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Of course, I love Linux! Why would I use anything else?

9 (10%)

Yeah, Linux's nice. Windows (or Mac OS) still has its uses though.

46 (51.1%)

Linux... Meh... Tried it, what's the big deal?

7 (7.8%)

Linux? Wuzzat?

3 (3.3%)

Bleh. I could use it if I had to I guess...

9 (10%)

Linux? Screw that. I'm sticking with Windows/Mac OS!

16 (17.8%)

Total Members Voted: 90

[SolarShado]

I'm a huge fan of Open-Source software in general, and especially Linux.

Currently my favorite distro is Arch. I tried an Ubuntu derivative (Xubuntu), but found it a little too "newbie-friendly" for my taste. (Updates should not silently overwrite config files! That could be another entire post/topic...)
I've built both a nice laptop system and a (relatively) simple home server using Arch. I'm still fine-tuning both, but getting each functional was fairly straight-forward.

The main thing I like about Linux: options. There's seldom only one package that'll do what you want, and virtually everything can be configured via a plain-text file (which often has it's own manual page). Also, bash pwns CMD so hard it's not even funny.

I'm not sure if I can completely abandon Windows though... 7 is by far the best yet, and the sheer amount of games*cough*software available is kinda hard to ignore.

So, any other Bay12 Linux users out there? I know there's a few from the Desktops thread
What distro(s) do you prefer? What's your favorite thing about it and Linux in general?

[Fayrik]

I think I was on the verge of moving over to Linux... And then I found C#, and developed an active interest in Windows programming.

Debian was always my favourite Distro, but I found it a little hard to configure a few things like the Xorg stuff.
But Ironically, I had the same problem with Ubuntu as you. Everything seemed a bit prepackaged.

However, this may be unrelated, and I'm completely green on the subject here.. (Don't get me wrong, I've used bash, but only in a limited capacity.)
But, isn't bash more on par with Windows PowerShell than CMD? (I could be completely wrong though.)

[Sir Pseudonymous]

I used Ubuntu for a while, my second year of college. I had to use an old livedisk to get access to my harddrive at one point, because windows wouldn't boot. After I'd gotten what I wanted backed up, and reinstalled windows, I went ahead and installed Ubuntu in a second partition. I actually knew what I was doing with a bash shell for some time, after studying it and messing around. Don't remember any of it now, though, I stopped using linux after I no longer had access to the campus wifi (on account of being out of class), since I can't get online any other way while running linux.

[Bauglir]

-snip-

[SolarShado]

But, isn't bash more on par with Windows PowerShell than CMD? (I could be completely wrong though.)

I haven't tinkered with PowerShell (bash via Cygwin instead), but bash is pretty well the standard vanilla shell; I've yet to see a distro that didn't include it in the base install packages.

[Sir Finkus]

I actually just installed linux (again, ubuntu 10.10, but I've tried everything from gentoo to opensuse).  The main thing bothers me about linux as a desktop is that everything seems slightly broken.  The standard "support" response is either "run xyz in the terminal", which has about a 25% chance of working, or "that software is shit, use xyz obscure shit instead".  At the command line it is king though.  I'd really love to like linux more, but it needs some work.

[Murphy]

I actually just installed linux (again, ubuntu 10.10, but I've tried everything from gentoo to opensuse).  The main thing bothers me about linux as a desktop is that everything seems slightly broken.  The standard "support" response is either "run xyz in the terminal", which has about a 25% chance of working, or "that software is shit, use xyz obscure shit instead".  At the command line it is king though.  I'd really love to like linux more, but it needs some work.

Totally what he said.
Doesn't make Windows better for me though.

[ChairmanPoo]

I moved to ubuntu 10.04 this summer, and so far I am happy with it. Granted, it's less gameworthy than windows, but wine compensates this somewhat. And for my purposes it suffices.
I do use acrobat reader for linux, however, because I have found the open source equivalents wanting.

[ILikePie]

Gave Gentoo a shot sometime in July, it's incredible. Gentoo is very much like Arch, only the package manager compiles everything from source. It also features no installer at all. You do everything from installing the precompiled system, to building your kernel (Yes, custom, barebone kernels are awesome). The package manager is also great, it takes a while for newer packages to get accepted onto the tree, but there tons and tons of stuff. It even allows you to download apt-get, dpkg, packman, and yum.

[Sir Finkus]

Gave Gentoo a shot sometime in July, it's incredible. Gentoo is very much like Arch, only the package manager compiles everything from source. It also features no installer at all. You do everything from installing the precompiled system, to building your kernel (Yes, custom, barebone kernels are awesome). The package manager is also great, it takes a bit for newer packages to get accepted, but there tons and tons of stuff. It even allows you to download apt-get, dpkg, packman, and yum.

Yeah, Gentoo is fun.  There's something magical about downloading a few tarballs, extracting them onto your newly partitioned hard drive, and then chrooting into the installation.

[ILikePie]

Indeed, it's kinda like LFS, which is also something I have to try. Favorite is part is definitely the boot speed. I used a modular kernel (One that supports all hardware) for two weeks before compiling my own. The beast boots in maybe ten seconds (it takes a while to decompress an lzma archive :-P), I thought it was broken at first.

Before installing Gentoo the terminal used to scare me stiff. I didn't rm (del, to be exact) files because I was afraid I was removing the wrong stuff, and navigating was confusing. After spending a day using the terminal only, it becomes much easier to use.

[Phmcw]

Ubuntu, and debian. Right now i stick with ubuntu, and use it to work.
i actually deployed it in a small enterprise, and it's doing all right.

I cannot find one advantage of windows against Linux that isn't an eventual driver problem.
I may have been lucky, but every installation I've done have been successful without any complication (one exption now that I think of it, but that's still better than windows. At least tree, long,  bothersome installations over the last years.)
And, usually, I don't use command line.

[Virex]

I'd like to try it once, but I currently lack a spare partition on my PC and I'm afraid to overwrite vital data if I make a new one...

[SolarShado]

I'd like to try it once, but I currently lack a spare partition on my PC and I'm afraid to overwrite vital data if I make a new one...

As long as you've got free space you should be able to shrink a partition. Windows 7 can do it natively from its partition manager (maybe vista too, but I don't think so). Otherwise, boot a live CD (most Linux installers are now) and run gparted. Excellent general purpose partition management utility.

[Muz]

I don't like Linux because it doesn't let me run a lot of games. And a lot of the applications for it are ugly.
I don't like Windows (Vista) because it takes a while to compile C code and runs EVERYTHING slowly.


Yeah, that's my honest opinion. There's nothing really beautiful about operating systems. They're a tool like a hammer or truck or a battleship. It's all about how poorly they do a job.