Hacker News Reader

Comment by WayneDB | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot more people run Linux as a guest than the other way around.

Yes, I would guess the same. However, I think people see it as a very big leap to jump over or the percentages would be different. Gaming, drivers (not as big a problem these days) and other specialized software also factor into this.

The way I see it is that if you're working with code, especially open languages and platforms, Linux is a great fit and you should make the leap :).

It's extremely telling that in the link to the Quine posted a few days back, the README listed a single apt-get command to install compilers/interpreters for 52 different programming languages. It's one of the reasons I love Linux (Debian in particular) - there's just so many toys included, not just for programming, but sys admin and science as well. Who needs games when you have that kind of power at your fingertips?

I definitely don't need games either. The other thing is that Windows is very graphical by default (understandable given that they are targeting the masses) but there isn't a built in way to make its presentation minimal[1], like stripping everything out and simply being able to launch what you need. This is easily achievable with a basic Openbox setup, with dmenu on top, boom!

1. There are probably customization tools out there that would let you get close to this but I don't believe it's truly possible just given desktop Windows' architecture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com