Whats the point of linux ?

For me, I prefer the user interface with linux, as in you are not forced to use something you don't like. Don't like kde try another ect. Should mention, I dislike windows UI and how it normally behaves.

Generally few programs are able to take down the os when they crash, so far only vmware managed to kill X, and then its just X not the rest of OS. While programs do tend to crash in both os's but linux handles it better.

Again like pople mentioned malware/viruses are not really a problem, unless someone knows you are running a flavour of linux and tailors for it, but then again you generally find these sort of things on dodgy sites. :p

I use linux for browsing the web/router/nas/media player/coding at home, its currently running on a low power 1.2ghz chip with a gig of ram, and is absolutely suitable for the task. Some time later il put together my old monolith which will have windows to play a game I like.

Generally the argument of windows/linux boils down to how much you know about upkeeping the system, when I was running windows many years ago I only ever got a malware virus once, and thats it. Otherwise the system was only reinstalled when I woke up one day feeling bored. It was stable, but that was because I knew how to keep it stable.
 
platypus said:
Sorry to hijack, could you provide an idiots based guide to getting that up and running?
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What do you want to do with it? What capture cards do you want to use? how do you want to use it? Will it all be one one system? Will you have a combined server and client machine? Will there be multiple clients? Are you using a monitor or HDTV? Do you already have all the hardware you'll use or are you interested in building a media system just for this?

Start a new thread and we'll have a chat.
 
There's the Mono project funded by Novell that has implemented a darn good copy of the .NET runtimes for Linux. Monodevelop is the IDE for it. for the most part all code written for Mono will work on both Mono and Windows. Code written for Windows may require some attention to work in Mono right now. Check out the website for details.

For the purpose of intellectual exploration you might want to check out some more Linux-native languages. If you haven't experimented with them you should check out Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, or maybe even Lisp or Haskell.
 
GarethDW said:
Didn't know there were no iPod drivers for *nix... Isn't OSX based on a version of BSD? If so, are their OSX drivers open source? If so, I'd have thought someone would have ported it across to *nix by now.
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There ARE *nix drivers. Sadly, they **** up my album artwork, no matter how hard I've tried to build a workaround for it. It then takes another hour or so to re-sync the whole thing through windows, which is an annoyance to say the least. I am working on a fix, but I haven't had any breakthroughs yet, still trying to get Ubuntu Hardy Heron to run on my PS3, getting close to giving up on that though! (Thanks for the note about the sig, it looked OK on the work iMacs, but yeah, squashy and crap at home!)

JK
 
For your PS3 you'd be much better off with a distro that is better supported on PowerPC processors. Fedora or Debian are good choices. Ubuntu's PowerPC support is unofficial and extremely poor in my experience (which is more extensive than I'd like to admit :p).
 
lol, I know it's PPC support is awful, I'm using the latest cell optimised kernel, and I've been playing around for some time with it. Got Gutsy working great, (minus bluetooth support), so it's more of an ongoing project rather than a working machine. It's a fun thing to play with, not nearly powerful enough to use as a main machine. I've just been getting stressed as I can't find out why the hell this release has died on me!
 
After trying linux on my laptop i am starting to quite like it, but i still have to have windows installed simply for some programs to work. Like for my OU courses i need to use a program called FirstClass, which is a program used to communicate with my tutors and other course members, the problem is its not fully supported on linux.

Also i am bit of an impatient person, so linux being able to boot faster then xp on my laptop is great (even if i leave the OS selectrion screen idle during boot up, causing a 10 sec countdown till ubuntu auto runs its faster then when i had only XP on my laptop). Shutdown is also faster (although at one time i had a bit of a buggy shutdown on ubuntu, i think because i had a shared folder mounted at the time of the shutdown), which is usefull on my laptop as its annoying to wait for the laptop to shutdown so i can just pick it up and go. With windows if i try to close the screen while waiting for it to shutdown it just goes into sleep mode and doesnt shutdown properly, forcing me to wait ages.
 
I will probably go back to a dual boot or 2 pc (with a kvm) and use Windows for some games & to test out my web design hobbyness in IE, but I pretty much completely switched to Linux for about 3-4 years and am having a bit of a break with OSX on my Mactop until I build my new desktop pc :)

I suppose the open-source-ness of Linux just really suits my personality, anywho:

Linux:
- free, I guess in that it seems to me to be more of a shared (without exclusion) ip where anyone can contribute or take it to their own creative dimensions as they like :)
- huge amount of free quality software to go with it
- good fun if I feel like messing about under the hood (Gentoo for me :))
- great community, very helpful & enthusiastic
- extremely easy to maintain (i.e. great package management solutions - Gentoo at least, update your installed applications easily and not just the os :))
- I prefer some of the light window managers to the xp & Vista desktop environments (just my preference, I tend to prefer a more minimalist desktop)

- free - it's important - an OEM version of Windows can be around £50, and some people will feel they have to pay however much a year on anti-virus software, although I accept most pre-built pc's will come with Windows pre-installed so this point won't be valid for everyone.

At the end of the day, I like Windows, OSX and Linux for different things and can see where all 3 os's (and others) benefit from competition. If I had to pick one OS it would be Linux but I don't see the point in excluding other OS's if you have them and have a use for them
 
I bought my macbook in June and I have to say I think Ubuntu is now better. Well, let me phrase that a different way. For my needs ubuntu does it better than OS X, it may well be because I haven't spent a lot of time learning mac os x.

Just feel that the macbook was abit of a waste. It is small and sexy looking though. Need to get ubuntu installed on it at xmas..... anyway im rambling... hehe
 
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