3 things Linux users always get wrong
3 things Linux users always get wrong
https://www.howtogeek.com/things-linux-users-always-get-wrong/
Publish Date: 2026-03-13 10:30:00
Source Domain: www.howtogeek.com
If you watch new Linux users and their struggles with the system, you might notice some consistent patterns in their behavior. Here are a few common pitfalls Linux newbies fall into.
Thinking Linux is merely a replacement for Windows
Linux has a richer history than most people realize
A lot of new users seem to have the impression that Linux distributions are just a drop-in replacement for Windows. A lot of this impression seems to come from the Linux community itself.
While it’s possible to use Linux instead of Windows, these systems aren’t the same. One key difference is that Linux has inherited a lot of its style from earlier Unix systems that date back to the late 1960s. This was before MS-DOS, or even personal computers, were invented.
Unix was created at Bell Labs by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs after the research lab had pulled out of the MULTICS project to build what we would now call cloud computing after numerous budget and schedule overruns.
It was originally an internal research project but a 1974 paper published in the computer science journal Communications of the ACM popularized Unix in the computer science community. Bell Labs’ parent company, AT&T, was forbidden from entering the commercial computing business due to a consent decree in exchange for a monopoly on US telephone service. It licensed Unix to universities for a nominal cost, and Unix was widely taught in computer science courses. When the students graduated and got jobs in the computer industry, they insisted that they keep using Unix, porting it to new hardware after obtaining source code licenses. That was how Unix proliferated in the 1980s.
Windows, has always been a commercial project to attract the widest possible user base. Linux shines as a platform for development, with so many programming tools available. There’s…
