Posted: 11/16/2008 9:17:56 AM EDT
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I've always been a windows guy. I love Vista, but am looking at a netbook laptop, and they just don't have the horsepower for Vista. I don't really want to go with XP, so I'm thinking about getting one with Linux of Ubuntu instead.
Educate me. How do they stack up to XP and Vista? What's the good and bad on them? |
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I've been a linux/unix hacker for well over a decade. You don't want to run Linux on the desktop. The only people who would try and convince you that you do are hardcore cult members. It's a great operating system for the server environment, but all the graphical environments for it thus far suck ass.
If you want to get your feet wet with Unix, get a legal copy of Mac OS X and use the hackint0sh patches to run it on your PC. OS X is by far one of the most well-designed desktop operating systems I've seen, both from a user interface perspective and as a developer. It also uses a BSD Unix backend. |
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uhh...just buy the Netbook with linux and try it out. If you dont like it you can put XP on it.
I have an Eee Pc that used to have Linux on it, but I removed it and installed XP because: linux power management isnt as good as XP Wifi drivers were/are bad for linux I needed to run certain apps that liunx didnt support That said, I do have linux on other machines and like them just fine. Give it a shot! or you can download a LIVE image, burn it to CD and boot your computer off the CD(make sure in bios that the CD drive is set to boot before the hard disk). Once you boot off it, you can load up Ubuntu linux and test drive it WITHOUT installing it. Just select LIVE. download it here and for Netbooks, I recommend the Asus 1000h |
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Quoted:
I've been a linux/unix hacker for well over a decade. You don't want to run Linux on the desktop. The only people who would try and convince you that you do are hardcore cult members. It's a great operating system for the server environment, but all the graphical environments for it thus far suck ass. If you want to get your feet wet with Unix, get a legal copy of Mac OS X and use the hackint0sh patches to run it on your PC. OS X is by far one of the most well-designed desktop operating systems I've seen, both from a user interface perspective and as a developer. It also uses a BSD Unix backend. Couldn't have said it better. |
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I just recently converted from Windows XP to Linux. Right now, I run a dual-boot configuration on my laptop with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 as my primary and Windows XP Pro there for a couple Windows apps I need. If you know your way around a computer, Linux is a great OS. I don't agree that the GUIs out there are terrible. I'm running Gnome and I think it's a LOT better than it was 5 years ago. Linux has come a long way over the years, but it still has a little bit to go in terms of usability for those who are not computer savvy. Burn a Live CD and try it out.
P.S. My Linux is light years faster than my XP. |
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Quoted:
I've always been a windows guy. I love Vista, but am looking at a netbook laptop, and they just don't have the horsepower for Vista. I don't really want to go with XP, so I'm thinking about getting one with Linux of Ubuntu instead. Educate me. How do they stack up to XP and Vista? What's the good and bad on them? Unless you have Linux or Unix experience I recomend you try Linux in a Virtual Machine first. Ubuntu 8.10 is easy to install in a VM, I recomend you do that first before you comit hardware to something with that kind of learning curve. If all you are going to do is surf the net and read gmail you can probably get by with linux with no problems. |
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Search the urban commands forum. There are guys who swear by it, and haters. I’m neither. What kind of work are you going to be doing? Any problems with specific app you need to run?
For now, I MUST run M$ for work. When I retire retire (as in no more work, just for personal use) and I don’t need to worry about anything besides personal use, M$ is going bye bye. As it is our next major upgrade at work will include open office before I retire. Are you a student? If not, will any work be done on their computer? What do you do for a living? Drivers seem to be the biggest problem, but if the machine comes with it, you know it should be working. Biggest problem I see is if you order it with Linux most of them are coming with the smaller HD. |
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Quoted:
I've always been a windows guy. I love Vista, but am looking at a netbook laptop, and they just don't have the horsepower for Vista. I don't really want to go with XP, so I'm thinking about getting one with Linux of Ubuntu instead. Educate me. How do they stack up to XP and Vista? What's the good and bad on them? I bought a Dell Mini a few weeks ago, it came with XP. I installed both Vista and Unbuntu on it since, and it was able to run Vista nicely. Only real problem with Vista was trying to run movies. It was pretty choppy, Office and other apps ran just fine though. I have Unbuntu on it now, it runs movies but I hate how things arent as user friendly as Vista. i.e I have to manually go into the command line and do a "sudo hidd ––search" to find my bluetooth mouse everytime I want to use it. You can try to run BASIC vista, that might help with media. ETA as a work around for office apps, I actually run RDP from my desltop PC. So if I ever need to use Outlook or Excel I RDP through my firewall when I'm away from home, or just direct RDP from my LAN. |
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Ubuntu is probably the easiest distro to start with.
