Linux is free or paid

Is Linux free?

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psufootball

Guest

You can try out the different «flavors» of it, all free. Some of the big ones are Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Godric

Guest

You can try out the different «flavors» of it, all free. Some of the big ones are Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Sinister_Diagram

Guest

Linux is completely free as another poster stated. It is possible that you will find some Linux distributions that offer «Premium» versions, that generally include more software or other features not offered in the free versions, but the price is nothing compared to mainstream operating systems. And the upgrade process afterwards is free once a donation is made. However, the most user-friendly and popular versions will not cost you a dime!

Oh and most people download and burn the Linux OS that they are interested in. However, it is possible to have some of the Linux distros shipped to your house and in this case, you may have to pay a small shipping & handling fee.

DaReaper

Guest

Linux is an Open Source software and it’s Free. So this means you can distribute, Modify, re-distribute the modified linux and even develop for it.

The only Paid linux Distro’s i’ve come across is Xandros which costs about 100$ maybe cause they might have some applications that cost. I don’t know the actual reason why. But they also do have a Open Circulation Edition which is free.

So overall Linux is free.

Smokey

Guest

Linux is and always will be free, and completely open source. Popular flavors for beginners are Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Linux Mint.

I prefer Mint and Xubuntu over Ubuntu. Xubuntu is better suited for older less powerful systems and just feels better then ubuntu. Mint is also a nice choice. If you have a REALLY old laptop with minimalistic specs (less then 100MB MEMORY, 30GB hard drive or less) 700mhz or less, I recommend installing Puppy Linux on it and it will work just fine and be pretty snappy too for the specs on the machine.

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How Linux Can Be A Designer’s Best Friend

Even after all these years, when the differences between operating systems has become increasingly blurred, the majority of designers are heavily entrenched in the Mac camp. Many of them will never leave it because they’ve fallen head over heels in love with the brand.

Other designers use Windows because it’s what they started out with, is supported by most of the major hardware manufacturers, and has plenty of software available. For them, it’s less about love, and more about practical considerations.

Both groups are missing out on the advantages Linux can provide. The interesting thing is that Linux not only can do just about everything the other operating systems can do, it can do these things better and with greater simplicity, except when it comes to “low level” tasks that a typical user rarely has any need to perform.

What you’ll discover in this article is some of the features that make Linux a perfect operating system for any designer.

1. It’s free

This is the biggest advantage Linux offers over Windows, and to a certain extent over OS X as well. The worst thing about Windows is the upgrade cycle you get locked into with it. Over time, Windows keeps releasing new versions, which are never cheap if you want any real control over your system.

It’s no fun paying for this stuff, when it doesn’t actually do anything special. Plus quite a lot of the software you’ll be running on it may require paying for. The same goes for OS X. And don’t even get me started on the hardware costs of a Mac.

Linux doesn’t cost you a dime unless you decide to make a donation to help support its development. And once you have it, it’s yours for life. There’s no costly upgrade cycle to get locked into, and you also don’t need to constantly upgrade your hardware to keep pace with the operating system upgrades.

Even better, nearly all the native software for Linux is free, and you can also run almost every Windows and some Mac applications on a Linux box as easily as you could on the native operating system.

Armed with GIMP, mtPaint, ImageMagick, Inkscape, myPaint, Xara Xtreme, Blender, and Agave, you can have a powerful design platform without spending a cent on anything other than your hardware.

2. There are no residual trust issues

Windows and OS X both contain huge amounts of code that nobody outside of Microsoft or Apple is supposed to examine.

What that means for you as a user is you have to put your trust in these corporations that they haven’t hidden anything nasty in the source code that might invade your privacy. Did somebody say PRISM?

Linux is fully open source. There are no surprises this way. If there was any malicious code hidden inside Linux, it would be discovered almost instantly and removed by any of the thousands of volunteers who work to keep Linux as the most secure operating system no money can buy.

