Linux users here?

Achinz

Hermit of Huangshan
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This could be a poll but I thought it would be just as interesting as a free form information exchange.

So
1. What distro (distribution) do you use?
2. What is your hardware?
3. Do you play Linux games and if so what are they?
4. Do you think Linux will displace M$ Windows in the future :) ?
 
I've tried both RedHat and Corel, but currently don't have it installed at home. I never got used to linux because I installed it on the slowest computer, which meant it took a very long time to just to start a program. I think M$ will be around in the future too, people like the friendliness and obviousness of their OSs, even if it crashes more often than others.
 
I suppose I should post my answer as well.

1. Mandrake 9.1 (dual-booting with Windows 98)

2. Duron 800, Elite mobo, 512 MB P133 RAM, HD: 30 GB WD (with windows) and 8 GB Fujitsu (with Mandrake), usual accessories.

3. Being a Civ2 fan, I naturally tried Freeciv and quite liked it.

4. On principle, I support the free Open Source OS. With the much friendlier distros like Mandrake and SuSE with a pretty gui-Windows environment like KDE 3.2, Linux is getting more approachable as a desktop OS, a far cry from its poor reputation even a few years back. It seems to me to be a publicity exercise now to wean users from the endless money treadmill of the proprietary OS. I admit I have to keep the other OS so others can use the computer but I'm doing my best to show them the freedom and the light :)
 
My specs:

1. Red Hat 9 (dual boot with winXP)

2. Dell inspiron laptop.

3. I've tried bzFlag, Unreal tournament (linux edition), freeCiv, Chromium, Gnibbles and whatever other game I feel like playing at any particular moment ;).

4. I agree that windows will still be around for a while, the amount of applications that require windows is astounding.
The open source movement will help ease the transition with many, many free alternatives but until full compatibility is gained, windows will still be around. However, I do believe that more and more people are opening their eyes to alternatives to windows, and Linux is an obvious choice.
 
1) Mandrake 9.1 (dual boot with Win 2000)

2) AMD XP 2.1 (1700MHz), 512 MB RAM, 80G HD (of which 10G is partioned off for use with Linux), ATI Radeon 9000 Pro video, other common accessories. ;)

3) Mostly just played the games that came with it. FreeCiv is quite good. :)

4) I'm afraid MS Windows will always exist. Too many companies have too much invested in it. But I wholeheartedly support the Open Source movement and would love to see true standards set and used to facilitate inter-OS compatability. (Note: by "standards", I do not mean whatever MS wants, just because it is biggest. I hate when they *extend* standards, to make them incompatable with everyone else.)
 
1) Gentoo (who cares about the number, it's all compiling from source anyway :yeah: ). Officially it's 1.4, but it was installed with my old 1.4_rc4 disc, so that really has little sense. But it's using gcc3.3.1 and I'm using the 2.6.0-test6-mm4 kernel, with all sorts of weird usability patches. And almost everything is bleeding edge, like GNOME 2.4 (with several patches to improve various stuff, especially the file picker, and another thing that adds shadows to menu), GIMP-1.3.21 and the ximianized version of Openoffice that makes it use the gtk theme for its colors.

2) Amd Athlon 850Mhz, 384 MB RAM, 20 GB (6GB as a FAT partition for both linux and win, 100 MB for /boot using ext3, 200 MB for the swap, and the rest for / using ReiserFS)/8 GB hard drive (NTFS), Radeon 7200 and a usb ethernet card.

3) I played a few old games through wine, like starcraft, but that's not really great. Played some free games, like freeciv, but again, they were not as great as their windows counterparts. However, I'm planning to try to get a few games that were ported to linux, like maybe utlimate tournament 2003, alpha centauri or sim city 3k.

4) On server and on the corporate workstation, yes that's sure. Linux (or another free kernel, like maybe open darwin, or even the Hurd someday, or actually any *BSD) will eventually overtake windows, and the old Unices, as companies are looking for cost-effective solutions and stability. Windows is not stable enough for mission-critical situations, and the Unices are too expensive, and proprietary, which means that in the end, you can't customize it enough, if that's what you need. And big corporations need this. But on the desktop, it will take a very long time, if it ever happens.

