Anyone use Linux as there main Operating System

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

Buchanan0204

Soldato
Joined
10 Jun 2010
Posts
5,158
Location
Scotland
I was just wondering if anyone used Linux as there main OS.

If you do, why?

I've heard so many stories about Linux being able to repair Windows problems and so forth, what's your experiences with this?

If Linux is all it's cracked up to be, why doesn't more people use it as an alternative to Windows? After all it is free.

Any views and or opinions on anything related is welcome.

I personally have dabbled with it over the years and occasionaly have a little play with, I love the Compiz effects, and nothing for windows comes close to the effects you get with compiz. Although a lot of it is rather gimmicky and isn't practical in the long term, nice to show off though.

Linux live cd's are excellent for data recovery and the trinity rescue disk has been put to good use many times before.

That's my take on it, what's yours.
 
Im a great believer in open source software.

My main OS in work is linux, I can do my day to day duties 100%, with the added bonus of all the great open source software out there. Working in IT it's countless the amount of times a colleague has asked me to do things for them, be it recover data from a windows machine with the powerful recovery tools that can be used in linux(adding the hdd as slave) to simply formating pen drives.. My OS comes in handy so much.

I'm primerily a Fedora user, and a certified redhat technician. I use windows as a secondary OS on my home built gaming PC for gaming. That's it.

I'd strongly suggest anyone to try linux, and learn it. It has so much use and is a fantastic OS.
 
You'd probably have better posting this in the software section (being that it's about software an'all... ;)) but it's interesting that you haven't had a reply in over two hours!

I've been a computer owner/user since the days of the ZX81, and consider myself a mid-level geek - but Linux was just too hard for me. Have tried a couple of times with a couple of versions, simply because it seemed to be the zeitgeist at the time. It was just...well... hard work!

Then I realised that (a) Windows is easy, (b) Windows works, (c) all games and applications are designed around Windows, and (d) I couldn't care less if Microsoft has a monopoly on the market as long as (a) (b) and (c) are true.
 
(ST)Pohaku said:
Then I realised that (a) Windows is easy, (b) Windows works, (c) all games and applications are designed around Windows, and (d) I couldn't care less if Microsoft has a monopoly on the market as long as (a) (b) and (c) are true.
Click to expand...

This is the problem with Linux really... Above is most people's views to Linux, and actually, this view makes sense....

I have had some experience on Linux before and I'm looking to take a slightly older machine down from the loft at Xmas, and install Linux on it, have a bit of fun with it and see what it can do, especially for the kind of recovery stuff suggested above...

In all honesty it would be a side project for me, something to tinker with when I have some spare time... Don't think I'd use it as a main build, but that's just how I feel about it. I would say however that if you do learn to fully utilise it, it is a very nice OS. Still, Windows is much more compatible and has fewer issues...

kd
 
I do, Windows 7 was my last try at Microsoft, compared to Linux Mint 7 (what i was using at the time) it didn't have a chance. Bloated, a huge security risk and impossible to customize to the extent that i wanted to.

I use Arch now, brilliant lightning fast distro that i have set up in a way that makes me far more productive than i ever was with Windows. Will not be returning.
 
Every few years I have a dabble in Linux again, and it always impresses me, but there are key niggles that stop me fully adopting it.

Games are a nightmare on Linux.
Photoshop never runs perfectly on Linux (although I think these days I may be incorrect in that statement)
I much prefer Office 2010 to OpenOffice

Of course, the other thing is that Windows 7 just "works" which makes me quite happy to stay where I am with OS choice. I'm becoming old and set in my ways!
 
Superewza said:
I do, Windows 7 was my last try at Microsoft, compared to Linux Mint 7 (what i was using at the time) it didn't have a chance. Bloated, a huge security risk and impossible to customize to the extent that i wanted to.

I use Arch now, brilliant lightning fast distro that i have set up in a way that makes me far more productive than i ever was with Windows. Will not be returning.
Click to expand...

Surely Windows 7 coupled with a good AV program and perhaps firewall isn't all that vulnerable with regards to security issues. If anything ever does go majorly wrong, it's only a 15 minute image backup away to getting back full functionality.

I agree though that Linux is far more customisable and has more potential providing you have the knowledge.

It would be great to see some screenshots of your System, customised to your liking etc.
 
unp|dissy said:
My main OS in work is linux, I can do my day to day duties 100%, with the added bonus of all the great open source software out there. I use windows as a secondary OS on my home built gaming PC for gaming. That's it.
Click to expand...

