What's your thoughts on Linux distros?

[metalmonstar]

*Looks around*

I am currently using Red Hat and Solaris. Managing your way around the shell doesn't seem that difficult to pick up on, but I guess if you wanted to customize the shell that could take some effort.

I want to try and dual boot and Ubuntuu once I am done the class. A friend of the teacher's showed up the class and looked at the different scripts we had made. He suggested a different distro to use. I wrote it down can't seem to find it any more. It might have started with an L.

 

[Diddyknight]

First time: Ubuntu
Second,third time: Feldora/KUbuntu
Experienced: Arch Linux.
HardCore: Gentoo
Ultra HardCore: Plan 9 from bell labs (though not linux)

You will figure out quickly that the better you want linux to be, the more of it you have to compile yourself.

edit: people up higher Gentoo gives you pretty much to start even less than arch.

yup and installing Gentoo is bull. Hard for Beginners...

Good to start out with Red Hat Linux or...forgot name xD

 

[Sensai]

Anyone tried Ubuntu 9.04? I know it doesn't come out until tomorrow, but the RCs are generally the same or _very_ similar to the finished product. Anyone got impressions?

 

[AltF4]

Naw, I'm not upgrading my laptop until the semester's over. I've got work to do on it until then.

8.10 actually gave me a bunch of problems on my laptop that 8.04 didn't. I'm hoping that 9.04 fixes it. My video drivers got shot. It don't let me use the "fancy" graphics anymore. I've had to resort to proprietary ATI drivers...

And my "brightness up and down" buttons glitch out. The computer pseudo-crashes when I try to hit them. I have to hard reset to bring it back up.

None of this happened in 8.04, only 8.10. If 9.04 doesn't fix it, I'm going back down to 8.04, lol.

 

[Crimson King]

Gaming is the one thing holding me back from taking the plunge. I have two cards running in SLi Mode (1GB Geforce 250 GTS), and I am getting amazing FPS and anti-Aliasing (16Qx, whatever that means). Crossover still isn't great because it won't load games in full screen, or if it does, I have no idea how.

Really, if anyone can find an awesome program to run Windows games, that'd be great.

 

[AltF4]

Have you tried Wine?

 

[Crimson King]

Crossover is Wine. I went to the official site for it, and they recommended that one as the best version of it. The version is really great, to be honest, and plays things quite well. It just can't run games in full screen.

 

[Big Sean]

I'm switching to Ubuntu 9.04 today, i'll let you know how it goes!

 

[Superstar]

2 Geforce 250 GTS? HOLY ****

I'm just running a 9600GT.

 

[AltF4]

Crossover is Wine. I went to the official site for it, and they recommended that one as the best version of it. The version is really great, to be honest, and plays things quite well. It just can't run games in full screen.

Oh! I didn't know. I don't really do a whole lot of PC gaming (nor gaming in general, lately, to be honest). So I'm not very up-to-date on the different versions.

You could always just do the dual-boot and run your games in a real windows partition. Then just switch back to Linux for everything else.

It's kind of like going on "the patch" for Windows, lol. It's best not to go cold turkey. You're likely to have issues, go into withdraw, then go back completely. It might be wise to wean yourself off of it more gradually.

 

[Sensai]

@ AltF4: I did that for a long while (dual boot Windows and Ubuntu). The problem is that everytime I wanna get on my computer, I wanna have the options to play games so I load up Windows. And then surf the web for a while before playing anything.

It's gotta be cold turkey for me simply because I don't wanna reboot my machine between playing TF2 and looking at the web/listening to music/etc.

 

[TheBuzzSaw]

Using Xmarks makes dual booting less painful as far as browsers are concerned. ^_^

 

[Superstar]

I put Fedora on my PC, but it's only really as a testing environment's sake. I'd like to put it on my laptop though since I don't use it for gaming.

 

[Big Sean]

I agree Sensai, every time I try to get someone into linux, they inevitably fall back on windows. I think for most people the only way is to single boot linux.

 

[Crimson King]

2 Geforce 250 GTS? HOLY ****

I'm just running a 9600GT.

It's pretty gorgeous looking.

 

[Sensai]

@ Crimson King: That can run Crysis maxed out, right?

Either way, I'm jealous.

 

[Crimson King]

I need to try. It can run Merchants of Brooklyn, which uses the horrible Crysis engine, on max.

The problem with the Crysis engine, at least from what I've read in the community, is that it is so unoptimized that running it becomes a chore/something impressive. Also, if the programmers don't take the long time to optimize it, then they are going to be working on a system that will fight them. This is why Source = awesome.

 

[iamthemicrowave]

For linux distros, find one where all your hardware works! that is so important, and so easy now cuz they all have live CDs. If your hardware works, just go with personal preference. I prefer GNOME over KDE because i like simplicity over lots of eye candy.

My Dell laptop has been on ubuntu for awhile, and i love it. Just upgrade to jaunty, and flash sucks now in firefox, so hopefully they will fix that soon!

 

[Sensai]

@ Crimson King: Jeah, I've heard that too. I've also experienced it a bit...the coding just doesn't seem to have been done very well. Apparently Crysis Warhead is a bit better, so you might wanna try that out instead of Crysis.