Windows crashed for the last time; I'm getting Linux. Which OS should I get?

Sims2789

Fool me once...
Joined
Oct 26, 2002
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I'd anticipated the arrival of my favorite game of all time, Black & White, for a few days. I ordered it online to replace the version lost by a friend's brother a few years ago. It came, I pop it in, ready to play. It runs fine for a while. This time, I got an ape so that I can teach it the meteor miracle. When my clock stirkes eight, the game crashes, as Norton Antivirus has to put itself in front of all other programs to do its auto-scan. Fine. My mom's a Luddite and won't get AVG Free (not Adaware, thinking it's "adware"), so there's no need to get mad about it. I close Norton, restart my computer, and expect to play Black & White. While loading, it crashes. The error notification box blames not the game but Windows Explorer. Why? How would Norton crashing cause this? I restart my computer, turn off Norton, and it happens again. I do the same process again except this time I don't connect to the Internet (I would later realize the difference between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer, but both prior to IE 7 beta use the same files), and the same error box appears. I uninstall the game, reinstall it (and the patch) and it still crashes. When I uninstall the patch, then reinstall it, the game works fine. The game crashes naturally a few hours later (Black & White crashes on autosave a lot; I forgot to turn it off) but when I try to reload it, I get the same error message. I eventually fix it again but then it autosaves again and crashes (there's a few points where it autosaves even if you tell it not to). Of course, the error message blames not Black & White, but Windows. To add insult to injury, I read the error report
and it I was running Windows NT, despite me running XP! That's it. I've had it. When an operating system can't even identify itself correctly in its error reports, it is not worthy of being used by me. As I don't want to pay for a new Mac, I've decided to get Linux. Of course, I'm still gonna have Windows on here so I don't have to replace all my software. I'll download the Linux version of OpenOffice.org and Mozilla to spend as little time as possible on Windows.

There's one problem, though: I know nothing about Linux! Which OS should I use? Which ones are stable? Can any run Windows programs?

Here's a list of what I want from Linux, in order:

*Ability to run games (Red Hat makes a lot of Linux games, so Windows compatibiliy isn't an issue).
*Stability.
*Speed.
*Compatibility with Windows.

Basically, tell me what the best Linux OS is.

And of course, it has to be free, which I assume all Linux OSes are.
 
You could have asked for the other thread to be moved or merged. Reposting:

I use Ubuntu, which is fairly streamlined, and it runs windows games through WINE, which is downloadable in the friendly Package Manager. (I found my old StarCraft CD the other day, was hit by a wave of nostalgia, installed it, and played the entire campaign through in the course of a week, all without a hitch.)

You may also wish to try a Knoppix CD.
 
Sims2789 said:
I know nothing about Linux! Which OS should I use? Which ones are stable? Can any run Windows programs?

Here's a list of what I want from Linux, in order:

*Ability to run games (Red Hat makes a lot of Linux games, so Windows compatibiliy isn't an issue).
*Stability.
*Speed.
*Compatibility with Windows.
Virtually all major Linux distros are as stable as Windows. Virtually none can run Windows programs natively.

As for your specific points:

*Many, many games are available for Linux. Some good/great, some not so good. (Kind of like Windows games. ;)) Some Windows games have Linux versions, some can be played with Wine, or Cedega, or even DosBox. Some cannot be played, period. (And, to the best of my knowledge, RedHat doesn't make any games at all. They *do* supply Linux games for their distros, as do most other distros.)

*Stability: Unless you want "bleeding edge" software, most distros are quite stable. Even "debian Unstable". ;)

*Speed: Not quite sure what you want, here. You can load up bloatware easily in Linux, just like in Windows, and make your system run like a dog. By it's very nature, the graphical desktops in Linux load things a little more slowly than similar apps in Windows, because they don't "preload" on bootup, and keep all the required hooks resident in your RAM. But the difference is often a matter of fractions of seconds. In my case, Firefox loads up faster from scratch in Mandriva than it does in XP on my wife's laptop....

*Compatability with Windows. Like I said at the outset, *NO* Linux distro is compatable with Windows. But you *can* share data files fairly easily: .mp3, .txt, .doc(using e.g. Open Office) and so on. But no program written for one will run natively on the other. (You can get around this to some extent by using wine, and its offspring.)

My suggested distros would be Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, Suse, Ubuntu.
 
I tried using Linux for my writing computer and it was extremely difficult to use. I ended up retyping my novel from a hard copy rather than wasting time trying to learn this virtual language. Open source is not for the casual user I'll tell you that.
 
If I have a choice, I prefer not to use Open Office. I just don't like it.

But it's a good program to have around, and I keep a copy of it.
 
puglover said:
I tried using Linux for my writing computer and it was extremely difficult to use. I ended up retyping my novel from a hard copy rather than wasting time trying to learn this virtual language. Open source is not for the casual user I'll tell you that.
Like Padma, I'm curious as to what the bleep happened here. Several distros are designed explicitly for casual users.

This is my desktop: (wallpaper from MTG)


This is the menu where I select Office: (for advanced stuff only. for basic stuff, I use text editor ~= notepad)


This is the result:


Virtual language????? :confused:
 
Maybe he is talking about vi =P

May I suggest dual booting. If I remember right some distros (ubuntu comes to mind) when installing can reorganize partitions without data loss. Linux installs a boot loaders so you can decide which os you want to load at boot.

Also try the LiveCD versions of the distributions, you can boot off of the livecd and try the os out without having to install anything. In the case of ubuntu its a unified live/install cd, boot to the live cd and if you like it there is an install incon on the desktop.

Also you should pay attention to the shell you want to use. There is gnome which is more similar to MacOS, and KDE which is more similar to the windows interface. (Ubuntu uses gnome while kubuntu uses kde, I am not sure what the other distros use).
 
Padma said:
Puglover: You actually found it hard to use OpenOffice? Or KWrite? Or AbiWord? Or any of the other word processors/text editors available? They are as easy and as intuitive to use as MS Word is. Maybe more so. :confused:

No problem with the text editor, so I got a large document written. It was saving to a floppy or CD without letter drives that really messed me up.
 
puglover said:
No problem with the text editor, so I got a large document written. It was saving to a floppy or CD without letter drives that really messed me up.
"letter drives" -- another strange idiocy dreamed up by MS. :crazyeye:

I had a hard time figuring out just what those silly drive letters were when I first used MS DOS many, many years ago. And I hadn't used *nix then either. It's just that nobody else making OSes at the time even considered limiting themselves that way.

Besides, what's hard about saving/copying a file to "/mnt/floppy", or "/mnt/cdrom" ? I find the names quite obvious....
 
Padma said:
Besides, what's hard about saving/copying a file to "/mnt/floppy", or "/mnt/cdrom" ? I find the names quite obvious....

I shudder everytime I see mnt. Mnt = telling a PC to mount a device reminds me of the mainframe days, days I'd prefer to not go back to. That type of archaic terminology doesn't deserve to be used with PC's. What's next, packing and unpacking integers in order to add a couple of numbers ? :crazyeye:
 
Padma said:
"letter drives" -- another strange idiocy dreamed up by MS. :crazyeye:

I had a hard time figuring out just what those silly drive letters were when I first used MS DOS many, many years ago. And I hadn't used *nix then either. It's just that nobody else making OSes at the time even considered limiting themselves that way.
.
I once tried to move a Windows install from drive F to drive C. References to drive F throughout the registry made that move quite a mess. The way I ended up dealing with it was using "subst" to link drive F to drive C. So drive letters can occasionally be a bit of a problem...
 
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