Linux

[Lord Winter]

Any Lunix users here? I'm thinking of switching over from windows. How does it compare? Advantages disadvantages? Hard to set up?

[Whacker]

Paging Blodrast

[Blodrast]

Paging Blodrast

LOL!, I actually laughed out loud like an idiot, thank you, Whacker.
Right, so how much time do you have to read this ? K, I'll try to keep it smaller than novel-size.

To be completely fair, in case Whacker's post didn't make it clear, I'm personally biased towards Linux (actually, it's more like against Windows), but I'll do my best to be as objective as I can here, okay ?
And, of course, everybody else feel free to chime in and share your experiences.

I'll try to break this down into sections, based on some criteria that I believe will be meaningful to you. It may or may not be adequate, since I don't know what you want, what kind of user you are, and what kind of tasks you want your OS to perform for you.


GAMING

- if this is important to you, then it's Windows all the way. Yes, there are certain games that can run under linux, but it's only a subset - not big enough, in my opinion. There are 2 major ways you can get them to run in linux, one involves wine, the other one involves cedega. The amount of tinkering that you may have to do varies from almost nothing, to potentially quite a bit. It really depends on what platform you're running, and especially what game you're interested in.
For wine, you may want to check this out: Debunking Wine Myths, it'll give you some idea of issues with wine.

Bottom line for this section, is my first sentence: if you're really into gaming, then there's no dispute here.

EASE OF USE

(Please do not confuse this with maintenance)
I'd say they're both equally easy to use. You have the two major desktop environments, Gnome and KDE, that are perfectly customizable (sufficiently for most people), and as easy to use as Windows. You also get a bunch of preinstalled applications, more than you'll probably ever use anyway.
A point that matters for some people (myself included) is that on Linux, as opposed to Windows, you can choose to customize the interface within a huge range: you want all the bells and whistles of 3D-cubes or gliding and fading windows, animated icons, and what not ? You can have it. You want a spartan GUI that is fast as hell, simple, and just does stuff, without any eye-candy ? You can have it. You want anything in between ? You can have it.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you are the type of user that wants lots of eye-candy, so maybe you wanna check out some screenshots of Compiz, which I suppose is the spiffiest window manager (read: GUI, although that's an oversimplification) these days.

DRIVER ISSUES

This will really depend on your hardware. It's pretty well known that the driver manufacturers favor Microsoft, so sometimes drivers will be an issue. Usually, it is a problem for really new hardware. If you bought a machine that has some boards in it that have only been on the market for a couple of months, you're quite likely to have trouble with getting them to work properly under Linux. However, this is most commonly the case (as far as I know) with wireless stuff, and, strangely enough, with graphic cards (but with these latter not nearly as bad).
Driver coverage with Windows is far better. With Linux, the community does eventually pick up, but it might be a while.
If it looks bleak, let me assure you that it's not as bad as it seems - most of the times you can find some compatible driver, or some older version, or some workaround. But it can definitely be taxing, and a hassle.
With Windows, most of the time drivers just work, and are available. The situation is definitely better than with Linux.


INSTALLATION

This will depend on which Linux distribution you'll choose. Some offer friendlier interfaces, some are more spartan. That is not a good thing, and I consider it a long-standing weakness of Linux.
I'm sure you've done Windows installations, which are trivial - or, in any case, if something doesn't work, you're stranded anyway.
With Linux it can definitely be overwhelming in the beginning, because you simply don't know what to do. See, one of the principles of Linux is that it allows the user to do whatever the user wants, even if it's apparently absurd, or useless - simply because the user wants to. This is a strength, and a weakness at the same time, because if the first thing you see is an installation screen that offers you 8 options, 7 of which look like they're written in a foreign language...

Anyway. Ubuntu seems to have recently gained a lot of fame for being very user-friendly, including the installation process.

I'm not gonna try to beat around the bush here: installation can be very much a challenge, especially if you run into driver problems. However, once you've gone through it, you'll actually feel you accomplished something. (Opinions differ on whether that's a good thing or not. ).

But go with a friendly distro, and you should be fine.


MAINTENANCE

I will assume you're familiar with how this works under Windows.
It's pretty similar under Linux these days: people update programs (packages) all the time, and store them online. With a couple of clicks or a command line, you can keep your box up-to-date all the time - you can automate this, as well.
I'd say it's a tie between the two, equally easy or difficult, and perhaps slightly more useful and more choice on Linux (I can elaborate, if you care), but this might not matter to a large percentage of users.


STABILITY

This is a no-brainer, I'm sorry: Linux is much, much more stable. Let me know when you've heard folks that didn't have to reboot their Windows box for a year or so. Since it's always more fair to talk about first-hand experiences, I'll tell you about mine: my linux box at work usually gets rebooted in two cases: once a year, when they do maintenance of power equipment in the whole building, and they shut down power to everything; and when the cleaning lady trips on my power cord.
Before the last power maintenance, my box had almost 11 months of uptime.

In comparison, Windows - aw hell, who am I kidding, there IS no comparison.

