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Alternatives to Linux

Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Android SDK, Windows 10, and Windows are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Linux.
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What is Linux and what are its top alternatives?

A clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.
Linux is a tool in the Operating Systems category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Linux

  • Ubuntu
    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers. ...

  • Arch Linux
    Arch Linux

    A lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

  • Android SDK
    Android SDK

    Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment. ...

  • Windows 10
    Windows 10

    It is the latest iteration of the Microsoft operating systems and has been optimized for home PC performance in a wide variety of applications from serious work to after-hours gaming. ...

  • Windows
    Windows

    A series of personal computer operating systems produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows NT family of operating systems. ...

  • Amazon Linux
    Amazon Linux

    The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). ...

  • FreeBSD
    FreeBSD

    An operating system for a variety of platforms which focuses on features, speed, and stability. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large community. ...

  • Kali Linux
    Kali Linux

    It is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. It contains several hundred tools which are geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering. ...

Linux alternatives & related posts

Ubuntu logo

Ubuntu

78.6K
57.9K
468
The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud
78.6K
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+ 1
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PROS OF UBUNTU
  • 230
    Free to use
  • 96
    Easy setup for testing discord bot
  • 57
    Gateway Linux Distro
  • 54
    Simple interface
  • 9
    Don't need driver installation in most cases
  • 6
    Open Source
  • 6
    Many active communities
  • 3
    Software Availability
  • 3
    Easy to custom
  • 2
    Many flavors/distros based on ubuntu
  • 1
    Lightweight container base OS
  • 1
    Great OotB Linux Shell Experience
CONS OF UBUNTU
  • 5
    Demanding system requirements
  • 4
    Adds overhead and unnecessary complexity over Debian
  • 2
    Snapd installed by default
  • 1
    Systemd

related Ubuntu posts

CDG

I use Laravel because it's the most advances PHP framework out there, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and most of all : easy to get a handle on, and to follow every new technology ! PhpStorm is our main software to code, as of simplicity and full range of tools for a modern application.

Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.

As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.

To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our nginx / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .

CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.

Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.

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Tassanai Singprom

This is my stack in Application & Data

JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB

My Utilities Tools

Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch

My Devops Tools

Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack

My Business Tools

Slack

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Arch Linux logo

Arch Linux

556
551
108
A lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.
556
551
+ 1
108
PROS OF ARCH LINUX
  • 17
    Large Community
  • 15
    Package Manager
  • 13
    Customizable
  • 12
    Rolling Release
  • 11
    Arch User Repository
  • 11
    Bleeding Edge
  • 10
    Extensive Documentation
  • 8
    Arch Build System
  • 7
    X86_64 architecture supported
  • 4
    Can fix bugs yourself if you know how to
CONS OF ARCH LINUX
  • 4
    Systemd only
  • 3
    Only X86_64 architecture is offically supported
  • 1
    No Guided Installation
  • 1
    System maintenance
  • 1
    Unstable
  • 1
    Comparatively fewer offically supported packages

related Arch Linux posts

Denys
Software engineer at Typeform · | 13 upvotes · 1.9M views
  • Go because it's easy and simple, facilitates collaboration , and also it's fast, scalable, powerful.
  • Visual Studio Code because it has one of the most sophisticated Go language support plugins.
  • Vim because it's Vim
  • Git because it's Git
  • Docker and Docker Compose because it's quick and easy to have reproducible builds/tests with them
  • Arch Linux because Docker for Mac/Win is a disaster for the human nervous system, and Arch is the coolest Linux distro so far
  • Stack Overflow because of Copy-Paste Driven Development
  • JavaScript and Python when a something needs to be coded for yesterday
  • PhpStorm because it saves me like 300 "Ctrl+F" key strokes a minute
  • cURL because terminal all the way
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Shared insights
on
UbuntuUbuntuLinuxLinuxArch LinuxArch Linux

I once used Ubuntu as my exclusive Linux distro, but then I decided to switch my primary operating system to Arch Linux.

While more difficult to install, Arch Linux offered more flexibility during the installation process which allowed me to customize my system to fit me perfectly. With Ubuntu, instead of installing everything i did want, I had to remove everything that I didn't need.

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Android SDK logo

Android SDK

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An SDK that provides you the API libraries and developer tools necessary to build, test, and debug apps...
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PROS OF ANDROID SDK
  • 289
    Android development
  • 155
    Necessary for android
  • 128
    Android studio
  • 86
    Mobile framework
  • 82
    Backed by google
  • 27
    Platform-tools
  • 21
    Eclipse + adt plugin
  • 5
    Powerful, simple, one stop environment
  • 3
    Free
  • 3
    Больно
CONS OF ANDROID SDK
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Android SDK posts

    Jesus Dario Rivera Rubio
    Telecomm Engineering at Netbeast · | 10 upvotes · 1.2M views

    We are using React Native in #SmartHome to share the business logic between Android and iOS team and approach users with a unique brand experience. The drawback is that we require lots of native Android SDK and Objective-C modules, so a good part of the invested time is there. The gain for a app that relies less on native communication, sensors and OS tools should be even higher.

    Also it helps us set different testing stages: we use Travis CI for the javascript (business logic), Bitrise to run build tests and @Detox for #end2end automated user tests.

    We use a microservices structure on top of Zeit's @now that read from firebase. We use JWT auth to authenticate requests among services and from users, following GitHub philosophy of using the same infrastructure than its API consumers. Firebase is used mainly as a key-value store between services and as a backup database for users. We also use its authentication mechanisms.

    You can be super locked-in if you also rely on it's analytics, but we use Amplitude for that, which offers us great insights. Intercom for communications with end-user and Mailjet for marketing.

    See more
    Sezgi Ulucam
    Developer Advocate at Hasura · | 7 upvotes · 959.4K views

    I've recently switched to using Expo for initializing and developing my React Native apps. Compared to React Native CLI, it's so much easier to get set up and going. Setting up and maintaining Android Studio, Android SDK, and virtual devices used to be such a headache. Thanks to Expo, I can now test my apps directly on my Android phone, just by installing the Expo app. I still use Xcode Simulator for iOS testing, since I don't have an iPhone, but that's easy anyway. The big win for me with Expo is ease of Android testing.

    The Expo SDK also provides convenient features like Facebook login, MapView, push notifications, and many others. https://docs.expo.io/versions/v31.0.0/sdk/

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    Windows 10 logo

    Windows 10

    404
    377
    13
    The most secure Windows ever built
    404
    377
    + 1
    13
    PROS OF WINDOWS 10
    • 3
      On 4gb other applications less likely to run smoothly
    • 3
      Slow
    • 2
      Best for Indonesian PC Users
    • 2
      The best developer tools for all devices
    • 1
      Editors choice. But not suitable on 4gb ram. Alth
    • 1
      Complies with JIS Standard
    • 1
      Great is if you have 8b ram and a 128gb ssd minimum
    CONS OF WINDOWS 10
    • 3
      Lags really much on low end devices
    • 3
      Slow, slow and slow
    • 2
      Worst OS to run on 2GB of RAM
    • 1
      Acts posh
    • 1
      Can't fix bugs yourself

    related Windows 10 posts

    Shared insights
    on
    Windows 10Windows 10C#C#Visual StudioVisual Studio

    Visual Studio 2019 keeps rendering only part of my project. I changed from 200% dpi to 100% and it is still doing this. Any ideas?

    Razer Blade Stealth Intel 7th gen i7 8550u

    A little more info, I'm trying to make my GUI my self in WPF C# so I turned off FormBorderStyle

    I have Windows 10 Pro Installed which Home is usually the go-to.

