The title of this thread might not get much attention from we Nigerian users because we basically know just one OS - Windows. We were born with it, we learnt with it and we are used to it in our daily lives.
This post does not intend to malign windows as an operating system but just shows some reasons why you might opt to switch over to linux. If you do choose to opt I will provide guides in subsequent posts that will help you switch completely and hence make you a happier and more efficient windows user.
here are the reasons:

1. Stability: this term might seem ambiguous but I will break it down. You always hear of windows users speaking of their systems crashing and them "formatting" the systems. This is the harsh reality. Windows is the most widely used operating system in the world with about 90% of the market share (yeah, that much) so it is naturally the best choice for black hat hackers (the bad hackers) to target with malware (viruses), spyware and every other "badware" that exists. It is therefore natural that a windows computer crashes more often than others. From my own personal usage of windows computers I had the following experiences:
Windows 98: My first windows 98 crashed after which I moved on to windows 2000.
Windows 2000: This didn't crash but the frontend had an issue which stopped it from loading up the explorer GUI.
Windows XP: This was the climax. I was practically reinstalling every months. Though this could be attributed to my own carelessness and indifference to reinstalling.
Windows Vista: This was pretty stable as I never had to reinstall.
Windows 7: This was also stable as it didn't crash but it had a lot of errors within the system which made reinstallation inevitable. Errors included BSOD (Blue screen of death), slowness, freezing etc.
Windows 8: Same with the above.
Windows 10: I haven't used this for long enough but it seems more stable than the others.

Linux on the other hand, is extremely stable. I have run on linux for the past six years and none of my distributions ever crashed.

2. Speed: a major problem with windows is the speed of startup. Windows on a healthy, fast computer takes at least a minute to boot up. This gets significantly larger as you load up the system with files and applications. A system with a core i7 processor (a very fast processor) might startup much slower than is expected due to the windows OS installed on it. It is as a result of this slowness in startup that makes many windows users resort to hibernation which saves the state of the computer before shutting down. Linux on the other hand boots significantly faster than windows.

3. Support: a large number of linux users are technical users and hence have good knowledge of the operating systems. There is thus a large community of knowledgeable users willing to help you out whenever you have a problem.

4. Viruses: we have spoken a bit about viruses earlier on but I think it's a point that needs to be restated. THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ANTIVIRUS ON LINUX. I've read some places of viruses on linux but I can confidently say that I've not experienced such. This is due to the fact that the linux kernel (core of the OS) is updated regularly in fairly small sizes. Windows is also updated but many Nigerian users will turn windows update off due to the sheer size of these updates. With linux you can see the updates, their size and choose to update or wait till another release comes out.

5. Free software: most of the software on linux is free for download legitimately. In Nigeria here of course, we might not understand this since most of the software we use are gotten free or cheap from pirated vendor sellers. There are dangers to using pirated software but that's a topic for another day. With Linux however you are not using any "cracked" version but rather the original version provided by the software developers. Now as a developer I'll just give a small explanation about these cracked software that we use on windows. A software that has been cracked isn't in the original state which the developer made it. It has been modified by someone. Now one can not be sure what modifications were made by such a hacker but most people don't mind. But if you are careful about your security and privacy you have to be careful with cracked software. For example, the hacker who cracked your Corel Draw could easily have added a "key logger" into the application. A key logger simply stores a log/journal of every key stroke you type on your computer, it might also periodically upload this to the hacker. Most of the software we use here in Nigeria is simply too expensive for most of the users,for example Corel Draw graphics suite is about $500 (roughly N150k) so we can't afford this. Should you then forsake your known apps for lesser free ones? not really, on to our next point.

6. You can run windows and windows apps on linux: yes, you can still run your windows apps and the windows OS in a safe environment within your linux. With an application called WINE on linux you can run windows applications natively from your linux. You can also install windows within linux using a hypervisor for example Virtualbox. This will be part of our tutorial. Hence, you can run your software within the virtual windows which is a computer inside your computer. Even if it crashes or is infected by a virus you are safe because it is not affecting your system directly and your files can still be recovered easily. You might not be able to run heavy applications like games inside the virtual windows but you will be able to run most other things.

7. You can install linux alongside windows: you can still keep your windows installation when you install Linux. I recommend this. You can do most of your file storage and serious work on your linux OS then keep the windows for those applications that must be run on windows like games and other pirated software which must be run on a live windows setup. In this situation, even if your windows OS crashes you still have access to your windows files from within your linux. You can also easily reset a crashed or misbehaving windows installation without losing your files and documents from within linux. This will be treated in a subsequent guide.

8. Useful technical tools: you have a number of useful tools bundled with the linux command line. If you learn these tools you will be a master computer user (white hat hacker). As a writer, you know you have written article about puppies in the past but you do not know the name of the file which you wrote it or maybe you just want to list all the email addresses that in all files on your computer. You can easily do this on the command line on linux. A guide will also be released subsequently that will tutor some of the most important linux commands. If you are a programmer,developer or a technical IT person then you have no business running windows as your main OS. Almost all development tools integrate seamlessly with the linux shell. Git, npm, nodejs, vim, nano, javac, python etc.