Same for me. I do a lot of computational work in the field of Engineering, so most of my work is done in Linux as we use and develop in-house software. I switch to Windows sometimes for games and that's it!

I'm basic though, I use OpenSUSE as it's the distribution that I use at work too. Simple, clean and quick - suits me fine!
 
I hate Linux but the only paid-for software on my PC is Office 2007. My copy of Windows was free (MSDNAA) and pretty much everything else on Windows can be done with free software. Works great for me.

Next time my friend that is an avid Mac user moans about Windows, I shall remind him of the time that he had to restart his machine because it stopped accepting terminal commands (today), lol.

I also know someone who writes FORTRAN code in Linux and he was showing me how easy it is. He has a basic text editor that highlights the code so that it's more readable (something that is easily and freely available in Windows also) and uses a command line compiler to build or run his program. Doesn't sound easy to me. FTN95 on a Windows machine with its IDE makes coding FORTRAN so much easier than that but it just seems that some Linux users buy into the philosophy of "nothing can be straight forward". There's always a terminal trick to install/fix/upgrade/run something and they act smug because they know about it as well as praising how easy it was to do, when in fact it wasn't at all.

Not every Linux user is like that at all but I know a few that are and it confuses me. Perhaps they like the feeling of superiority. :p
 
Last edited:
Dave said:
Same for me. I do a lot of computational work in the field of Engineering, so most of my work is done in Linux as we use and develop in-house software. I switch to Windows sometimes for games and that's it!

I'm basic though, I use OpenSUSE as it's the distribution that I use at work too. Simple, clean and quick - suits me fine!
Click to expand...

Out of interest, what area of Engineering do you do?
 
I love experimenting with Linux distros every few months to see what's new. They've come a heck of a long way in just the 2 years I've been trying them! If you're serious about computers and work in IT then there's no reason you shouldn't know some linux. I even got to use fedora at work because we needed a station that would have a webcam page be displayed and nothing else, no point in using a windows license for that! :D
 
Buchanan0204 said:
Surely Windows 7 coupled with a good AV program and perhaps firewall isn't all that vulnerable with regards to security issues. If anything ever does go majorly wrong, it's only a 15 minute image backup away to getting back full functionality.

I agree though that Linux is far more customisable and has more potential providing you have the knowledge.

It would be great to see some screenshots of your System, customised to your liking etc.
Click to expand...

Well an AV program is just dealing with the symptoms, not the problem. You still get viruses, just if you're lucky you can catch them and deal with them. Linux has security built into practically every line of code, rather than slapped on at the application level.

Linux can be amazing to mess around with if you want to, but you don't have to. The recent incarnations of Ubuntu and Mint in particular are simply fantastic at working out of the box, wonderfully set up and easy to use.

It's not much to look at, considering my liking is a very minimal approach, i might go for KDE or take another crack at E17 if i had a better system but this works brilliantly for me:

73832877.png
 
Superewza said:
Well an AV program is just dealing with the symptoms, not the problem. You still get viruses, just if you're lucky you can catch them and deal with them. Linux has security built into practically every line of code, rather than slapped on at the application level.
Click to expand...

Not sure what you mean by this but surely it's irrelevant? I'm willing to bet the vast majority of viruses come from opening email attachments or downloading dodgy programs/scripts from websites. No amount of OS security will stop that from happening. The OS and browser can try to warn the user (using blacklists, security signatures, spam filters, heuristics, etc.) but if the user gives permission to run a program, then it can run and it can do what it wants (to a degree, it depends on the privilege level of course).

One key issue here is that the average level of "tech savviness" of Linux users is far higher than that of Windows users, so even if there were lots of viruses written for Linux, there'd still be less instances of them doing damage than with those running Windows because they'd be far more likely to identify a website or program as "dodgy".

In terms of low-level OS security though, my Ubuntu virtual machine gets far more security updates every month than Windows 7 (and it barely has any non-default packages on it!) so, really, how secure is it?
 
DragonQ said:
I hate Linux but the only paid-for software on my PC is Office 2007. My copy of Windows was free (MSDNAA) and pretty much everything else on Windows can be done with free software. Works great for me.

Next time my friend that is an avid Mac user moans about Windows, I shall remind him of the time that he had to restart his machine because it stopped accepting terminal commands (today), lol.