    I'm going to uninstall and reinstall and see if that does anything. Fingers crossed, I was looking for a more concrete solution though. :x

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    Justin Dorfman
    Open Source Program Manager at Reblaze · | 3 upvotes · 40.6K views

    I have been using macOS for 12 years. I can't imagine switching to another operating system since I have all of my hotkeys memorized. Windows 10 has made some drastic improvements like adding GNU Bash/Linux to win developers over from unix-like systems, I just don't feel it is there yet. Maybe I'll give it a shot next time I need a new laptop. 🤷‍♂️

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    Windows logo

    Windows

    1.1K
    785
    3
    A group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed by Microsoft
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    PROS OF WINDOWS
    • 3
      Lovely
    CONS OF WINDOWS
    • 2
      Proprietary
    • 1
      Not free to use

    related Windows posts

    Shared insights
    on
    UnityUnityElectronElectronmacOSmacOSWindowsWindows

    We want to create a 3D web and desktop(Windows and macOS) application with a lot of functionalities. This is a 3D furniture customization application in which we give options to add, delete, scale, move, rotate objects. Something like a floor planner. We are also going to add AR and VR.

    I am thinking about using Electron or Unity. Please recommend what should I choose for this purpose. Please consider that we have to develop for web and desktop (windows and mac) all platforms.

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    Actually, I'll add, C++ and C# as well.

    Well, I'm into Computer Science since 1996, so I understand a bit of everything plus a lot of different OSs, I study 10 hours per day every day. However back in the 90s we didn't have books or universities about programming, all were passed through if you knew somebody in that profession. Which I did and in that time, he showed me .NET and MySQL, and that offered a lot of jobs also Java. Today you have a lot of options but I'm already discarding new languages as I believe they will jot succeed.

    My always dream was to create game, and software. I don't understand all programming concepts and I'm studying all languages at the same time, so I'm heavy loaded. But that keeps me more aware.

    I made a choice: use Python for everything but if you want performance, apps, security, compatibility, Multiplatform. What should I choose? The real question here is: which language should I go 100% and that language will teach me all I need about programming BUT without getting lost in that language forever (I discard any Assembly possibility) and one that has full documentation, support and libraries.

    In my experience: I found a lot of info for python and java. But hardly I have ever found anything for C lang, C++ and, what about C# (it's only for Windows, is it easy, I saw a lot of documentation). Thanks!!

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    Amazon Linux logo

    Amazon Linux

    148
    148
    0
    The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use...
    148
    148
    + 1
    0
    PROS OF AMAZON LINUX
      Be the first to leave a pro
      CONS OF AMAZON LINUX
        Be the first to leave a con

        related Amazon Linux posts

        FreeBSD logo

        FreeBSD

        249
        196
        28
        An operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms
        249
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        PROS OF FREEBSD
        • 8
          Excellent as Server
        • 6
          Very Stable
        • 4
          Helpful community
        • 2
          Free to use
        • 2
          Extremely simple updates and compiles of kernel and use
        • 2
          Good for Cloud - Nextcloud
        • 2
          Ports and packages system is mature and well-supported
        • 1
          Easy to install
        • 1
          Supported by major cloud platforms
        CONS OF FREEBSD
        • 1
          Slower to adopt non-server hardware than Linux
        • 1
          Poor support for laptops, especially wireless cards

        related FreeBSD posts

        Kali Linux logo

        Kali Linux

        254
        378
        25
        Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking Linux Distribution
        254
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        + 1
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        PROS OF KALI LINUX
        • 8
          Penetration testing tools are pre-installed
        • 8
          Has many penetration testing tools
        • 5
          Runs on both x86 and ARM platforms
        • 3
          Its just debian so it has better support
        • 1
          There's no restrictions
        CONS OF KALI LINUX
        • 3
          Wireless driver issues on some systems
        • 3
          Packages are too large in size as compare to alpine
        • 3
          Outdated versions of common packages
        • 2
          Root GUI setup is a potential security hole

        related Kali Linux posts

        Shared insights
        on
        Kali LinuxKali LinuxArch LinuxArch LinuxLinuxLinux

        I do find Linux-based systems to be cool! However, I am confused when it comes to which Linux operating system to use. I cannot make my mind between Arch Linux and Kali Linux. Guys, give me some advice if you would be so kind.

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