9. Safety: I've met some pretty paranoid windows users who wouldn't let you plug anything into their usb ports because fear of viruses. I even saw some who disabled their usb ports just in case you mistakenly plug one in. With linux even you built a virus and made it a flash drive and plugged it into your linux drive, the virus would be useless because linux cannot recognize windows viruses and they have no effect on the linux systems. Instead you will find that you can observe see the file that is the virus and delete it easily. We discussed about the corrupted flash drive issue a few days back, if such a flash is inserted into a linux system, the files will be very much still visible. The process of repairing the same drive in linux is as simple as deleting the shortcuts, moving the files into your computer and then copying them back to the flash drive.

10. Drivers: you might be used to carrying install discs around for your printers, scanners, phones etc. With Linux a lot (and I mean a good lot) of devices work out of the box. I've never installed a printer since I started using linux. I simply plug it in and print. Same with my phones, iPad, iPhone and almost all of the devices.

Bonus 11. Variety: I've been mentioning linux since the beginnning of this post but I think it's time to disambiguate the term. Linux is not an Operating system but rather the core of many operating systems called linux distributions. There are over a thousand linux distributions suited to different kinds of users. You can make your choice. I recommend one of two:

- Ubuntu: this is the most popular user linux. It has great support because of it's ubiquity.



- Linux Mint: this is based on ubuntu but I recommend it because it has a similar interface with windows. In fact, there is a windows 7 theme on it which makes your linux mint indistinguishable from a windows system. Visit their site

Caveat: the above reasons were tested and experienced while using ubuntu and linux mint. I can not guarantee some of them on other Linux distributions.

Thanks for reading. Don't forget to leave your questions, corrections, suggestions and comments in the comments section. This is a series as I will be teaching in my next lesson how to install Ubuntu and Linux mint alongside your windows 7. After this I will show how to do it with windows 8 and windows 10 and many more. Stay tuned!!!.


source: http://zingerentertainment..com.ng/2016/01/10-reasons-to-install-linux-alongside.html

Visit source for full article and definition of keywords.

Most people not just Nigerians only know about Windows regardless of which country you are in. There are those that know about Mac OS X as well which is just UNIX.

GNU Linux no matter the distro is the least used O.S in the world. Mainly only I.T. people are aware of it on desktop platform. However, most people use it mobile daily (Android).

Nigerians dont use linux? Yes! But u have to understand that not only Nigerians, Linux generally has low users primarily due to the fact that it is seen as a bit hard and meant mainly for tech-Savvies and Geeks. Its also important to note that Nigerians may not have the internet power(see how much we dey buy data) to install Application software in the box since linux softwares are not sold in the market the buy appsoft to instal in their windows OS as such the have a point, but a weak point since they are missing all the goodies you mentioned above.

I have been using linux for quite a while(about 6years) and have honestly enjoyed working with it, some of the distros i have used are Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Arch and have experimented on Backtrack and Kali lately. favorite play ground has always been the almighty Terminal.

I wanted to also clarify a few things. If you have a fast computer with good specs, Windows is fast. My current computer which runs Ubuntu 15.10 also at one point ran Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Windows boot up from the manufacturer logo to the login screen was roughly 4 seconds, thanks to the fast SATA3 SSD and the quad core core i7 4710MQ. It's actually funny because on the exact same computer in which I got rid of Windows completely, Ubuntu boots up in about 8 seconds. The difference is negligible as I could care less as long as bootup time is under 30 seconds.

The latest iterations from Windows 8 to Windows 10 have extremely fast bootup times faster than Linux/Mac OS X.

One thing that drove me away from Windows was the crappy version of Windows terminal (command prompt and Windows power shell). Linux and to a certain extent Mac OS X terminal are so much better.

Also everything is prone to viruses, Mac OS X and Linux included. They might be more stable than Windows due to way file permissions work, but that's debatable. There is also a smaller user base for both Mac OS X and Linux.

Fulaman198:
I wanted to also clarify a few things. If you have a fast computer with good specs, Windows is fast. My current computer which runs Ubuntu 15.10 also at one point ran Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Windows boot up from the manufacturer logo to the login screen was roughly 4 seconds, thanks to the fast SATA3 SSD and the quad core core i7 4710MQ. It's actually funny because on the exact same computer in which I got rid of Windows completely, Ubuntu boots up in about 8 seconds. The difference is negligible as I could care less as long as bootup time is under 30 seconds.

The latest iterations from Windows 8 to Windows 10 have extremely fast bootup times faster than Linux/Mac OS X.

One thing that drove me away from Windows was the crappy version of Windows terminal (command prompt and Windows power shell). Linux and to a certain extent Mac OS X terminal are so much better.

Also everything is prone to viruses, Mac OS X and Linux included. They might be more stable than Windows due to way file permissions work, but that's debatable. There is also a smaller user base for both Mac OS X and Linux.

it probably ran faster than ubuntu because on windows 8 upwards there's a feature called Fast startup enabled by default...in the eyes of the user the system shutdown but the state of core system files are saved to the hard disk to make bootup quicker (so it's almost like hibernating)

But that dosen't mean ubuntu does not slow down on my current linux machine (ubuntu 14.04) the bootup should be > 20 seconds cuz a lot of programs have been installed on it.......Fulaman i know we've clashed in the past ...but you need to join my Linux Telegram group

https:///joinchat/CamCTwDITGHX6xNOaiQgFQ

we need people like you there....OP too...thanks