So, let's talk Linux!

What are some of your thoughts regarding this particular operating system--do you like it, or dislike? Have you ever used it before? If so, which distro did you choose? Of all distributions that you've seen so far, which would you call your most favorite, and why? If you were to change anything of them, what would they be? Also, many other distros are set to be released in future--which are you looking most forward to? Currently, Ubuntu is the most well-known; do you think anything else will take-over someday?

I really don't mind Linux, personally; if something happens to your primary OS, you've always got this one to back yourself up. Last year, I've accidentally erased my Windows partition, causing me to get rid of everything. Since I didn't have re-installation disc, I had to rely on Linux for a few months. Found it to be an amazing alternative, and have been following ever since. I've managed to re-install Windows, somehow, but eventually, something caused it to stop working, so I had to jump back.

As far as favorite distribution goes, that'd most likely have to be Arch for me. It's heavily customization, and you're able to make it behave like pretty much anything that you choose. Elementary's pretty nice, too, but unfortunately, I don't think I'll be using it until they make this distro more stabilized. Ubuntu's fantastic, but only thing I'm not too fond of is its interface; while black, orange, and purple do go along nicely, they could get sort of tiring after a while.

I would try it but the game support still isn't good enough yet. While it has definitely improved (especially steam) over the past couple years most games I own still don't support Linux. It also seems kind-of pointless as Windows 8.1 works well enough for me and dual booting feels pointless. I can do anything I want on windows rather than Linux. It's not optimal but the game support wins me over.

Linux = name of the kernel
OS = kernel + distribution
(just something I'd like to make clear :P)

I think, the main reason why I tried Linux (Ubuntu by that time) was simply because I was bored. So I made a bad decision, erased my Windows partition and installed Ubuntu 9.10. After that it automatically upgraded to 10.4. Well, back then it was a real hassle, I couldn't even listen to music, because I didn't have any codecs installed xD

When Ubuntu 12.4 was introduced I switched to Xubuntu, because I didn't like neither Unity nor Gnome3 and after my old laptop died I installed Arch Linux on my new one. I even got NVIDIA Optimus to work, but unfortunately somewhere in the kernel development history there were a couple of changed and since then, bumblebee won't work anymore...
I like to switch between my Windows 7 and Linux installation when I feel like it. Linux is better for programming/scripting and customization, but Windows is still better for playing games, so it's alright.

I live on linux these days. i find that my linux mechine has outlasted my windows xp mechine by mile. Most the games i like run on wine rather well. and personaly i take the opinon that windows is just a waste of money. nearly all games work in wine now.
My fav disto of linux would have to be Lubuntu(Its ubuntu with out unity) mainly for the color scheam blue,white,gray.

Random trivia in consideration of all games wine has more compatablty than windows 8

Wine malfunctions a bit on my end, sadly; every time I would try running Adobe softwares, it would immediately crashed. Have tried a variety of things to fix it, but none seemed to work.

The only dislike I have to Wine is that it doesn't have access to your Application Data folder when running programs from your Program Files folder. I can't seem to find a way to get it to load settings from there either, because when I open mIRC in Linux, the settings aren't there, thus it acts like a new install. :/

Also, if you use TeamViewer on Linux, it's required to have Wine.. or at least the install file I have required it.

Endless said:

Wine malfunctions a bit on my end, sadly; every time I would try running Adobe softwares, it would immediately crashed. Have tried a variety of things to fix it, but none seemed to work.

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Most adobe softwares fail in wine. :(

Zach said:

The only dislike I have to Wine is that it doesn't have access to your Application Data folder when running programs from your Program Files folder. I can't seem to find a way to get it to load settings from there either, because when I open mIRC in Linux, the settings aren't there, thus it acts like a new install. :/

Also, if you use TeamViewer on Linux, it's required to have Wine.. or at least the install file I have required it.

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The AppData issue was fixed in wine 1.6 i believe. Zach could you run "wine --version" in a terminal
and post the results

PS:im used to wine issues i maintain 2 games on winehq

Depends on what I'm using it for.

Mint/elementary for basic use (so never, since I just use Windows instead, at least on my machines)
Slackware for development (though I don't do enough development anymore where that's really necessary)
OpenBSD for servers

I just use Windows most of the time at home, though.

Arch. In my opinion, it's hands-down the most efficient Linux distro ever.

