linux systems

wolfman

It relates to science to. How you can only really disprove something, but never truly prove it.

Linux certainly isn't bug free. Due to the way it's developed bugs are picked up and fixed by the community quite quickly.


Just make sure with any hardware you buy in the future, google online quickly and see how it fares in Linux. If it's good then buy it. It'll just make switching in the future easier.

The only things I've not been able to do in Linux are programming (.Net stuff), Gaming, and Encoding (gotta love AutoGK). For programming, and encoding I can just run XP via a virtual machine when I need to in Ubuntu. Runs perfectly, very smooth.

Apart from those, cd ripping, playing music, tagging music, browsing, watching movies/dvd's, organising photo's, ftp'ing, torrents, office work, email, image editing, watching tv. I can do all of it, just as well, sometimes even better than I could in Windows (and I'd consider myself a Windows power user).

And for gaming, I just keep a super light install of XP on a separate partition, and dual boot when I need to. But already with some games (like World Of Warcraft) I can play them in Linux.

NicolaJH_2

I would probably recommend ubuntu for a beginner, partly because there is an excellent online community who are generally quite helpful towards beginners.

The main issues are:
setting it up to play mp3s and stuff because it doesn't do that out of the box - but its fairly easy how to find instructions for this.

hardware issues: This isn't really a fault with linux but rather with the manufacturers only making windows drivers. I find that my printer/scanner combination doesn't work under Linux.

The learning curve: it takes a bit of getting used to. also it may take a while before you find alternatives to all the windows programs that you use.

kingmonkey

NicolaJH wrote: »

The main issues are:
setting it up to play mp3s and stuff because it doesn't do that out of the box - but its fairly easy how to find instructions for this.

The learning curve: it takes a bit of getting used to. also it may take a while before you find alternatives to all the windows programs that you use.

Feisty also makes it easier to install restricted non-free codecs.

The learning curve is no more than say upgrading to the next windows release.

The learning curve is greater if something goes wrong, but again there is a helpful support community eg forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, local user groups. Just don't go asking where is the c drive and dont say linux is all wrong, cos, most probably, thats your windows minded perception of how something should work.