Best OS for non-gaming use

[Nitrous Oxide]

Now, I'm curious. What distro of Linux is considered the best? I've used Ubuntu before, and kind of liked it, but is there anything better?

 

[Bianca Paragon]

I thought that was the project homepage. Wikipedia steered me wrong; I suppose if there are more organized forums out there that I don't know about, it's possible that it's easy enough for a non-technical user to install. I haven't seen any, though.

This is why academic institutions forbid wikipedia as a source.
While the Insanelymac forums may be where the scene started; the real advancements including being able to install from retail with no binary patching all came from other sources such as Netkas, the hackint0sh forums, infinitemac and pcwiz; to name just a few.

 

[Zet]

I'm gonna have to start watching this thread more closely, before flaming happens

 

[twocows]

Now, I'm curious. What distro of Linux is considered the best? I've used Ubuntu before, and kind of liked it, but is there anything better?

I like Fedora; it's relatively easy to use and has a lot of customization options. There are some cool features, etc. Die-hard Linux nuts seem to like Gentoo; no clue why.

I'm gonna have to start watching this thread more closely, before flaming happens

I assure you, it would not have escalated that far.

 

[Eureka1]

Honestly, XP.

It's what I'm used to, there is no "best" non-gaming OS.

 

[beauty. proletariat]

Mac OS X for the win.

I just got it on my pc (through illegial methodz) XD

and its s e x y.

I love it how it saves all that space with all your programs running and how it runs so smoothly with so many programs running in background!
(i.e. Messenger Client, Firefox, Office Mac, iTunes, Photoshop CS4)

 

[DrCoolSanta]

Now, I'm curious. What distro of Linux is considered the best? I've used Ubuntu before, and kind of liked it, but is there anything better?

Umm Ubuntu is the best, the rest to choose are personal preference. Ubuntu has been "the best" according to many surveys. Because of their LARGE repositories, support and especially the frequent updates along with shipit do the needful to give it that position.

IMO Fedora, Suse, RHEL are nice and fun to use but for me, they just weren't as good.

Anyways I vote for Linux and it disturbs me how you people have so much inaccurate information.
I believe half of you criticising it have not bothered to use it or pick up just any copy of the Operating System lying somewhere, no matter how old it was. I did that and I know that Linux has evolved so much over the years that it is not just a server thing anymore.

Every paid software that we see around in Windows has an equivalent and better freeware available for Linux.
Moreover half of the features that we see today in Microsoft software was thought up by these people anyway, including features like tabs in IE.
If you think Linux is just a black screen with some white text on it then well it is just not that anymore, and Compiz and Beryl do a much better job than Aero to make it look good as well. Just youtube beryl or compiz and you'll know.
Linux was a black console once, just like when windows was not there but dos was, its no longer.
Then ofcourse we have the typical virus free situation for Linux.
You no longer need the wit to use Linux, any layman can use linux now.

Its just that Windows is paid for and so Microsoft can afford to make advertisements and all the hype, linux is not for the hype and so it doesn't have just as many supporters. It takes a computer litrate person to be litrate to be aware and to use linux.

 

[Mr. Epic]

Not to mention it works with games...
Windows 7 boots up in about 30 seconds, which is tied with the fastest I've gotten a Linux distro to boot up on my machine. Sorry to say, but Windows 7 is everything gone right. Not to mention it's a lot less confusing than Linux distros.
One more thing, the Windows 7 kernel is a lot less resource demanding, to the point where it's actually faster than XP for basically everything. The fact is, Vista sucked, XP was great but boring, and Windows 7 took the best of both, and made it better. I've actually tested Windows 7 on my old PC (196 MB of RAM) and it works fine (I normally ran XP off of that machine, no problems either).

Agreeing to this 100%
That was a beautiful statement, thanks for summing it all up.

 

[twocows]

Umm Ubuntu is the best

Preference. The whole point of Linux is that you use what you like, and do what you want with it. Ubuntu has its merits, but I think Fedora is far superior, and I have friends that would argue Gentoo until the end of time. All those things you mentioned that were "surveyed" are nice things to have for most people, but that's it. In other words, if you're an average person, you'll find Ubuntu's feature set to be mostly desirable.

 

[羨望]

Ubuntu Linux for Decent Ram users(About 512)and Xubuntu For not so decent,And OpenSolaris is also a Good Contender.And they are Live CD Distributions What else could you want.