OpenBox has a really low memory footprint and its boot time is faster than that of any other DE by whole seconds.

It's great for servers or supercomputers, the Package Manager, pacman, is amazing, and you can pretty much lay anything you want on top of Arch. It supports most of the stuff that you'd otherwise find exclusively on certain distros, too.

dragonnite said:

Most adobe softwares fail in wine. :(

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Well, only thing I was attempting to use was Photoshop, which a lot of other people seem to have installed just fine. Regardless of how try, it'd simply fail. I suppose it's got something to do with my laptop itself, but not completely sure.

Team Fail said:

I'm dualbooting Ubuntu 13.04 on a laptop I got for $40 from a friend alongside Vista (I think it was) and it's really nice, although it's really struggling with only 1GB of RAM, but it's still really nice. I may look for ways to configure Ubuntu to run well on low-ram devices and see how that goes, as it locks up from time to time.

In addition, it's really nice that Ubuntu has support for Wacom digitizers, as this laptop has one and it handles really nicely.

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Lubuntu is good on slow mechines!

I'll use either or. My server's usually run linux for various reasons. My laptop normally runs windows for reasons of compatability as well as user programs. I'll generally develop using either Linux or Cygwin, but there's exceptions to the rule.

I've ran into one case of IBM's CPLEX (for integer programming) ran noticably faster on Linux then on Windows, but it wasn't a controlled test by any means.

Any other Arch Linux users?
I recently installed it for the first time since last summer. Bye bye Windows 8.1! It was seriously less of a hassle installing Arch than Windows 8...

I run the KDE desktop, and got everything to work
I'm waiting for a bug fix to the Plymouth package affecting Intel graphics
But I did get HDMI working perfectly (with audio!) on my ATI card :)
I got my VPN to work, but I just can't remember how to use TrueCrypt :(

Still pumped at how good the audio and graphics support for my laptop have gotten (HP Envy 15 2012 IIRC)

I'm using mac so close enough.

(It's Unix format just like Linux!)

I do like how it's cleaner than Windows Shell though. Not a lot of support which sucks, but hey I know exactly what to do. Maybe it's because I'm just more used to Unix though.

obZen said:

Any other Arch Linux users?

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I used it on my Surface Pro for a while, and it worked even better than Windows 8, or Windows 8.1 have ever worked on.
But it's like anyone else here already said, App Support is bloody lacking, mostly because of lazy Devs.
The reason why I went back to Windows 8.1, is because I can't use a lot of Apps I use on Windows, and I'm to lazy to Dual-Boot.

So I installed linux-ck with Con Kolivas' BFS patch.
I think things are a little smoother?
I used a specific linux-ck for sandybridge Intel processors.
It works a lot better than when I patched -ck in Linux 2.6.38
Virtualbox even works! I think I've found my new custom kernel

obZen said:

So I installed linux-ck with Con Kolivas' BFS patch.
I think things are a little smoother?
I used a specific linux-ck for sandybridge Intel processors.
It works a lot better than when I patched -ck in Linux 2.6.38
Virtualbox even works! I think I've found my new custom kernel

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Still running Linux 2? Linux 3 has been out for years >.>

Synchronous said:

Still running Linux 2? Linux 3 has been out for years >.>

Spoiler:

Or is that just something you did in the past

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That's something I did back on Ubuntu 10.10 iirc
This was a while ago, back when Unity was using Mutter and exclusive to netbook interface.

I've tried it in the past but Linux doesn't support my needs. As a sound engineer (music mixing) I need either a Windows or Mac operating system for the recording/mixing software. I know Linux has Wine to run Windows applications but it didn't run the software properly, it had many issues.

As for Linux itself, I actually quite liked it but it doesn't support what I need so I can't use it. I may dual boot Ubuntu with my Windows computer but then again I'm not entirely sure what I would be using Linux for so I may just turn it into a Hackintosh for music purposes.

Anybody knows what happened with SLiM? I've only heard it was discontinued and while the project's still on SourceForge, the main page seems to be off at the moment. I've used it for about two years, but it seems there where no updates for quite some time.

Well, for now I've switched to LXDM and I'm thinking about changing from XFCE to Openbox at some point in the future. If there is anything I really like about Linux, it is having a lightweight OS available all the time. ^^