Quote:
Originally Posted by manikus
While Helix is cool, I and my instructor don't think it's the best choice to be using as a regular OS for a home user. His recomendations were if you want to ease away from the Microsoft apron strings, try Ubuntu, but if you want to use the best linux that you can get without compiling a version yourself, to try Red Hat/fedora/CentOS. 
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From my experience so far trying different distros out I believe your instructor is right. If you are installing to the HD and making it your primary OS you definitely want one that you compiled yourself. Compiled on the same system you plan to boot and run it from. Because then it is basically adapted or customized to fit your system specs perfectly.
Out of those three best you recommended manikus which one would you say is the most intuitive for someone accustumed to Windows but also very familiar with DOS and command line utils and operations? Which one lends itself the most to understanding for someone who has mastered x86 OS's but is quite new to Linux?
I think it would be cool if something like FreeDos were to develop their OS to the point that it could do everything leading 32bit OS's can do. Or if there were a DOS interface for Linux that allowed me to use DOS commands and have them translate to Linux commands behind the scenes and have the command line shell show DOS style file management and DOS style paths instead of that confusing Unix gibberish.
BTW: I had Ubuntu installed on a separate partition for a while and was using it as my primary OS while I experimented with installing different customized XP installations on my NTFS partitions.
I was having a big time until the MBR on my Linux partitions got messed up and I could no longer access it. I couldn't even get partition magic or any other partitioner to work with it or repair it or even delete it.
I ended up doing it from DOS with an old DOS version of Partition Magic.

DOS is definately my choice of OS, always was and always will be. But I guess times have changed and I just have to accept it. DOS is obsolete as a primary OS. But at least I can still boot to DOS 7.1 from USB or a separate partition and play my old DOS games in it or write a small program in QBASIC just for fun. Or I could load up the old WWIV bbs software and play around with that.
Anyway, by then I had found the perfect minimalist XP distro for me and had it set up already on my NTFS partitions when the Linux partitions died so I just reclaimed the space I had given to Linux and created a bunch of NTFS partitions to use as storage and organization of game materials like graphics, sounds, intaller packages, archives, etc.
I will probably still go back to Linux eventually but right now I would rather spend the time working on DC stuff and other projects than learning a new OS. I need productivity more than anything right now. And with my new super fast super small version of XP [mostly using non-microsoft utils: agent ransack instead of indexing/ms file search for example] and my custom partition scheme I have just what I need to achieve that.