3. It’s way more secure

Linux was built from the start to be a secure operating system, and it is. That doesn’t mean you never have to worry about security, but it does mean you don’t waste time downloading anti-virus database files every day.

4. It’s also more efficient (than Windows)

Windows has a funny method of storing files, and this method wastes a lot of space and causes fragmentation. It’s why you need to occasionally defrag NTFS or FAT32 disks. Linux stores files very differently, so you don’t get wasted space. That’s just one way it’s more efficient.

Another way it’s efficient is that it doesn’t require anywhere near the computing resources demanded by Windows 10 or OS X. Windows 10 needs 20GB of space just for the operating system, which is not going to be a problem with Linux, which can fit on a 256MB flash drive with room to spare.

Now let’s take a look at the software Linux offers to designers (and remember, you can also use Windows and Mac applications in those situations where a native Linux program isn’t up to the job.

Heavy duty bitmap image editing

Lightweight bitmap image editing

Batch image editing

Vector graphics

Painting & Drawing

Because the most recent versions of CorelDRAW and AutoCAD don’t install properly in the current version of WINE, you’ll need to either already have a copy of one of the listed versions, or purchase a second hand copy, and in any case they’re not guaranteed to work. The native Linux applications, whether free or paid, are a better choice.

Animation

Synfig Studio is the replacement for Flash and it does quite a good job of 2D vector drawing and animation. Its main purpose is to create broadcast quality animated cartoons, so it doesn’t duplicate everything Flash could do, but in some ways the animation quality is superior. Check out this great demo video, for example. It’s a short film created using Synfig Studio, Blender, Pencil, MyPaint, Remake, and GIMP.

Flash, of course, should no longer be used for creating online content. It’s blocked by default in many major browsers and operating systems, has known security vulnerabilities, and is generally hated by web users due to its abuse by the marketing industry, and the privacy-stealing persistent Flash cookies.

Another alternative in this category is Tupi, which is less well known and more simplistic, but nonetheless a decent tool for drawing and animation. The resultant files are not the same broadcast quality you’ll get from Synfig, but it can export output direct to video in multiple formats.

One thing that is especially impressive about Synfig Studio is that there’s a very comprehensive online video training program, complete with proper closed captions, which is something you won’t often find with commercial software, and here it is for freeware.

Other

Scribus is a free, open source application for desktop publishing based on SVG and capable of producing PDF, Postscript, and XML output.

Agave is a brilliant piece of software for selecting color schemes. It’s a little difficult to describe, but once you’ve seen it in action, it will become an indispensable addition to your design tool kit.

Posterazor splits large images into multiple printed pages for assembly into a large poster (suitable for billboard creation).

Aeskulap is a DICOM compatible medical image viewer.

Povray, as the name implies, is a raytracer.

Closing remarks

The above list of software may seem exhaustive, but in reality it barely touches the surface of what’s out there. If you haven’t tried Linux in a while, you’ll probably be surprised by how far along all these projects have come in just a short time.

Previously, Linux had a reputation for being difficult to use and unsuitable for the desktop, but that has changed. Many things are actually easier to accomplish in Linux than they would be on OS X or Windows, because there’s less hidden from you.

The best thing though is that even if not every piece of hardware is supported, at least you’ll know instantly in Linux. Those massive delays every time you plug something new into Windows are infuriating. In Linux everything either works or it doesn’t, and there’s either a way to get it working or there’s not.

Finally, it’s possible to run both Windows and OS X inside Linux, and it’s possible to run Linux inside either of the other two, and there are Linux distros made especially for running on Mac hardware. So it’s possible to enjoy the better features of all these operating systems if you wish.

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Nobody Owns Linux, But You Can Pay For It – Or Not

There is nothing quite like the open source community to demonstrate the principles of freedom, democracy, and meritocracy – and the difficulties of bringing those principles to bear and keeping them pure when money is involved.

Open source software is not just about having access to source code, but that is a kind of protection against tyranny if parts of the community, particularly corporate sponsors who cut the paychecks for a lot of the developers – either directly or indirectly – who create open source software, particularly the Linux kernel and the operating system that is stacked up around it in various distributions.

