The ever-popular "I'm interested in another OS, any suggestions?" Thread

[Hivetyrant]

By the way, I truely am not trying to start a war here, I know I may have seemed to be against Linux for a while, but I really ahve had nothing but bad experiances with it [img]smile.gif[/img]

(Don't kill me!) [img]graemlins/hidesbehindsofa.gif[/img]

[shamrock_uk]

It's a shame you didn't ask the community, as they would have told you Doom 3 is available in a native Linux version

If you don't make use of the community, you are missing one of Linux's greatest assets.

As for your lack of OS menus - firstly I would suggest that Fedora Core 3 is horribly out of date - FC5 is just about to be released.

I haven't had to use the command-line for installing any Linux system in the last year, including on my new bang-up-to-date system.

In Ubuntu things seem to 'just work'. Suse 10.1 is widely acknowledged as being something quite special and is also blessed with a hugely comprehensive control panel - if you like fiddling then try it out. Mandriva also has a decent control panel, although not quite as comprehensive.

I had to install Windows the other day and it was one long fight - from the installation that made me sit by it and answer questions (why can't they all be done at the beginning?) to the endless windows updates & restarts to the search for all my driver cd's in order to get a workable system. Then we have to locate MS Office CDs, a pdf reader, a decent media player....

In Linux it's a 20 minute process, I don't need driver cd's and I have virtually everything I need, with no need to go trawling dodgy shareware sites for useful utilities.

As for just wanting to kick back and enjoy your computer after work - I've had my new one for about a week now. In that time, the number of computer freezes stands at:

Windows :3 Linux: 0

That's despite Linux being running for about twice as much as I've been in Windows. Once it's set up, it's stable.

I moved my parents to Ubuntu half a year ago - not only have their tech support requests completely stopped, I went back to find that they hadn't restarted the computer in 3 months. Ubuntu was of course as snappy as ever and neither the OS nor a single application had crashed once. Try repeating that in Windows

[Ilander]

Hive, in general, I have a mind like yours on this issue..."I really want my stuff to just work." The only thing about it is that Windows, for the power user, does not "just work." I'd rather not talk about all the stuggles I've had with codecs, toggling some on and some off to find which ones are compatible with the others...heck, because of issues like that, compounded by unknown error messages about things I've never heard of, make for a system that can't play .mov files (they even crash Firefox). Beyond that, I've had to drag through the process of rebuilding corrupt DLL files so that I could once more run 8-bit executables (which, thankfully, the microsoft website helped me with).

I like certain aspects of Windows, I really do...but the truth about it is that I'd like more control over my operating system. I'd like it to use less of my hardware's power, so that I may devote that power to programs, and I'd like it not bog down needlessly on programs that it should NOT be slowing down on.

[Dace De'Briago]

It's probably worth taking a look at Linux if thats what you want to do. My vote would be for Ubuntu or Xandros (almost an XP clone and well worth a look).

Both have the standard live cd versions for you to play with before a full install if your that way inclined.

If Linux could support the games I play and simplify install routines, then I'd use it all the time. As it stands, I can't be bothered having to research getting everything to work (having to enable DMA transfers and download a DVD codec and install the rpm before the system resembles something with decent capabilities...).

As for stability of the OS, I regularly have my XP box up and running for days at a time - there are no freezes and everything works.

Do I have to reboot when updating drivers? Well, at least I have drivers for my Radeon card [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Felix The Assassin]

First and foremost to be successful with Linux, you must approach the whole experience with ONE thing in mind. Linux is NOT windoze. No matter how PC savy you are, a different OS has different quirks.

With that said. If you wanted to try a distro in 64 bit, that would support RAID, and just wanted to try it without using the HDD, download an burn a "Live" version and give it a spin for awhile. If you like it, get the full enchilada.
My current PC percentage is 98% Ubuntu Linux, and 2& windoze. For school and work OpenOffice 2.0 runs native as does Firefox for web browsing.
Security? I use none with Ubuntu.

http://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/5.10/

[Ilander]

Hmm...I don't guess it'd be a bad idea at all to try the live version first! I'll get a CD and try it out at some point in the not-so-distant future...

[Drakilor]

Originally posted by shamrock_uk: I don't rate the Ubuntu live CD against the Knoppix one to be honest - Knoppix is uber-speedy in comparison and the DVD version contains tons of software. Your Radeon will always work - it'll handle 2d absolutely fine. There are a multitude of drivers all handled 'out of the box' in Linux (you generally don't have to go driver-cd-hunting in Linux) There's even reverse-engineered 3d-acceleration available, it'll just never be as good as the proprietary drivers from ATI and it's the proprietory drivers that make it fall down. If you could tell me the exact error message it should be an easy fix, as there are several 'guaranteed' drivers that would work. Oh, and your mouse will work just fine - I've always used Microsoft mice.

"Failed to start the x server (your graphical interface). It is likely that it is not set up correctly". I noticed that i allowed 640x480 resolution wich i think the graphics card might have some problems with. But it doesn't sound like i would get that kind of message for that. I'll be able to check any answers in 5 days. (friday)