~Envy

 

[DrCoolSanta]

Preference. The whole point of Linux is that you use what you like, and do what you want with it. Ubuntu has its merits, but I think Fedora is far superior, and I have friends that would argue Gentoo until the end of time. All those things you mentioned that were "surveyed" are nice things to have for most people, but that's it. In other words, if you're an average person, you'll find Ubuntu's feature set to be mostly desirable.

I don't consider myself "average". Programming in C/C++ and other languages, working on my website and fiddling around with stuff doesn't count as what an average person would do. I could go on with the list of what I do on my linux machines but I rather not rant XP, like I keep sshing to my server to schedule all my downloads, making it the home theatre system, watching movies streamed from it, etc. Rather I always felt that average features like OpenOffice suite in ubuntu were never as nice, it even lacked the dictionaries for Spell check and everything which is there in other distros.
Meh I have even made 3D games in Ubuntu, of course they worked faster than windows, much faster.

And again you can't say that if you are not the "average person", you personally would have never used beryl and compiz, I can't even program properly if my desktop isn't all eye candy when I just can't debug anything.

What I like about ubuntu is that you get almost everything pre installed, unlike fedora and rh. Even though a lot of software can be installed from the disks at installation or later on from the repositories, I always had a liking for Debians aptitude or apt-get. And just check it out, ubuntu's repositories are too large. Anyways I already said that its personal preference, I used Gentoo as well and pretty much liked it, but it caused my LAN card to malfunction in windows. And Fedora was not very stable on my system. Considering that my system is state of the art, it was a major put off. I never went ahead to fix anything because that hard disk ended up getting corrupted soon. Now it has a copy of OSX-86 and Windows 7 on it. And if you ask me, Windows 7 is nice, but its probably that you used Live CDs to boot up which were taking more time than Windows 7. I have nothing big against Windows 7, but still Ubuntu was much better atleast for my work.

 

[twocows]

I don't consider myself "average". Programming in C/C++ and other languages, working on my website and fiddling around with stuff doesn't count as what an average person would do. I could go on with the list of what I do on my linux machines but I rather not rant XP, like I keep sshing to my server to schedule all my downloads, making it the home theatre system, watching movies streamed from it, etc. Rather I always felt that average features like OpenOffice suite in ubuntu were never as nice, it even lacked the dictionaries for Spell check and everything which is there in other distros.
Meh I have even made 3D games in Ubuntu, of course they worked faster than windows, much faster.

And again you can't say that if you are not the "average person", you personally would have never used beryl and compiz, I can't even program properly if my desktop isn't all eye candy when I just can't debug anything.

What I like about ubuntu is that you get almost everything pre installed, unlike fedora and rh. Even though a lot of software can be installed from the disks at installation or later on from the repositories, I always had a liking for Debians aptitude or apt-get. And just check it out, ubuntu's repositories are too large. Anyways I already said that its personal preference, I used Gentoo as well and pretty much liked it, but it caused my LAN card to malfunction in windows. And Fedora was not very stable on my system. Considering that my system is state of the art, it was a major put off. I never went ahead to fix anything because that hard disk ended up getting corrupted soon. Now it has a copy of OSX-86 and Windows 7 on it. And if you ask me, Windows 7 is nice, but its probably that you used Live CDs to boot up which were taking more time than Windows 7. I have nothing big against Windows 7, but still Ubuntu was much better atleast for my work.

I didn't mean to offend you or anything; I guess I misstated what I meant. I meant to say that most people will find something in Ubuntu to like, but that doesn't make it the de facto best distribution. I also like Debian and even Ubuntu (Kubuntu for me), I just don't like them as much as Fedora.

Regarding Compiz, though, it can be used on Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, and a number of other distributions. It seemed like you were implying that it was something that only ran on Ubuntu.

I also tested the Windows 7 beta (though I refuse to use OSx86 due to its legality, or rather lack thereof), and while there was a lot to like, I also found a lot to dislike. I still wouldn't recommend it over XP, personally.

 

[Cartmic]

Windows >_>
I don't see why people would use Linux isn't really a desktop environment.

The Linux OS is separate from the DE, on Linux you can run a multitude of Window Managers and Desktop Environments. I like Gnome and IceWM with Ubuntu and Puppy.

In reply to what others have said, last time I used Ubuntu(yesterday), it didn't feel very amateurish to me, in fact it was a lot easier and nicer to use than XP....you plug a printer/scanner/wireless dongle/etc. it just works! You want to add some new software,s go to the 'Add/Remove Software' program and choose from a huge list of free and open source software.