should just halt the system and then initiate a reboot sequence.

Closure:

That’s all there is today. I told you, it’s a short article. We just covered the halt command and nothing more. This isn’t complicated enough for a full-length article but is still a command that deserves to be mentioned. So, it has been mentioned. The good news is that there might be a future article that refers to this article, so my time might not be wasted.