Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Tech Tip: Dual Boot Operating Systems

This tech tip may not exactly be pertinent to this course, but I think that it's a very technological tip useful to have at your disposal.  For my last tech tip, I wrote about text editors, and this tech tip will be slightly related. 

If you're familiar there are many operating systems: Windows, MacOS, and Linux are the main ones floating around.  I'm sure that the first two, Windows and Mac, are fairly known.  However, not many people are familiar with the Linux operating system.

For a quick summary of what the Linux operating system entails, essentially, Linux is a open-source freeware operating system as compared to Windows and MacOS which are commercial products entailed towards consumers.  Essentially a public library compared to a book store.  Linux is used for professional use in many technical areas. So it's good to be familiar with the system if you're involved in a particular field (although it has a learning curve compared to Windows and MacOS).  I am a big advocate for the use of Linux systems due to the fact that it values public and free information of its use.  The Linux system is free online, and any person can view the source code to see what exactly makes up the Linux operating system and see what they are installing on their computer.  In this day and age, both Windows and MacOS come preinstalled with software that allows Microsoft and Apple to track your information.  Linux will always be free to install and secure. It's extremely fast and memory&CPU efficient.

On to the tech tip, the Linux OS does have its caveats.  It's a bit difficult to ease into:
  1. You must be comfortable without a graphical user interface and be able to type in a command line terminal (There are resources online). 
  2. It does not have many of the commercial products and software available on Windows and MacOS (However, there are many open-source free alternative software available that fall in line with Linux's free mission statement.

 My tech tip is to dual boot (or even tri-boot) multiple operating systems.  You can have multiple operating systems installed on the same computer and use each one accordingly to which particular function you need at the moment.  There are many resources online that you can search up that instruct and guide through the process of doing this.  However, if you don't know what you're doing, there's possibility to accidentally erase your data, so it's a good idea to back up (That's also a really good tech tip. BACK-UP YOUR DATA!).

Learning how to install multiple operating systems is also useful because you get to be more proficient on working with the computer BIOS.  I would say that doing this sort of stuff with computers is similar to working on a car.  You gain so much knowledge about the specifics.  The next time your hard drive fails, you can diagnose and fix the issue just like changing your own oil or switching a tire in a car. 

Even if Linux is not attractive to you, there are many software that are on Windows but not on MacOS (and vise-versa), so a multiboot is still very useful.  However, a caveat on MacOS is that MacOS can only be installed on Apple products.  So "theoretically", Apple products are the only devices that can "tri-boot". 

1 comment:

  1. Hi Nathaniel, just a quick note: there are LOTS of tech tips there, and I'm sure there must be some you did not do before... have you tried Twine, for example? Very useful programming environment for writing! Anyway, let me know. I added about 10 new tips this semester, and about as many new ones last semester, so I'm guessing there must be at least some there new to you that are relevant to this class (like Twine for writing, etc.). And with Twine you can go way way way beyond what I listed there since I did not include any actual Twine coding, but it offers some serious coding possibilities (to create actual games, etc.). :-)

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