I also know someone who writes FORTRAN code in Linux and he was showing me how easy it is. He has a basic text editor that highlights the code so that it's more readable (something that is easily and freely available in Windows also) and uses a command line compiler to build or run his program. Doesn't sound easy to me. FTN95 on a Windows machine with its IDE makes coding FORTRAN so much easier than that but it just seems that some Linux users buy into the philosophy of "nothing can be straight forward". There's always a terminal trick to install/fix/upgrade/run something and they act smug because they know about it as well as praising how easy it was to do, when in fact it wasn't at all.

Not every Linux user is like that at all but I know a few that are and it confuses me. Perhaps they like the feeling of superiority. :p
Click to expand...

if you know what ur doing, the command line can actually be very fast and efficent, however, i wouldn't say its easier, especially if you've not used it much

however, that isn't what linux is, its amazing how many ppl still see linux has a command line os. Get something like ubuntu and u will never see the command line if u dont want to.

for programming theres also plenty of gui based IDE's you can use
 
Cycrow said:
however, that isn't what linux is, its amazing how many ppl still see linux has a command line os. Get something like ubuntu and u will never see the command line if u dont want to.
Click to expand...

Well sorry but Ubuntu is the only Linux OS I've had on my home machine and when I first tried it a year or so ago, I had to use the command line to install VirtualBoxAdditions properly and also to get Firefox to update itself automatically without waiting for official Ubuntu packages (which were only released once a month or something).

Cycrow said:
for programming theres also plenty of gui based IDE's you can use
Click to expand...

Yes there are but that wasn't my point - I was talking about the fact that some Linux users like the fact that certain things are a bit (or very) tricky to do, especially for beginners, presumably because it gives them a sense of superiority.

Again, I'm in no way saying all Linux advocates are like that but it's just my observation from the few that I know.
 
Last edited:
DragonQ said:
In terms of low-level OS security though, my Ubuntu virtual machine gets far more security updates every month than Windows 7 (and it barely has any non-default packages on it!) so, really, how secure is it?
Click to expand...

Security updates of the sort that Microsoft would consider pointless. For instance, the moment a vulnerability that might be exploited by a malicious program is discovered a patch is make and released usually within days. Windows is full of these vulnerabilities and nobody seems to care.

And is it just me, or with Windows do you often tell it to do something but find yourself waiting for it to decide to do either do it, do something else, tell you it can't do it or just randomly go off the idea altogether. Linux just works for me in a way that Windows never did, in that if you tell it to do something it does it... or at the very worst it doesn't :)
 
Ive dabbled with linux quite a bit and still dont enjoy using it. Ive used windows since I can remember and im very at home with it. Windows has always done what I wanted at ease.

I decided to get a old PC out (Core duo E6850 in a shuttle chassis) and isntall fedora 12 on. First issue was drivers but gradually got around it. Then I hit the big stumbling block. Everytime I swapped KVM's it would hard freeze. Eventually this corrupted the OS and I dumped the project. Now Fedora 14 is out I tried again and am hitting the same kind of issues.

I think Linux is a great OS but it just isnt as intuitive as OS's like Windows/MAC.
 
DragonQ said:
Well sorry but Ubuntu is the only Linux OS I've had on my home machine and when I first tried it a year or so ago, I had to use the command line to install VirtualBoxAdditions properly and also to get Firefox to update itself automatically without waiting for official Ubuntu packages (which were only released once a month or something).
Click to expand...

not sure y u needed to use the command line.
althou VirtualBoxAdditions is not really linux, its used to allow it to work better as a VM, installing linux normally, u wouldn't need anything like that.

however, i use ubuntu using VirtualBox, and i never needed to use the command line to install VirtualBoxAdditions.

in VirtualBox, just added the Additions, which auto mounted it as a drive in linux and opened it, then double clicked on the install script and it was done, not exactly difficult

and never had a problem with Firefox either, never had to touch the command line to get it working or update and installed addons, etc.

however, i do use the command line a lot anyway because i prefer it for some things.

using apt-get is just so much easier than navigating through menus to install something
 
Cycrow said:
in VirtualBox, just added the Additions, which auto mounted it as a drive in linux and opened it, then double clicked on the install script and it was done, not exactly difficult
Click to expand...

Well yes that's the method I used the last time I set it up but initially, this did not work correctly (getting mouse integration and everything) and the terminal was needed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom