Why Linux Is Better For Programming|Helpful Illustrated Guide

Have you ever asked yourself the question of a Linux and why programmer seem to prefer Linux and why Linux just seems to be really hyped among developers

This is a question that I've asked myself in the past and especially before starting to use Linux and before starting to learn more about Linux,Now let's know why Linus is preferred mostly by programmers

The thing that actually makes Linux really popular among programmers was there actually lots of things but I'm going to go through the major ones that I've found that are generally accepted among programmers as like what makes Linux really great 

These Are The Seven Things That Programmers Appreciate Linux

1. Security

security in Linux tends to be a safer system you won't need antivirus software and viruses overall just aren't really an issue

So it's a really secure system and you won't get bothered by needing to find and pay for anti-virus software and then update that software and get notified by it

Linux just works good and it is safe the reason that Linux is really secure is because of the fact that the Linux operating system is open source this means that anyone who wants can look at the source code for the system

Then this may sound like it would be the opposite of safe since anyone can find vulnerabilities and create viruses for it or exploit the vulnerabilities really easily and that's not wrong anyone can do that. And a lot of people do try to do this

But the thing is that Linux is a really popular operating system as that means that there's so many people reading through the source code every day and like looking for these vulnerabilities so that they can patch themselves because of the fact that they are actually using the system themselves so they don't want these own abilities there and so they try to fix them

So what ends up happening is that there's actually very very few of these vulnerabilities out there and the ones that are out there become really hard to find because so many people are actually looking for though and that also means even if there are a few bad people out there looking for these flaws and trying to exploit them in a bad way for every bad person that's out there trying to find these flaws 

There's potentially like a thousand good people out there looking for the exact same floor and I to eliminate it and so that kind of results in a really safe system

2. Improve Programming Workflow & Ease Of Use

The second reason is that Linux can improve your programming workflow the package manager in Linux is a godsend for programmers in terms of efficiency

 If you want to install something or use something new just type in sudo apt-get install whatever you want to use and then within a couple of seconds or a minute or two you get it and you're ready to rock

This is something that can sometimes be more difficult in other operating systems if you're in Mac OS and windows if you want to have a good reliable one and just doing that can be a difficult task for a beginner 

Linux that just comes pre-installed and you ready to go and it also has a lot of packages already installed and set up,so let's take a really simple example here that kind of illustrates both Point number one about security and also Point number two about ease of use and just workflow in general

So let's say that you wanted to install VLC media player on your Windows machine what you'd have to do is first open up a web browser of some kind then you'd have to find or like Google search for VLC media player find the right actual website to actually download it go to that website, press the download link start to download it run the exe file and then choose whatever like installation location

And then after you've done all that you potentially also need to restart your computer for these like changes to take effect or for you to be able to actually use the program,But in Linux all you'd have to do is open up a terminal window and type in sudo apt-get install VLC and hit enter and then you're done

The windows approach leaves a lot of room for errors to occur you could get to the wrong site and accidentally download malware or you can get to the right side but accidentally, press one of the thousands of download now buttons that is actually an ad for something completely different compared to Linux where you just type it in and it automatically does everything for you

As a programmer we usually work with lots of different Technologies and we're installing things constantly to get things to work so making the process of installing stuff as easy as safe as possible is really important and Linux does this really well

Kite is a free auto completion engine that uses machine learning to provide the completions, which is what makes it more helpful and also what makes it the best auto-completion engine that I've used one of the most useful features

The kites completions are sorted or ranked by relevance instead of by popularity or by the alphabet this is possible because they're using machine learning to provide the completions it means that you will get suggested completions based on the code that you're actually writing and if you're writing code in Python the copilot feature offers documentation look up so you don't have to constantly Google search function signatures and call patterns 

With kite you can actually write code up to 18 percent faster and who doesn't want to write code faste so i highly recommend that you download Kites and try it out it's completely free and supports up to 13 programming languages and 16 IDs

3. No Rebooting

The third reason is no rebooting,if you need anything and after intstalling you to restart the entire computer just to be able to work with whatever it was you installed and this is not the case with Linux

