How safe is Linux?

[Danny Carlton]

Last year I played around with an ubuntu install on my laptop. I installed it as a dual boot, secondary to my Vista OS. It ran okay, but it was during that time that my computer went belly up. I've been hesitant to reinstall it lest it prove to be the cause of the problems.

But I was intrigued but the recent articles first touting Linux as DOA in the marketplace (ZDnet: Windows kicks Linux to the curb) and next promoting a marketing effort to improve Linux's popularity. (ZDNet: I am Linux). While I find Linux interesting, I was glad to be able to get back to Vista. However, I don't see it as a doomed OS, because there are too many people who prefer it for a variety of reasons, not all of them as silly as "It's not a product of evil capitalists". Personally I find it interesting albeit ultimately not that useful unless I'm unable to get one of the other two major OSes.

So how safe is it? What are the odds that it was the Ubuntu install that trashed my laptop? I would like to re-install it if it's not going to be a problem.

[Invicta]

I installed Ubuntu as a dual boot on my old laptop. At the time I installed it my laptop was crashing regularly with windows XP. I replaced the hard disk with a new one, but that didn't improve matters, so I installed Ubuntu. The PC did not crash quite so often, but I was unable to get it to work with my wireless or printers. I have read that other people managed to get their's to strait away, but I never could so I bought a new laptop. Strangely my granddaughter is using my old one and the last I heard it was working well.

[anime4christ]

In that meaning of safe, Linux is just like any other operating system. It won't harm your hardware all by itself; no major operating system conains code designed to burn hardware. There is some malware that can do that, but it's all written for Windows, like most viruses are. Most of the time, hardware just fails from natural wear and tear (poor quality or defective hardware usually wears out first obviously).

[Danny Carlton]

In that meaning of safe' date=' Linux is just like any other operating system. It won't harm your hardware all by itself; no major operating system conains code designed to burn hardware. There is some malware that can do that, but it's all written for Windows, like most viruses are. Most of the time, hardware just fails from natural wear and tear (poor quality or defective hardware usually wears out first obviously).[/quote']
The hardware's fine. the system crashed and had to be re-installed. It did it a few weeks after installing Ubuntu, so I was worried about a connection.

[anime4christ]

The hardware's fine. the system crashed and had to be re-installed. It did it a few weeks after installing Ubuntu' date=' so I was worried about a connection.[/quote']

I assume you mean your Windows installation went bad, but either way: Other than improperly set up partitions, I don't think it would be connected. Or perhaps if you tried to write to an NTFS partition from Linux and something went wrong there. I can't really say, since I haven't done any writing to NTFS from Linux myself, but I've been running Linux and Windows together on desktops and Linux on a server for about 3-4 years with no problems except the initial learning period, in which I broke the system a lot because I like to play with the internals and then I had to figure out how to fix it. Casual users shouldn't have too much problem with that part though.