Just so you don't believe that this is a statistically-irrelevant case, being a single event, I also use a bunch of other linux boxes - many of them. None of them are EVER rebooted, except when people who work on them need another kernel (which won't be your case, if you're a casual user).

SECURITY
Linux wins this one by far. Upset about all those botnets, viruses, trojans, nasty email attachments, and other malware ? None of that on Linux. To be fair, there are two caveats here: first, while the OS itself does come with decent security features, this is Linux; in other words, it's up to you, the user, to decide exactly how much security you want. This may be somewhat challenging at times. The second thing is this: the market share of an OS DOES have an impact on the number of exploits that are created for it.

On the other hand Linux has the advantage of being open-source, which translates into: when an exploit is uncovered, the community patches it promptly. With Windows, Microsoft will fix it if and when they feel like it, depending on how many customers it affects, and how serious they consider it is. Also, because Linux is open-source, this means lots and lots of people look at, and work with, the source code; consequently, the code makes it out only when a large number of people who know what they are doing consider it is mature enough; with Windows, well, Vista is a shining example of a product that was released simply because of marketing requirements, regardless of how finished and mature the product was.

Let me conclude this section with a question: what code do you put more trust in: one that's produced in a fixed interval of time by people who have to meet deadlines (i.e., by this date, the code WILL be released, no matter how stable it is, pretty much), and is being developed by a relatively small number of people, and only those people ever get to see the code; or code that's produced mostly by people doing this because they enjoy it, because they are passionate about it, and code that has been tested and reviewed by potentially millions of people ?

TECHNICAL SUPPORT

I am not familiar with how much help you can get from Microsoft on the phone. They do have their online Knowledge Base, and there is some stuff in there, and there are also forums online.
In my opinion, there is much, much more information and troubleshooting and advice online for linux, from installation and maintenance, to the most obscure issues - if you've run into it, rest assured that a bunch of other people have, too, and by now they've already found a solution and a work-around.
But you can probably survive just fine with both OSes.


PERFORMANCE

No. Here I kinda tricked you. I'm not even gonna try to compare them, because it'd be like comparing apples and oranges. The problem is agreeing on some criteria by which we define performance. This is NOT a trivial issue.
If you have some criteria in mind, I can definitely tell you my experiences and my opinion.
Besides, there are so many Linux distros, which one do you compare, and is that a fair comparison ?
As a rule, Linux distros give you the choice of not hogging your system, and are (can be) much less demanding in terms of resources. With Windows, there's not much choice. But that's as far as I'll go concerning performance-related issues.

I'll stop here with the (somewhat) specific details, because this post is getting long, and I'm sure you've already fallen asleep, but I'll add a few more generic things.


In my opinion, Linux has a few extremely important strengths (and I'll skip over the more philosophical ones):

- variety: wikipedia says there are over 300 distros of Linux. Why is that a strength ? Because they all have their strengths and weaknesses, they are all particularly good at something. If you want to have an OS that's good for "X", odds are you'll find a Linux distro that's specialized in "X".

- freedom of choice: this partially overlaps with the previous point, but they are not identical. The basic idea is that you can get pretty much whatever you want, and in any way you want it. You're free to choose among them.
Another aspect of freedom of choice is that, as a rule, most distros that I am aware of are designed from scratch with the principle of empowering the user; in other words, let the user decide what they want. This is in complete contrast to Windows, where the OS is extremely intrusive, and most of the time makes the decision for you (and is bound to get it wrong at least _some_ of the time). Linux, on the other hand, usually lets you choose. Including from some choices that may brick your system. But hey, if that's what you want to do, Linux is only happy to assist you.
There IS a downside to this, of course - a lot of people don't know what they want, or which choices are better in which cases, so they prefer to let the OS decide for them. But then you have to live with the cases where the OS does whatever it wants, without giving you a choice. If you disagree, too bad.
In other words, the problem is that you need a bit of knowledge to figure out what you want, and how you want it done.

- customizability: this may not be obvious to you in the beginning, and it depends on what kind of user you are, but, because it's all about open source, you'll be able to change things exactly in the way you want to (although, to be fair, whether you have the know-how is another matter). Or at least somebody else who does have the know-how can, and you can use their work.

- last, but not least: it's FREE .


I'll stop here for now, but keep in mind that this is a veeeery generic overview of the issues at hand. I can go into a lot more detail, so if you have any specific questions, go ahead. And always keep in mind that to figure out what is the best OS for you, first you must figure out what you want your OS to do for you, and what you want to use it for.

[Xiahou]

I'm a Linux tinkerer, by no means a guru. I run a server at home with Mandriva 2007 as my distro and KDE as my desktop environment. I've got it running as a web server, print server, file server, NT domain controller and also use it as a general workstation for some gaming or when I don't feel like turning my XP box on.

Blodrast pretty much covered everything, but I'll try to add a little more nonetheless. If being able to run every single game out there is important to you, stick with Windows- but with Linux, you certainly wouldn't have to give up on gaming altogether. There are lots of native Linux games and many Windows games run with Wine, ect. You can check Wine's AppDB to get an idea- anything that's rated Platinum or Gold should run pretty painlessly.

