30 Days With Linux

[dbarrow]

http://consumer.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI5OCwxLCxoY29uc3VtZXI=

[H] Consumer has just spent 30 days with Linux to see what it has to offer the average PC enthusiast and the results just might surprise you. Take a moment to click on over and see what we thought of our month long journey with Ubuntu Linux. ...

[mommalina]

From the 30 Days with Linux article (Conclusions/Bottom Line)
http://consumer.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI5OCwxLCxoY29uc3VtZXI=

I'm certainly going to put a Windows XP partition on Whakataruna for the
near future - but I've decided to keep the bulk of my hard drive - and
most of my day-to-day operations, in Linux. XP is going to be my OS for
gaming, audio loop editing, and Photoshop, but for everything else,
Linux has transformed into an attractive, utility-driven, customizable, and
generally easy-to-use interface that takes all of the virtues and none of the
faults from the other major OSes and gives it to the consumer for free.
It looks like if you are smart enough and patient enough you can have the best
of both worlds! ..... as it should be. .. :)

Lina

[Tortanick]

Quite a nice little review, I think his first major problem was to install 64 bit, I'm not touching that untill its standard. His latter problems with flash show why.

Comments as I read through:

"Whakataruna." is years newer than my Linux desktop, I'm sure a few people here can post stories of the steem powered machines they've ran puppy on. And that's with linux's optional GUI

The comment about APT on page two is inacurate. APT is a program created by the debian project, its not also a database. He's thinking of the Debian Repository that APT is used to access. Ubuntu has its own repository. It also leaves me with the impression that APT is used to download programs from their creators websites, that is only a rare case based on license. Normally Debian, Ubuntu, or others store all the programs in their offical repositories. He also severly overesitmates the amount of software you can get through apt. its 1000% of what any one person will use. but 0.1% of whats avalible. (numbers are a wild guess)

On page 3: Xorg.conf is not a hidden file, its found in the /etc part of the filesystem. /etc contains text configuration files that you are _supposed_ to edit by hand. That said in many cases /etc could be better documented.

Quite a bit of trouble with MP3, I never had any, whats to blame? Ubuntu? Gnome? his instructions? ahh well. Works for me and only takes a second to setup.

Firefox and Iceweasel, page 6, Its not multiple mozilla based applications that are the problem, its that Firefox and Iceweasel are the _same_ program. its a long story, sufise to say firefox and iceweasel should be the only two browsers with this problem.

Can't you install flash with synaptic on Ubuntu? you can on debian.

page 8. 100% CPU never happens? happens all the time here, oh wait. Pentium 3 ;) Still got to Love the Linux Kernel, 100%CPU never caused an error, and the system is normally quite responsive (one fixed memory leak resulted in Linux deleating a gig of swap memory, froze the system but it allways returned after 5min). Of course the app that needs 110% of the CPU won't be but then, thats the processor's fault for being so outdated.

The guy REALLY should have revied amarok.

and finally his quote in conclusions (read that page if nothing else) sums up Linux
However, for those who stick it out throughout the learning curve period, the rewards are great.

[jcampi]

dbarrow, I read through much of the article and found it very interesting and useful. The writer makes some very good points and I learned a lot about Linux. I think I'll stick with Windows XP until I dabble with Vista in the near future.

[fleamailman]

points I felt missed
- how malware free linux is
- how if one system crashes the other means that one is still able to connect to the internet
- how easy it is to configure dualboot on an xp running system
- the problem of finding the drivers for the linux of choice