Quite a big stink is being made their week as Red Hat has made some major changes to the CentOS variant of its Enterprise Linux. And that is mostly because since its creation CentOS has been what amounts to a community supported variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that sits downstream from the RHEL development – meaning, it is rolled up from the source code after Red Hat is done – and Red Hat has reversed the polarity of the CentOS project it took over in 2014 and plans to move it upstream, as CentOS Stream, thus turning it into yet another development release like the Fedora project has been for many years and which also feeds into RHEL in some fashion. (Don’t even start thinking about how CoreOS Linux, which Red Hat acquired in January 2018 and which underpins its OpenShift Kubernetes container platform, fits into all of this.)

As the world’s largest company devoted to the development of commercial grade open source infrastructure software and arguably the only company that will ever be able to make this model work from a commercial standpoint at this scale, Red Hat can afford to have many different kinds of Linux that its employees contribute code to. The company rakes in somewhere north of $3 billion a year selling support contracts for such software, and has a vested interest in making sure the Linux operating system keeps getting more and better features added to it as well as support for successive generations of hardware. And to be fair, Red Hat does its share of this work and has since the company was founded decades ago. It is in this sense, though, that companies really are paying for Linux.

CentOS Stream was announced somewhat innocuously in September 2019, two months after IBM closed its landmark $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. That timing might be coincidence, but maybe not. IBM has promised to keep a hand’s off approach to Red Hat, and is a just as likely that the Red Hat team is making this change all on its own as it is likely that Big Blue is coercing it.

CentOS Stream was designed to create a half-way point between the Fedora development release, which is changing like crazy all the time, and the commercial-grade Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, which changes on a regular, predictable, and relatively infrequent cadence of about twice a year. To be more precise, CentOS Stream is the code-base for the minor RHEL releases, and parts of RHEL development were actually moved into the CentOS project to get everyone collaborating. Which was good.

Either way, Red Hat has had a free to pay problem even before CentOS was created in the late 2000s to package up the RHEL code and offer community support – meaning, free and collaborative – to that alternate, “bug for bug compatible” release of RHEL. There is nothing in the Linux licenses that prevents the community from spinning up and self-supporting its own variant of RHEL and calling it something else, but with somewhere around half of RHEL customers actually using CentOS – meaning they are not paying for support and therefore not helping Red Hat create its variant of the Linux operating system and its elaborate stack of container and virtualization management layers as well as storage.

When Red Hat was founded in the wake of Linus Torvalds creating the Linux kernel in 1991, and even when Red Hat went public in 1999, there were not yet hyperscalers and cloud builders and HPC centers were just in the middle of ripping out Unix-based federated NUMA system clusters and replacing them with Linux clusters supporting Beowulf and MPI. It surely looked like created an enterprise-grade Linux operating system that felt like a proprietary operating system like Unix or Windows in terms of its fit and finishing and upgrade cycle was going to be a great business. While it has been a good business to be sure – Red Hat has been plagued by the free to pay problem, and is no doubt tired of it. While the company never said this when it took over the CentOS project back in 2014, the idea was no doubt to have a tighter link between those who paid for RHEL and those who didn’t by using CentOS, presumably greasing the skids to get customers to move from free CentOS to paid Red Hat subscriptions.

But this market has not panned out as planned. The big hyperscalers and cloud builders have long-since grabbed a Linux kernel and maybe even a distro and created their own Linuxes, but if they could get out of that business they probably would. Facebook, for instance, intercepts CentOS Stream for its own implementation of Linux, adding whatever goodies it needs downstream, rather than just adopting RHEL proper. Somewhere north of 50 percent of the servers in the world are running some form of Linux, and somewhere around half of these, we estimate, are running a homegrown Linux that will very likely never be replaced by CentOS, CentOS Stream, or RHEL, much less any other Linux variant. (Ubuntu Server from Canonical, based on the Debian variant of Linux, has its own large base, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has a pretty large base as well.) In addition, HPC centers have their own variants of Linux (think Tri-Labs Linux) or those created by their supercomputer vendors (think the Cray Linux Environment) as well as a healthy dose of CentOS.

Many of the organizations do special things with Linux, tweaks for their own use cases, and they cannot be done by companies like IBM through Red Hat easily – and certainly not at the “free” price of having developers participate in the community and then using community support.

You might be thinking that one could fix this free to pay problem by making support contracts cheaper. So, in theory, if Red Hat cut RHEL support contracts in half, it could possibly pull in all of the CentOS users, keep the RHEL users, and have the same revenue stream and probably not have to deal with much more in the way of support calls because the upper echelon, who use CentOS in their distributed systems, probably know as well or better how to support their systems and applications than Red Hat does.

In practice, to make that economic argument, one would have to calculate the cost of self-support – those developers at the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and HPC centers are not free, after all, and are generally highly paid professionals at that. If you fully burdened their costs, you might discover that self-support is much more expensive than RHEL support. And still, while being a good economic argument, it wouldn’t matter because for these customers, homegrown Linux support is about having expertise and being self-reliant, and even perhaps to create a competitive advantage with the core Linux operating system.

What is the value of that, and how does it offset the cost? The very fact that there has not been a true standard Linux distro tells you. High enough that people will budget people instead of outsourcing support to Red Hat, SUSE Linux, Canonical, or any other company in most cases of upper echelon users.

Organizations that control their own software control their own fates. That is the lesson of both HPC and hyperscale.

The middle ground between those companies who pay for RHEL support and who can’t self-support is where CentOS has played, and that is where the newly constituted Rocky Linux, created by CentOS co-founder Gregory Kurtzer this week and in honor of one of his CentOS partners, Rocky McGough, who passed away some time ago. (Lance Davis is the other CentOS founder.)

Kurtzer was the HPC systems architect and technical lead at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and for several years was the corporate advisor at RStor, which initially tried to commercialize the Singularity Kubernetes container that Kurtzer created at Berkeley Lab. Singularity was eventually acquired by Sylabs, where Kurtzer was chief executive officer until April of this year. Since then, Kurtzer has been running the HPCng project, which he says is making the next generation HPC environment, and now is taking on the additional task of essentially re-creating the CentOS project that Red Hat has just said has no future. But Rocky Linux, which has over 750 contributors to the project already, certainly does because people like Kurtzer never really needed Red Hat support anyway. Or, more precisely, they don’t think they do.

Imagine if Red Hat just vanished tomorrow. That all of the programmers who work on Linux from Red Hat just stopped, that the testing and qualification process just stopped. The Rocky Linux community might just find out they needed Red Hat more than they reckoned.

What is clear is that Rocky Linux is dependent on all of the work Red Hat and the rest of the Linux community does, and it is equally unfair that users of Rocky Linux, who are among the smartest techies on the planet, are so unused to paying for support that they think it is free. It isn’t.

There needs to be a balance sheet that reckons value created by developers against costs to organizations for providing support. Or, we just keep creating free communities like Rocky Linux and pretending that it doesn’t cost anything.

Perhaps everybody – and we mean everybody – should always pay a little something, no matter how small per node, into the Linux Foundation to cover these support costs anyway. Perhaps the financing of the support model should be more like public radio (which doesn’t really work) and less like pay per view TV (which people sometimes hack to get around). Individual users might pay $50 or $100 per node per year or some such fee for community support, which would literally and directly underwrite the work Linux developers do the world over, and even Red Hat and Canonical and SUSE Linux would pay this per node. You could offset this with the value each company brings to the Linux stack. Do away with this notion that Linux is free. It really isn’t. It takes the life force of people to keep it going. If you want more handholding, then pay for a RHEL support contract from IBM.

It would be a messy balance sheet, to be sure. And one with a truly gigantic goodwill on that balance sheet, which is the most remarkable thing of all and something the Linux community should be proud of.

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