Linux flavors

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 12:45 pm

What's currently the best flavor of Linux that is available for free download?

Post by **TPRJones** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 12:53 pm

grape

DoctorChaos · Post by **DoctorChaos** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 12:54 pm

My personal favorite is Debian. People complain the installer isn't very friendly. I don't see it. There are a lot of good variations of Debian. One of the most popular is Knoppix. It runs off a live disk and you can load it onto your hard drive.

I would discourage you from running Gentoo as it requires you to compile everything. I heard stories of installs starting at 4 hours.

As for a best flavor, it all depends on what you want to do. For general desktop, I'd go with Knoppix.

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 12:57 pm

I want a basic file server capable of emulating windows for certain applications (Wine?), and I'd like the hard drive to be observable from under different (WinXP) machines on the network as a mapped drive.

DoctorChaos · Post by **DoctorChaos** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 1:00 pm

Any linux distribution can be a file server. Wine does ok with emulation (never tried it). Samba allows you to map linux drives as shared windows drives.

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 1:12 pm

Samba is an app that runs on Linux?

DoctorChaos · Post by **DoctorChaos** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 2:15 pm

Yep, Samba is an app that runs on Linux. Sorry about that

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 3:15 pm

I haven't played with Linux since Redhat version.... 4? back in 1999. I'm well out of the loop.

Paul · Post by **Paul** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 3:39 pm

I've fiddled with Knoppix.
A couple weekends ago my friend game me a CD with something similiar to Knoppix, in that it runs off the CD and doesn't touch the hard drive. I forget what version it is though.

My home PC dual-boots to 98 and XP Pro. I have a partition I planned on putting Linux on, but I never got around to figuring out which version or how to install it without f-ing up my Windows installations.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 7:02 pm

Avoid fucking Ubuntu like it's the plague. Cos it fucking is.

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 7:21 pm

Tell me more about Knoppix.

I gather that I could do a WinXP install on my hard drive... and when I wanted I could have a bootable CD that would launch the Linux OS, and whichever apps I wanted to run... and from there I could see my HD on the network, run my WinXP emulator, and stuff?

DoctorChaos · Post by **DoctorChaos** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 7:51 pm

Essentially. There are obviously some performance hits because it's running off a CD.

The version I'm using 3.6 or 3.7 was the last one on CD. It's now on DVD. So it has a butt-load of applications. The only pain in the ass running it off the CD is remounting the drives read-write if you have to write to the drive.

Paul · Post by **Paul** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 8:37 am

Avoid fucking Ubuntu like it's the plague. Cos it fucking is.

That's the one my friend gave me.
I booted to it last night, and played Connect Four.

I didn't fiddle around with it too much. What's bad about it?
It says "Ubuntu: Linux for human beings," and I'm a human being, so why isn't it for me?

Edited By Paul on 1130852315

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 11:26 am

--Paul wrote:
--Malcolm wrote:Avoid fucking Ubuntu like it's the plague. Cos it fucking is.

That's the one my friend gave me.
I booted to it last night, and played Connect Four.

I didn't fiddle around with it too much. What's bad about it?
It says "Ubuntu: Linux for human beings," and I'm a human being, so why isn't it for me?

Ubuntu + KDE = More crashes than a John Woo-Michael Bay-Jerry Bruckheimer flick.

Edited By TheCatt on 1265290886

Post by **TPRJones** » Thu Feb 04, 2010 12:05 am

GORDON wrote:What's currently the best flavor of Linux that is available for free download?

For a desktop system, Linux Mint is without equal.

I've finally made the leap into Linux for reals. No more Windows for me at all (except maybe for iTunes to synch with my iPod, but I'm hoping to lick that wrinkle this weekend). And after messing around with a dozen different distros, I can say with confidence that Linux Mint is the most user friendly by far.

It's based on Ubuntu, which as of 9.10 is pretty good (use GNOME, not KDE, because KDE bites). But the GUI interface is much improved, and you vary rarely need to actually use the terminal. I still do because I like terminal, but I have yet to try to do something in terminal that I couldn't have done in the GUI. And I've been messing around with setting up some complex stuff.

My next tasks are to get Steam (and all the games) running, and to solve that iPod problem. If iTunes ends up being the only reason left to have Windows, I may just go ahead and jailbreak and skip iTunes, too. Which would help with my Apple guilt, I guess.

Edited By TPRJones on 1265259971

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Thu Feb 04, 2010 1:42 am

First off...

use GNOME, not KDE, because KDE bites

Amen, brother. KDE = Krashes Damn near Everytime.

Secondly, how's Mint compare to Gentoo? What're the big differences?

Post by **TPRJones** » Thu Feb 04, 2010 7:08 am

Gentoo is one of the ones I didn't try. The thing about everything requiring local compiling didn't sound like the sort of user-friendly experience I was looking for.

It's a neat idea, and if I ever end up with hardware that just doesn't work under any other flavor of Linux I'll give it a go, but that seemed like more hassle than necessary for now.

What do you like/hate most about it? Perhaps I can give you the Linux Mint take on those issues.

Post by **TPRJones** » Mon Feb 15, 2010 8:04 am

Well, I'm about to give up on Linux for now again, or at least just keep dual-booting. The problem is games. There are plenty of games that work well under Wine or VM, but not all of the ones I want to play.

Bottom line: Linux is now good for Granny, but still not there yet for gamers.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Mon Feb 15, 2010 1:43 pm

TPRJones wrote:The problem is games. There are plenty of games that work well under Wine or VM, but not all of the ones I want to play.
Bottom line: Linux is now good for Granny, but still not there yet for gamers.

It's going to be a loooooooooooooong time before you see parity in PC-Linux game developers.

EDIT : Either that, or a huge software/hardware switch.

Edited By Malcolm on 1266259456

Post by **TPRJones** » Mon Feb 15, 2010 2:05 pm

Malcolm wrote:It's going to be a loooooooooooooong time before you see parity in PC-Linux game developers.

Oh, I don't expect support from the developers. Before then we'll have better Wine/VM solutions instead. It won't be that much longer, either.

Things like the Steam Client and Evil Genius and Torchlight just install and run automagically with no extra work at all, just as if you were still running Windows (well, a non-existant theoretical Windows that actually works right all the time).

TF2 should also work, but needs a little tweaking. I haven't taken the time to poke at it yet, but it did install and run fine as-is, I just can't see servers. That'll be fixable.

The specific game I'm currently enamored with is Star Trek Online. So far it's not working yet. Although someone has gotten it working. But I do miss the just-install-it-and-go of Windows. On the other hand no more BSoDs is nice.