Thread: Thinking of upgrading to linux...

I suggest Ubuntu Linux. It is very nice, and it is a fairly easy switch. They will mail you a copy for free (not even any shipping and handling costs)

From your experiences, what sort of flexibility does linux have?

One word: Bash

The bash shell (a.k.a Unix/Linux command line) is SOOOOOOO much better than the Windows command line. Although I use Windows as my primary operating system, I love the Linux command line and I hate the Windows command line. Even Windows PowerShell just simply doesn't match the power of Bash.

SSH is also very nice. I like the ability to SSH into a Linux/Unix machine. It is one of the nicest things about them, in my opinion. Windows simply doesn't have that capability, although they have come out with some free SSH servers for Windows just recently (not by Microsoft of course...by third parties).

Most of Vista's early problems are going away, and, at least in my opinion, it's current problems are founded on misunderstanding. A lot of people were complaining about the performance

Psh....the least of my Vista complaints is about its performance. My Vista complaints are:

1. 20 million different versions? Who the heck do you think you are? Make 1 version for everybody, just like Apple does. I tried to upgrade my WinXP Home Media Center 2005 edition to Vista Business (because Business is the copy that I can get for free through the CS department), and it wouldn't let me. It wanted me to reformat my entire hard disk! That's absolutely ridiculous! There is no way I am upgrading to Vista if it is going to force me to format my hard disk...mainly because it would take me days to reinstall everything and back up all of my data.

2. I have yet to hear one compelling new feature of Vista. If someone would tell me something new about Vista that is actually useful, I might upgrade, but so far I haven't heard a single thing. XP is doing great! (Mac OS X Leopard on the other hand has several compelling new features)

3. Finally....last on the list....compatibility and speed. These issues are being resolved as time goes on.....but Microsoft still hasn't resolved my primary 2 issues which are found above.

I'm a long time time windows advocate. I've used it to code COM, .NET, WSH, MFC, ATL, WINAPI and all sorts of stuff over the years, but after paying for Vista (which is a pretty dire upgrade in my opinion)

Although I use Windows XP as my primary OS, I have never really been a Windows "advocate." I like Windows XP, and it is a good OS. I see no "dire need" to upgrade to Vista...as no one has shown me that it is really needed in any way. As of late I have become quite the Mac OS X advocate. That is quite a nice OS.

whenever I switch over to a Windows computer, I miss so much stuff. What do you mean there's no KDevelop? No bash? No Valgrind? No logging on to computers remotely? No virtual desktops?

ditto.

Heck Windows doesn't even have native support for ISO CD images...

1. 20 million different versions? Who the heck do you think you are? Make 1 version for everybody, just like Apple does. I tried to upgrade my WinXP Home Media Center 2005 edition to Vista Business (because Business is the copy that I can get for free through the CS department), and it wouldn't let me. It wanted me to reformat my entire hard disk! That's absolutely ridiculous! There is no way I am upgrading to Vista if it is going to force me to format my hard disk...mainly because it would take me days to reinstall everything and back up all of my data.

2. I have yet to hear one compelling new feature of Vista. If someone would tell me something new about Vista that is actually useful, I might upgrade, but so far I haven't heard a single thing. XP is doing great! (Mac OS X Leopard on the other hand has several compelling new features)

I never really wanted to become the Vista poster boy. I happen to agree that Microsoft overdoes it considering the horribly fractured "versioning" they like to do to their new operating system. There are a couple of fundamental truths as to why this is.

In fact, even the third issue you raised (which is unquoted) can be dealt with by examining who it is. There are only two versions of Vista that would need to be available to a majority of consumers: Home and Ultimate. But Microsoft has a lot of special interests to pander to. I haven't heard you complain about Media Edition, and that's probably because you're a person who takes advantage of the things they packaged with that version (you work with a lot of digital media). This differs vastly from the needs of students or other corporations.

If Microsoft just sold the OS then you would have the freedom to put whatever the hell you wanted on it without all the extra fluff that comes packaged with it. But that's not who Microsoft is: creating versions of things is the great simple machine that helps Microsoft make money. I think it's stupid. I would rather see the copyright's of stupid things like window design go into the public domain so that the legal foundation Microsoft can stand on sort of erodes, competition can grow, and the user is presented with more alternatives. I mean, that's just reasonable: but Microsoft is free to copyright its whole image.

And they don't throw anything away either. Microsoft iis sort of stuck in a position where because they hardly manufacture any of their hardware (they are a software company), then, if they stop getting things to work on older hardware they lose part of the market if someone wants to build a computer on cheap old hardware or a computer for a specific job. Supporting everything is also another way Microsoft makes money.

So performance and compatibility issues are going to happen. As long as the company keeps doing what it's doing and whenever Microsoft moves on to a different technology (like the move from GDI to DirectX for drawing on the screen) the ........'s gonna hit the fan because it's not as fast or something. It takes time to get used to, but people will get over it as computers themselves get better hardware performance.