In fact with Linux it's to the point where you can update the entire operating system without having to actually reboot and this is neither possible with Mac OS nor windows and it's something that I think is really important because of the fact that as a programmer we tend to install lots of different things and so the ability to just be able to install something without them having to reboot the entire machine for those changes to take effect is something 

The talks about why Linux is often used for servers and there's no rebooting point was one of the reasons according why Linux is used for servers the fact that Linux is built for stability and reliability many Linux servers on the internet have been running for years without failure or even being restarted

4. Comes With Pre-installed powerful Programming Tools

The fourth reason is that Linux actually comes with a ton of really powerful programming tools pre-installed things like grip W gift Grand and lots of other things that at once you learn how they work can be extremely powerful tools that can help you improve your workflow

This is a point that's highly individual and it really depends on your specific use case because there's so many pre-installed tools that come with Linux and it also depends on like what specific distro Linux you choose to go with because certain distros come with certain extra tools like Kali Linux for instance comes with a lot of like specific tools 

5. Task Automation

Number five on our list is Task automation,Linux is almost built for automation of tasks I'm not an advanced user yet I'm still learning and exploring the wonders of Linux but more experienced Linux users who also know how to code rarely need to do anything twice because of the fact that Linux lends itself really well for automation 

A common thing in the Linux Community is something referred to as one liners, which is often used to refer to short little scripts that you write to or a task you may find yourself doing three things in a row every morning as you start up your computer,may be always open up Spotify to play a certain playlist and then you open up your latest project that you're working 

It's very easy to write a quick little script to automate all of these tasks with a simple Cron job or something like that there are lots of being installed tools like we talked about in our previous point that lend themselves really well to automation

6. Performance

Linux is not necessarily faster than any other operating system, but it is very lightweight for an OS and it's compatible with pretty much any machine you can find you can run Linux on almost anything

So this means that you can very often take an old laptop that is virtually useless because of being so slow and install Linux on that machine and all of a sudden Breathe new life into that a machine that was impossible to work with before is now all of a sudden working really well

There are more performance benefits of Linux like the reliability of the system this is like the major one like being able to revive a dead computer is something that's really useful and it's also really like environmentally friendly because it means that your laptop running Linux will last you so much longer than one running Mac OS or Windows

7. Provides Error Messages 

The number seven is that Linux actually provides you with useful error messages,This may sound a little bit weird or whatever but it is really important because with Windows and Mac OS where you know often find yourself stuck with an error message along the lines of like oops something went wrong and it's not very useful because like Googling that and like finding the actual answer to that question is really difficult because lots of different other people have had that same error message for lots of different things

But with Linux instead what you'll get is a full readout of the actual processes and you'll get like proper and see what actually happened and that means its easier to actually Google that and find an answer to your specific problem and that is really important, especially for programmers when you're running into these errors constantly

Now, this also comes with a caveat that a beginner might not find that much help from these error messages at least not if they've never spent time in a terminal like interface because for a beginner this can be very intimidating and just seemed like a bunch of texts that all says the same thing but once you've spent some time in a terminal these error messages are super useful

8. Customization

The point number eight I don't think that it's a good reason to choose Linux over Windows and Mac OS but I do think that it's a recent that a lot of Linux users kind of like to use so I wanted to include it in the list anyway, and so Point number eight is customization

The thing about Linux is that you can pretty much customize anything and because of the fact that it's open source, you can essentially like, it's Limitless because you can write your own customizations,this is something that programmers tend to care about a lot It's like customizations and making your own environment own 

This is something that's really important to programmer like benefits of it where you set up the environment to be more productive for you because you can customize certain things

9. why you should choose Linux over Windows and Mac OS ?

It is a really interesting point and once you start going down the Linux customization you'll quickly realize that you can spend an entire lifetime,So in conclusion that many things that you can do on Linux that are impossible to do on other systems, especially if compared with Mac OS but the over arching theme is ease of use as a rule it's easier to do what you want to do on Linux than it is to do on other operating systems

should I switch to Linux? 

The answer that I like to give here is that you should probably try out Linux first in a virtual machine and then see what you think of it and then you can decide from there because especially for like programming related tasks that was just so much smoother to do in Linux than it was to do in main OS

So guys if you have any comments or questions feel free to leave on below comment box 👍