Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge Linux users??

Anyone here switched from Microshaft to Linux? Care to share the experience-the good, the bad and the, erm, you know? Anything you can't do now that you could with MS? Anything you can do now that you couldn't with MS? Any security issues? Any stability issues? Which Linux are you using?
Anything else I should know before I make the switch?

Anyone here switched from Microshaft to Linux?

'bout 10 years ago and haven't looked back since.

Cheers,
Brad

echoance,
if you're just wanting to give linux a try, before making the switch whole hog, google 'wubi'. it's a linux ubuntu installer that will allow you to do a dual boot configuration, without actually having to create partitions and whatnot. if you find that you don't like ubuntu, you can just boot into windows, and remove wubi like any other program, and you're back to normal. if you do decide to try it, i highly suggest doing some serious defragmentation of your hard drive first. jkdefrag does a pretty good job, but it takes a while.

i really liked ubuntu, but there aren't any linux drivers for my high end sound card (that are easily obtainable), which meant that i was getting NO sound out, which is a drag. if it wasn't for that, i probably would have stuck with it. on my next computer i will probably keep on-board sound and then make the switch again.

if you don't need to do oodles of things, then linux is really nice. if you are really computer savvy, then linux is nice. if you're somewhere in between, it can get to be a little bit of a pain. using 'sudo' commands in the terminal can get to be tedious, but for most people that are only going to doing email, listen to music, watch movies, etc, the synaptec installer is pretty sweet and will get your programs for you. i know just enough to get myself in pretty deep crap, and not enough to get out, lol. that's why i went back to windows. i can handle most digging around in windows, but i don't know enough unix to work well in linux. i LIKE messing around with my computer, but without knowing the language, you can see the mess you can get into...

I never did thank you guys for your comments, did I? Hmmm.

Thanks.

Well, it's been a while but I'm now a Linux convert. It took me all of 20 minutes messing about with the 'demo' disk to make me realise that it did everything I wanted...and more. So, using the same disk, I installed it onto my PC (taking 10 minutes), another 5 minutes saw me online and I can now take my time to learn to use it properly. It's not that it's any more difficult to use than MS, it's just different. To use an analogy, think driving a car to riding a bike, Linux being the bike. I'm looking forward to it.

The version I'm using is PCLOS (Gnome), available here.

For anyone who has been tempted in the past, download it, demo it and you may surprise yourself.

Isn't this just the coolest site ever? Where else could a Truman-era Old Fart like me get to listen to foreign language chit chat about my favorite Peanuts character, Lucy's brother Linus? More fun than nicking my pop's car (PC) or me mum's stationwagon (MS) Oops, gotta go, American Bandwidth is about to start, and I dig them jiving chicks....and that new kid, Dick Clark.

My company went to Linux on a piece of equipment we manufacture. Unfortunately, it is an MS world and equally unfortunately, we need to be able to communicate with other pieces of equipment. It just does not work. The war is over; stop fighting.

I loved my MAC but there were too many things I couldn't do. The OS was much more user friendly. Been PC now for years so I can do what ever I want with no issues.

I run Windoze XP Pro on my main work station primarily because of Photoshop (no, I'm not going to use GIMP) and certain games. But my old machine and my laptop both run Ubuntu Linux. Rock solid. Never could get my laptop to recognize the wireless card though and never cared enough to hunt down the right kind. Secretly I'm hoping the next release of Ubuntu will fix it.

I would really like to have a Mac again someday, maybe a laptop, then I could run my few Windoze-only programs on it with Bootcamp.

An Apple a day keeps Windows away...

i'm in the odd situation of needing to run some soctware that will only work on unix. I have a ubuntu live dvd from a mag that seems very nice but i'm not about to jump ship. Is it likely that i could install the package (openfoam) under ubuntu?

Bill, according to this, yes.

Don't ask me what all the code and commands are, tho. In fact, don't ask me what anything in the subsequent responses to that thread means!!!



If you've got a spare few GB of disk space, you can do a permanent install of Ububtu purely so you can use OpenFoam. Alternatively, you can run Windows (and applications) from out of Linux.