Edit : Oops, forgot to talk about my 2 other comps :mischief:

Mandrake 9.1 (which is quite broken now I must say :mischief: ) : Athlon t-bird 900, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive (~55 GB for windows xp on fat, the rest for linux), Radeon 7500, and other basic accessories.

Gento (once again) : Pentium 133, a wonderful 6 GB hard drive, a whole 40 MB of good ol' EDO RAM, an unknown 512kb video card and a cd-drive that can't read cd-rw (which forces me to rip the cd-drive from the athlon 850 whenever I need to read cd-rw on this one :D ). It takes about 3 days of compilation just to get to the marvelous command-line :yeah:
 
1) Mandrake 9.1 dual boot with winXP. I haven't really got into it yet, haven't had the time, but i will in the future.

2) Athlon XP 2600 (2.0 GHz-ish), 1GB ram, radeon 9200, 120GB HDD (about 30GB for linux partitions)

3) Not yet.

4) Not in the near future at least, and i think there is already too much dependance on M$ for it to disappear any time soon.
 
1. Gentoo and SuSE 8.2 at the moment
2. AMD Athlon XP1800+, 512MB, a GeForce4 card... a 1.5GHz Mobile Celeron laptop
3. No
4. On lots of servers, it's been doing that for a long time. It still has some way to go to replace Windows on the desktop... it has done it for me, but not for my mom... Windows won't die for a long time.
 
It looks like Mandrake 9.1 and Gentoo are the most popular distros so far mentioned.

Quick question: Is Gentoo more of a "geek" distro than Mandrake or Red Hat ie closer to the Debian strain?

With the current availabilities of "live" CDs such as those from Knoppix and Gentoo, newbies get a chance to savour the flavour of the OS without any need to install it!
 
Gentoo is probably one of the geekest distro there is. With its portage system, it's mostly compile from source for everything (well not everything. There is a portage binary tree, but as far as I know, not a lot of people use it). The main benefits are that you compile with specific C flags for gcc, but it in the end it doesn't matter much. But the best advantage of compiling is that you can configure which option is built in which program. So if I don't need/want to have, let's say samba support, in a program like konqueror, well setting your USE flag to "-samba" will leave out samba support in any program that gives you the choice wheter to have it compiled or not. So that is often what makes quicker and more efficient binaries in the end. Besides, you can stay bleeding edge, with the latest version of gcc, gnome, kde, whatever... And everything is made easy, since installing a program is almost always a simple "emerge insert_program_name_here" and a few hours if it's a big package. So yes we could say it's closer to debian than the "everything is made for you" big rpm distro :D

But Gentoo livecds are far from being a Knoppix livecd. Gentoo livecd only gives you a command line, to let you "bootstrap" (compile gcc, glibc, gettext and the basics of the rest of the OS), while knoppix comes with a whole graphical interface, with not much left to configure.
 
Mandrake and Red-hat are jokes, I wouldn't count you as linux users, rather you are Microsoft haters. Why is so "in" to be linux user? What it has that Windows doesn't? What it does as good or better than Windows?


And why all of you have Windows too?

1) I use none
2) Athlon XP 2600+ on Nforce2 with Radeon 9700+
3) Only game playable on linux is TuxRacer, which is equalent to 1986 in MS-DOS world. Beside that, making my Radeon work in Linux is Scientific Project
4) it won't
 
Originally posted by Comraddict
Mandrake and Red-hat are jokes, I wouldn't count you as linux users, rather you are Microsoft haters. Why is so "in" to be linux user? What it has that Windows doesn't? What it does as good or better than Windows?


And why all of you have Windows too?

1) I use none
2) Athlon XP 2600+ on Nforce2 with Radeon 9700+
3) Only game playable on linux is TuxRacer, which is equalent to 1986 in MS-DOS world. Beside that, making my Radeon work in Linux is Scientific Project
4) it won't

Oooooooh a troll... Here's a cookie for ya. Now go start your "Windows user here?" and praise microsoft all you want, and leave us alone. Your questions are as intelligent as "Why would people have bicycles nowaday since they can have cars? Why is it so in? What does it have that a car doesn't? What does it do as good or better than a car?". No one's forcing you to use linux, so just avoid this kind of topic if you can't stand people using their right to choose the software they want. Thank you.