The cd image that is available,it has a bootable cd environment that lets you log into linux.. test out your hardware to see what works. It will let you basically start up linux and play around as if it were installed on your system.. connect to the network, test printer drivers, play with the software, and test other pieces of hardware you use before you install it. -Printer drivers have come a long way since I started. Chances are you'll be able to get it working -Network/wireless drivers should be no problem -Display drivers should be fine -Ubuntu default X environment is very easy to use and nice to look at -Web/email/Openoffice should cover 90% of the stuff you do. It's a lot of fun to play with. I would suggest (unless theres a price difference) get the netbook with a copy of XP or vista (just so you have it installed) and ubuntu will partition the drive, leaving XP/Vista installed but will let you boot into linux if you want. It's a good way to play around with it, and if you ever need to give away/sell/use windows on that laptop, you'll already have a copy of it ready to go. |
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Quoted:
I have Unbuntu on it now, it runs movies but I hate how things arent as user friendly as Vista. i.e I have to manually go into the command line and do a "sudo hidd ––search" to find my bluetooth mouse everytime I want to use it. . You could put that in your X startup scripts and never have to type it again. 
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Quoted: What they said. I'm a die hard Linux geek and I run it on the desktop, but I'd never recommend that anybody else do it.Quoted: You don't want to run Linux on the desktop. I concur. I have computers running Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu. If you KNOW what you're getting yourself into, and you are a natural born geek (like me) who gets off on technology for technology's sake then fine, but otherwise - don't bother. Linux fanboys are just as annoying (moreso, really) than the Apple ones. They have a really bad habit of glossing over the finer details, while they're busy evangelizing. |
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Quoted:
I've been a linux/unix hacker for well over a decade. You don't want to run Linux on the desktop. The only people who would try and convince you that you do are hardcore cult members. It's a great operating system for the server environment, but all the graphical environments for it thus far suck ass. If you want to get your feet wet with Unix, get a legal copy of Mac OS X and use the hackint0sh patches to run it on your PC. OS X is by far one of the most well-designed desktop operating systems I've seen, both from a user interface perspective and as a developer. It also uses a BSD Unix backend. Disagreed. Ubuntu is very usable on the desktop. But it's not for everyone. If you're easily frustrated by technology and don't actually care about taking a crack at Linux, yeah, your life might suck. If playing the latest & greatest games is a priority, life will really suck. Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows but "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" was five years ago. KDE & GNOME are both so stupidly easy (and pretty complete) my 96 year old grandmother could figure it out. OS X makes my head hurt, but if that's what floats your boat... |
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Ubuntu is very easy to use.Other linux distros are not so easy to start off with. It is way more stable than windows and is much faster than windows and Macs. If you want to try it out before you install just use what is called a linux live cd. You pop it in the disk drive and reboot the computer making sure it reads from the disk first(might have to change in the bios). The entire OS runs from the disk and when you take it out nothing is changed with your computer.
1. go to a store and buy a ubuntu or linux mag that comes with a disk 2. try it out with the live cd/dvd without installing 3. ubuntu is way more secure than windows 4. ubuntu has a great support group that will help you. 5. Even and old out of date windows computer will be speedy and give new life with Ubuntu Faster computer, more stable and secure. Cool factor of being different. Learning something new. Don't listen to some of the guys who say not to use it on a desktop. I am running it right now and it is flying with my custom made computer. Ubuntu is great on laptops also. If you can find an old thinkpad those are the best with Ubuntu and linux. |
I just tried out Ubuntu on a Toughbook CF-52 that I was messing with for work. (I'm working on an image for it, so I was already wiping and reinstalling several times a day). It was a lot better than I expected, and it beat the crap out of a generic XP SP2 install DVD as far as drivers and hardware recognition go. The generic XP install was missing drivers for the hard drive, and the installer would only take drivers from a floppy disk, which had to be a USB floppy drive of the right brand to work.  Was probably missing a bunch of other drivers too, if I ever got it to install. Ubuntu 8.10 loaded right up and offered to automatically download and install the missing drivers from the net. Granted, I eventually found a factory XP image DVD that worked fine, but Ubuntu still beat Windows like a redheaded stepchild as far as hardware support from a generic install CD.
The desktop environment IMHO is at least as good as Windows or MacOS. I don't really know why everyone's knocking it. I set up network drives to my desktop computer, downloaded and played movies and music, flipped through some pictures, opened MS Office documents with OpenOffice, opened PDFs, etc. Never touched the command line for any of it. I did use the command line briefly to install Google Earth, but that's the only thing I used it for. The potential holdups are mainly drivers and applications. Some hardware has good drivers, some has buggy drivers, and some has none at all. Gotta check the hardware before you really commit to it - you're in for a real headache if you have hardware with buggy or nonexistent drivers. Booting off of a LiveCD is a pretty good way to check how well your hardware works before you install. And only open source apps can really be run easily on it. But most of the stuff you can run, you just scroll through a list of applications and click what you want to install, and everything else is taken care of. There's good applications out there to do most common tasks like web, e-mail, IM, word processing, spreadsheet, etc, but if you have to have some Windows-only app for something, then it will probably be hard. I would only hesitate if this is going to be your only computer and you know absolutely nothing about the Unix command line and are unwilling to learn. And you don't have friends who can help you. Most common tasks on common hardware really is Grandma-easy, but there's a good chance you'll need to do something on the command line eventually. |
| The greatest thing about Ubuntu is it installs in 20 minutes. Windows takes forever to find all the drivers and just takes a long time to load up. Ubuntu has all the support built it. Even my brand new Nvidia graphics cards works great without having to install any drivers. |