What have you found that works better in Linux than in windows?

I find watching movies to work better in linux

 

Great topic, I have found in general just the simplicity of doing tasks such as setting up a power plan, There must be 1000's of combinations for the various plans in W7, Ubuntu keeps it very simple with a single screen. Also I just plugged in a USB hard drive formatted to exFAT, it took about 2 minutes to bing search a solution for Ubuntu 12.04 to mount and use it How to solve the “unknown filesystem type exfat” problem « Softwaroid.

 

Linux blows Windows away in terms of raw filesystem performance. Software compilation on Linux occurs must faster than on Windows.

 

Linux is by far more granular than Windows and can truly be tailored for a specific task.

 

any kind of disk utilities.

 

It boots and shuts down faster. It doesn't have condescending popups or beeping balloons questioning whether I am even a Homo sapiens every 30 seconds.

Raw filesystem performance? Software compilation? Granular? I doubt the average user even knows what these mean. Me, I admit I'm below average when it comes to computers. I'd like to make the switch to Linux for 90% of what I do but so far haven't found that possible because it's not really accessible to a non-geek like me. I will keep plugging along, though each time I've tried it I've ended up reverting to windoze because Linux is kind of obtuse.

 

This, unfortunately.

I tried my first Linux system when I had an AMD64, which meant that Flash support was non-existant. Some people had workarounds, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to enable it.

Then, on my C2D, I tried three different distros and none of them could find my SATA hard drive. This was in 2008, so I really doubt SATA was bleeding edge and support just hadn't made it to the latest disto.

As long as there are ways to buy Windows for <$20, I just can't justify switching.

Thought I do run an ubuntu webserver in the cloud.

 

I found just the opposite. I wanted to run Linux on my HTPCs, but could never get it work right. I will say Linux boots much faster. It takes about seven seconds to boot on my R60e, which has an older SATA I controller, but about 20 seconds on my Windows based PCs and X220i.

 

just about everything i do runs better under Linux. The only thing that keeps me using windows at all is i use a handful of applications that are windows only and that wine does not like, and i HATE dual booting so on my main PC i have windows with a bunch of linux, bsd, etc VMs. on every other computer im using linux. the only problem i have had with hardware is with Nvidia Optimus, and a few wifi cards.

But i can see why Linux may not be for everyone, im not afraid to get down and dirty and hack some stuff together to get things to work, but some people just want things to work and sadly that is not always the case with linux, but i love tinkering so thats why i go extreme. I mean i use Arch linux a lot just because i love testing new things. In fact im planning to through together another Arch system and test out different kernel patchs and test to see what i can do.

I still think people should mess around with it in a VM so they can see what things can be like.

 

Speaking of fast boot times, OpenSUSE 12.1 on a stripe with two 80GB Intel SSDs... that was pleasure.

 

I find that programming in C is preferred on the Linux side than on Windows, though I'm probably biased since the class I'm in uses Ubuntu + command lines + Linux server backend. Before, I coded C/C++ in Dev-C++, but since the class requires gcc and turning in assignments requires some basic Linux command-line knowledge (command is "handin.XXX.X X progX.c", with X being some number), it's just convenient to use a Linux VM.

OTHO, I also did a bit of Visual Studio .NET, so the advantage would be with Windows on that...

 

Software RAID mdraid for my 2.6 TB NAS works great for years. I also use webmin for NAS administration. That way I even update CentOS kernel and everything from my browser over network - all works on a very old Sempron with 2GB RAM and delivers films and files at 65 MB/s over gigabit ethernet to my home network. I guess Windows solution would be more complicated, slower and much more expensive (since this costs zero).

Cheers,

Ivan

 

Software repositories and package management. I know that these were born from a necessity (dependency hell anyone?) but now you see every single major player out there trying to imitate this by their app stores and whatnot. When things work, and it takes a while for things to get there because of the fragmented nature of the gnu/linux scene (native apps, widgets, plugins for different desktop environments), they work brilliantly and with ease.