Oh and to answer your question as to why I have windows too. Am I really forced to use only one operating system and be completely locked in? You can dual-boot, so the question could be "Why don't you dual-boot?" instead of "Why do you dual boot?" I mean, you have no real reason not to dual-boot, right? You can use anything you want, with any software you want, anyday you want...

P.S. As for the games, I personally prefer simcity 3k, now that I have it, to tuxracer. But simcity 3k is SO 1986. And if I had to choose between a scientific project and making a radeon work, I'd go straight for the radeon, as it takes only a few minutes to figure out for someone who can read a few lines of docs, especially with a 9700 like you, which only means killing X and running the file downloaded straight from ATi's website, as it involves no compiling of any sort.
 
.S. As for the games, I personally prefer simcity 3k, now that I have it, to tuxracer. But simcity 3k is SO 1986. And if I had to choose between a scientific project and making a radeon work, I'd go straight for the radeon, as it takes only a few minutes to figure out for someone who can read a few lines of docs, especially with a 9700 like you, which only means killing X and running the file downloaded straight from ATi's website, as it involves no compiling of any sort.

Well it doesn't work like that, my friend. I can tell you I haven't made it work after numerous tries. Is it my fault that I cannot install video driver? NO! Will it install on windows? Yes. Who's fault?
 
Originally posted by Comraddict


Well it doesn't work like that, my friend. I can tell you I haven't made it work after numerous tries. Is it my fault that I cannot install video driver? NO! Will it install on windows? Yes. Who's fault?

Yes it's your fault dangit. If you can't use command line and edit configuration files by hand, linux is not for you, period. Some distro reduce the need for such manual configs, but if you want to install something not provided by the distribution, you can forget your old windows point and click. ATi drivers ARE easy to install, since so many people installed them. If you can't install it even after reading the doc, well use the open-source drivers that came with your distro, that's all. And if you're too pissed to continue using linux, well just go back to windows and avoid threads like this.
 
Sodapop, I could not have put it better than you just did :goodjob:

Us members of the free software (as per Stallman) world need to make the point loud and clear that choice means just that... choice. Don't like it, don't use it.

Why do I still keep Windows 2k around? Games... I don't use Windows for anything productive.

When it comes to installing stuff onto your machine... the difference between Windows and Linux is that if things don't work out of the box on Windows, they probably never will and there is not much you can do about it. On Linux, you can write a kernel module of your own if you need to... :D
 
Originally posted by Comraddict
Mandrake and Red-hat are jokes, I wouldn't count you as linux users, rather you are Microsoft haters.


You can't get away with a one-liner like that. Explain why Mandrake and Red Hat are jokes :eek:


Why is so "in" to be linux user? What it has that Windows doesn't? What it does as good or better than Windows?


Linux users support *free* (as in free speech) software which is open-sourced so that everyone who is interested can contribute to the advancement of the program. You are not locked into Bill Gates' gross and perpetual money-sucking OS with proprietary codes over which you have no control.

The Gimp is equivalent to Photoshop and as opensourceware still rapidly improving. OpenOffice.org 1.1 is overtaking M$ Office and again the rate of development has been phenomenal.

For developers most of the popular and important programming languages are included in the distros eg C, C++, perl, python to name a few. With M$ Windows they are a further extra and major cost!

For the geek, the shell is a lightning powerhouse.


And why all of you have Windows too?


Newer systems have to battle the "inertia" problem. As Jared Diamond has expounded in his now classic "Guns, Germs and Steel", it is not the best or most efficient system that gets adopted but the one that has the largest marketshare.

So Windows is used by Linux people because they basically have a transition problem. It takes time for newcomers to get used to the new OS and time and effort to counter the de facto position of the well-marketed product.

Traditionally Windows has spawned the gaming arena. So many computer gamers are Windows users. But it is apparent now that more and more developers are prepared to port their games to Linux and the trend will continue.
 
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