Linux What is this Linux thing?

Well you have to think along the lines of a lack of DirectX gaming and any (generally speaking) native/branded apps.
So MSOffice would be replaced (generally) by OpenOffice, MSN would be replaced by another client, so on and so fourth.

A lot of popular open source apps such as Firefox will already have a native client.

 

Nothing.

 

But like the guy said all Microsoft programs. Also there aren't many games available on Linux are there there all 'Games for Windows'. :'(

 

Oh sorry I looked at the link after my post. Thanks for the great reply. That might come in handy since Vista on my laptop decided that it wasn't genuine.

 

Linux rocks

I use it on all my systems, I don't think I'll ever go back to windows.

 

My main rig dual-boots between Vista 64bit and Fedora 10 64bit, been a Linux user for about 2 years now and love it - I only really boot into Vista when I want to play Flight Sim X or Football Manager 2009, or use my webcam (which annoyingly is one of the only gripes I have with Pidgin).

My work rig runs Fedora 10 and folds 24/7 with the SMP client, I run an XP VirtualBox VM when I need to use Windows and have a non-caching Squid proxy set up to auth with our MS ISA proxy, so all I do is tell stuff to point to 127.0.0.1 for proxy. Saves a lot of hassle .

I wrote a blog a year or so ago on my experiences of switching from Windows to Linux, may come in handy for some people: http://www.cwatson.org/blog/2008/01/10/switching-to-linux-from-windows

 

I dual boot Ubuntu 9.04 x64 and Vista Ultimate 64, but I'm spending less and less time in Windows out of choice. All of ID software's back catalogue is available on linux as well as a few others. I've managed to get Oblivion running in Wine ok, so I'm not missing out on much, plus, it is free so there's nothing to loose.

 

I pretty much only use my home PC to play games, and as such I like being able just to plonk in the game CD and have it run as you'd expect it to without having to rely on wine or fiddling configs to get it going.

Having said that, I run several linux/freebsd servers, and cannot fault it for that in the slightest.

 

You lose a lot of the familiar apps that you may use on Windows, but there is a vast amount of alternative linux apps that do the same jobs. It may involve using a number of apps together to achieve the same goal as an expensive Windows app, but you can mix and match and it doesn't cost a penny. For example, instead of paying £500 for Photoshop, you could just use GIMP, RawStudio and QTPFSGUI together. It may not do everything, but I'd imaging it would be sufficient for the majority.

 

just burning the Fedora 10 64bit iso now
Thanks for the great guide Glider.

I've also tried Debian before, I made a mistake and ended up with the KDE version as well, I hate KDE.

Gnome is much better.

Lets hope the flash plugin performance has improved somewhat.

 

Chicks.


Jack.
(Who should probably point out that he's been Windows-free and entirely GNU/Linux since 2007)

 

I can't use Linux because my sound card is PCI-E and creative are bad enough with driver support!

 

What sound card do you have? My card is the ASUS Xonar Essence STX and it does work, with some paying around with kernel modules.

The chances are that your card is supported, you may just have to install drivers manually or compile them from source code.

 

Gaming, mainly.

 

Its a standard creative X-fi using PCI-Express... i've looked on Ubuntu forums and theres not alot of info on it.

 

I'm currently running win7rc1 64bit , my system has 3 drives 1 x 640gb / 1x 250gb / 1x 80gb , i want to install linux on my 80gb disk which at the moment is empty - any reccomendations for the distro ?- i was thinking of unbuntu 64bit , already got the iso downloaded - is the installation relatively straight forward to dual boot with win7 ?

 

Yeah, I just did a dual-boot with Win7 and Xubuntu 64bit and it was easy.
Install Win7, install ubuntu and it creates the boot menu etc for selecting OS at boot time.

Only hassle I had was with partitioning.
The partitioning manager thing in the ubuntu install isn't the most intuitive I've ever used and it always wanted to resize partitions etc instead of installing to the 15GB I left free at the end of my drive.
Ended up deleting all partitions except the Win7 one and the small one it makes, installing ubuntu and selecting the 'use free space' option then creating the final exFAT partition for installig games in and storing files etc.

 

Wow, that looks like the one my roommate has which, according to Creative Labs, doesn't exist. Good luck getting it to work as my roommate has so far been unable to, but the last time he tried was a while back, so maybe there's a compatible driver in the newer sound stacks like OSSv4.

 

Thanks for the reply...

 

Thanks for such shearing...