I think the ideal situation for someone wanting to test the Linux waters would be to set it up on a separate box to see how well you like it without hosing your Windows machine. Of course, that isn't always possible for everyone. I'm very pleased with my Linux box, but for me, it isn't ready to replace my XP desktop.

[Banquo's Ghost]

Hey, you know Lord Winter might not have made a typo - maybe he wants LUnix advice?

[Lemur]

No idea if this will be of interest or not, but I just chanced across a good article about directory structure in Linux. Wish this had been around the first time I dove in.

[caravel]

There is an abundance of info on Linux on the net as well as forums for most distros, as well as wikis and howtos. Sometimes you just have to look for this info and not just plunge in impatiently - as I am prone to doing myself. I found that once I had learned some patience with Linux and stopped thinking in "windows mode" that things became a lot clearer. Getting hold of a decent book helped as well.

As far as Linux goes I'm pretty much shoulder to shoulder with Blodrast and Xiahou in that this is an accessible, solid, secure and totally free OS that is available to all that have the patience determination to persevere with something that is so clearly not Windows.

[Lord Winter]

Thanks Blodrast a few questions

Would you notice much of a jump in performance on a lower end machine compared to windows?

What Distro do orgahs here use and what do they think about them

Finilly does Itunes work via wine or anyother method is there some other program that works with ipods?

[Blodrast]

Thanks Blodrast a few questions

Would you notice much of a jump in performance on a lower end machine compared to windows?

Define "performance", please... I talked about this in my post above, towards the end, in the "Performance" section. The general rule is that you can choose to have all the bells and whistles, and in that case of course the OS will use up a lot of resources, or you can choose to have fewer bells and whistles, and the OS will use fewer resources.

The big desktop environments, Gnome and KDE, are / can be as much a resource hog as Windows is. The main difference is that you can choose exactly how many resources to enable (to a larger extent than just using/not using, say, Aero).

However, as a rule, on average, I'd say that a machine with modest resources would have a much easier time running a Linux/Unix OS than Windows, yes.
Remember, this is an OS where one doesn't even need a graphical interface, and can do everything from the command line, if one chooses so (and this is a very common case with servers). Naturally, you will use a GUI, but even so, yes, I would argue that fewer resources are needed to have a smooth-running OS than with Windows.

What Distro do orgahs here use and what do they think about them

The other members will speak for themselves, naturally. As for me, I'm using Fedora at home (dual-boot with windows though, since I do play games occasionally), and Debian and Ubuntu at work. All three of them are major distros, and I would advise going with a popular distro first, since it will be easier to find help and/or fix common issues, and there will be plenty of support (as opposed to some very specialized, obscure distro).

All three of these are popular for good reasons, and you can't really go wrong with any of them. I would maybe recommend Ubuntu, since it seems the most user-friendly of all. But really, the differences between the three are not relevant to you at this point - e.g., I don't think you care that certain configuration files are called differently, or located in different places, or have a different format.

Finilly does Itunes work via wine or anyother method is there some other program that works with ipods?

Good question, and I don't know the answer to that one. Never tried, never looked into it.
iTunes doesn't natively run on Linux/Unix. There are alternatives on Linux, like, for example, Amarok. However, if you want to buy music from Apple, afaik, you can only do that through iTunes. However, it does support iPods - check out its features: http://amarok.kde.org/features.

Somewhat related, though, is this: you can use Rockbox (see if your particular ipod is supported). It will replace the original firmware, and give you extra functionality (mainly, you'll be able to play a whole bunch of other formats on your ipod, which may or may not be relevant/useful to you, depending on your digital music library).

[Xiahou]

What Distro do orgahs here use and what do they think about them

I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva for years now and have generally been very happy with it. I used to use Redhat, but decided to try something different when I did a reinstall and never went back. I've also played around with a Kubuntu bootable CD on my laptop- seems nice, but I always end up going back to what's familiar.

That said, I think distros are very much a matter of personal taste/needs. If you need a direction, here is a simple questionnaire that could give you some idea of a good fit.

[caravel]

Hmm the last time I took that test a year or two back, Ubuntu was the best for me, but now it says:
1) Fedora
2) OpenSuSE
3) Ubuntu
4) Mandriva.

I've used Mandriva (Mandrake) in the past but could never get on with KDE. I prefer Gnome by a mile. I've also tried Fedora last year but I'll probably stick with my current distro Ubuntu 7.09.

[Banquo's Ghost]

I used to use Mandrake (before the Mandriva change) and it was very easy to get to grips with. I played with Fedora and before that, Red Hat too, and both were nicely presented and professional.

In my more enthusiastic days I also set up a box with Debian, which is a wonderful distro but not for the new (at least not in those days). I lost interest when I actually needed to be productive, rather than find fascinating new tangents.

I hated SuSE, even though it was one of the first boxed sets available in retail stores here.