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Khuutra said: ... Moving on. So I don't know if my computer puking on itself is the fault of Windows or the fault of Dell, but the point is I had Ubuntu loaded on my laptop for a while and the time has come for me to switch over full-time. Running the latest games may not be an option on this bad boy, but right now WINE works fine for the stuff I want to play. And hell, that's what me and the wife are going to be building a desktop for anyway. So, regardless. Linux seems pretty cool. I.... I don't really know a lot about it. I'm the kind of guy who stumbles through a new OS like a newborn learning how to walk without a walker. I only just today, for the first time, mounted all of my Windows files and pulled them over into my Linux partition! But I still like it! One thing I like about Ubuntu is that functionally it seems a lot more solid now than it did even a year ago, which is pretty surprising. Anyway, uh. Let's talk about Linux! Any other users out there? Anybody have a favorite distro? |
I've been using and working on Linux in some way or another since 1994, but only recently -about 6-7 years- it's been my default desktop OS.
Yes, it advances quite fast when it comes to support for hardware and new technologies. On the other hand its mission of being a slot-in Windows replacement (or at least that has been true for many distributions) has held it back when it came to interface innovation... somehow a shame when even OS X has been more daring, and of course still ended up being more polished.
But basically, for all your average user needs Ubuntu is a solid choice. The package management is great and it is focused on core desktop use cases: internet, messaging, office tools, email and multimedia. I myself tend to gravitate toward Fedora, which is usually a bit more bleeding edge and paves the way for many other distributions when it comes to integrating newfangled technologies.
On the extreme of the spectrum you have stuff as Gentoo, which I would seriously advise you against. It's a distribution for people who want to squeeze the last inch of performance out of their computer and the last megabyte out of their HDD, at the cost of some user-friendliness in managing and maintaining the OS. If you're not a tinkerer then you're better off with a pre-packaged distro such as Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian/Suse etc.