Apple works so nicely because Steve Jobs likes closed systems, where effectively you don't own your hardware. Instead, Apple sort of sold the whole computer instead of just software, so you're stuck with whatever's in the machine. That's not awful, just a different business model. But if you don't own your hardware then how are Mac manufacturers encouraged in any way to open up the system to a bunch of third parties like Microsoft does? It's so easy for Apple to develop something that works because of the control their company exerts over what developers use and what they need to make to some extent.

Both companies have their own little evils (if you will permit me to ignore linux flavors which is built for a different reason than capitalist successs). And I completely agree that if XP is working for you, then stick to XP. But maybe if you're buying a new machine try Vista. The store is going to sell it to you anyway.

in response to two, I can't really give you anything specific other than the usual better security claims, or bells and whistles type of stuff. Things are pretty settled in the OS world. Developers know what works and what to build. Innovation is sparse, you know, so if you've owned XP long enough it probably has all the security and bells and whistles you need. The only coersion Microsoft really has (and again this is because they own most of the market) is when Microsoft stops supporting XP. Switching to Vista now might ease the burden rather than waiting until you are forced to.

As an American, you don't need to listen to me though. Hell, I haven't switched over.

I apologize if most of this turns out to be rederick. I just had a lot to say on the subject.

I haven't heard you complain about Media Edition, and that's probably because you're a person who takes advantage of the things they packaged with that version (you work with a lot of digital media). This differs vastly from the needs of students or other corporations.

Eh...The only reason that I have Media Center Edition is because that's what came on the computer. And the only thing that I know of that it has extra compared to other versions of Windows XP is Windows Media Center.....which I never use by the way. I use other DVD playing software...and for music I use iTunes.

I agree that there isn't a dire need to run Vista.

I have to ask where do you shop $300 sounds a bit steep to me!

I recently came across an article with that - why you should upgrade from Vista to XP!
http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/ar...indows-xp.aspx

Didn't this thread start out about Linux?

I tried Mandrake (Mandriva) about 5 years ago, which basically sucked. Two years ago I tried Slackware, which was fun and extremely educational, but generally sucked for practical purposes (dependency hell, lack of packages). Last year I tried Gentoo, which was also fun and quite educational, and got AIGLX/Beryl working. Pretty awesome, I absolutely love the Scale and Expose effects (i.e. clones of Mac OS + wobble) as well as the cube - which I bound to an extra mouse button. And emerge = teh win for dependency hell purposes. Used it as my primary OS for a while, then accidentally hosed my system with an ill-fated 'emerge world' (). On the whole a good experience, minus the 30-hour-not-including-breaks installation time, and randomly discovering packages that hadn't been installed, every few hours, for the next 3-4 months. I then helped a friend install Ubuntu, which took 2-3 hours including download and trying random hex values in xorg.conf to get the screen resolution to show up correctly (docs gave the wrong codes). It came with newer packages, more of them, updated everything automatically, and looked better.

With my exam period just about to end, I'm planning on starting fresh. This time I'm thinking of trying Sabayon Linux, which is supposed to be essentially a pre-configured Gentoo system with an installer and a theme, using AIGLX/Beryl by default. Hopefully things will turn out nicely this time, and I'll be able to go another 6-12 months without needing to boot into Windows and leave all the beautiful desktop effects behind (yes, I love them that much - I swear, they're not just a gimmick.)

Originally Posted by Yarin

I'm sorry if these questions seem stupid, but I know absolutely nothing about linux.

Theres all sorts of Resources on the internet, not to mention countless books on every different flavor of linux.

And hey, think of it this way: It's just 1's and 0's man. Don't like it? Install a different linux variant or go back to windows. Whatever works, ya know?

I don't know if someone already mentioned this, but a lot of distros offer free CDs (you have to pay postage).

openSuSE has my vote, I love it -- Gnome of course. Not krap KDE

Originally Posted by zacs7

...Not krap KDE ...

haha!!!

ah, c'mon, it's not that bad is it?

I much prefer KDE, myself.

http://cboard.cprogramming.com/showt...ight=gnome+kde

Debian is amazing. I like it for several reasons. (It should be noted that Debian is the only distribution that I've used for any length of time, so this is extremely biased. )

• Debian's package management is incredible. I haven't tried emerge, but it's definitely better than rpm.
• Debian's free software philosophy is good. This might not matter to other people, but I love having a virtually completely open-source operating system (alas, fglrx -- an ATI DRI driver -- is not).
• It's quite popular. I don't know if Debian or Red Hat is more popular now, but Debian's probably first or second at least. This means that you can get support reasonably quickly . . . .
• It has Gnome and KDE and Xfce.

Anyway, I'm sure other distros would be great as well, I just haven't really tried them out.