Ubuntu Rules

[Mavix]

Ubuntu Linux is the best!
Windows Sucks!

[ZA_medic]

Here Here!!!!!!!!

Just wish I had ADSL so i could install the things i need!

[Vio]

It largely depend on whether or not you want to play games on your pc or not.

[Nokkie]

windows ruls linux sux ass!

[Carlhead]

here comes anyother Mac / PC type debate...

IMO Linux is FAR FAR better than windows, but nowhere near ready for the dedicated desktop environment.

Didn't we have this debate on MyADSL like 10 times already??

[Nokkie]

can linux play games? no why? not? because it sucs with hardware support

[Carlhead]

can linux play games? no why? not? because it sucs with hardware support

Hardware support is superb... but Game developers don't develop games for the linux kernal (same issue as Mac).

And I doubt they would be willing to provide the source code so we can compile it ourselves

[bwana]

Ubuntu Linux is the best!

Still too early for me to say for sure if its the best os or the best of the linux distro's.

Windows Sucks!

There's a sentiment I can echo.

here comes anyother Mac / PC type debate...

Nah - its a Linux / Windows debate. Wouldnt be much point otherwise given the superiority of the Cupertino Distro

[Carlhead]

There's a sentiment I can echo.Nah - its a Linux / Windows debate. Wouldnt be much point otherwise given the superiority of the Cupertino Distro

Yeah, Yeah, clever... Last time I checked there were MANY more users using distrobutions other than your favoured "Cupertino" Disto

[bwana]

Yeah, Yeah, clever... Last time I checked there were MANY more users using distrobutions other than your favoured "Cupertino" Disto

Well duh - its free

I've got more ubuntu cd's cluttering up my office than anything else so you could say its the number one os in my office too . . but it aint.

Ubuntu seems adequate and it's priced right so you wont find me trash talking it. One thing Ubuntu is doing well is helping to DeGeekify Linux. It just needs some work - polishing if you will - before it will be an os that everyone can use.

[Carlhead]

Ubuntu seems adequate and it's priced right so you wont find me trash talking it. One thing Ubuntu is doing well is helping to DeGeekify Linux. It just needs some work - polishing if you will - before it will be an os that everyone can use.

We all look forward to the day where Linux makes a good desktop OS that eveyone can use...

[bwana]

What's the Most Popular Linux Desktop?

The results of DesktopLinux.com's 2006 Desktop Linux Market survey are in, and the votes are all tallied. This first article of a series offers a perspective on how the various desktop Linux distributions fared, and why.

Before jumping into what the survey of almost 15,000 Linux users revealed, though, I should point out a few things.

First, this is in no way, shape, or form a scientific survey. Anyone who wanted to vote could vote. We did make sure that we didn't have a Chicago-style election with multiple votes from one person—or IP address, anyway—but that was about it.

We also didn't include some mildly popular choices—Arch Linux, GNOME's Epiphany Web browser, and the Fluxbox window manager—in the initial version of survey. Our readers spoke early on, and we added them.

Still, when all is said and done, we do think that our survey does say some interesting things about the current state of desktop Linux. So, without further adieu, here's what we found.

The most popular desktop of Linux today is... well, most of you can already guess without seeing the scores: Ubuntu.

[online14230]

If I piss anybody off, TOUGH!
OK. I stumbled across MyADSLwhile doing a search for DVD Writers. I wanna buy 1 today, so I decided to check prices on the net. I also wanted to check for one that Ubuntu supports. Seems I cant find one that Ubuntu doesnt! Now, Ive read this thread through, and Ive installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake, and Ive run Knoppix, RedHat, Mandriva, DSL, Aurora, Aurox, ATmission, Gentoo, Slackware, Morphix and a few others. The ones Ive listed are the ones I favor. Ive ALSO run 3.11, 98, 200, NT, ME, XP Home, XP Pro and now Vista.
Heres my honest opinion: Most people learn a language over a few years. As you grow, you learn to speak your NATIVE tongue. So too with computers. You learn to use what EVERYONE AROUND you is using: Windows. THATS why windows is so popular. Few have the strength of personality to DO IT ON THEIR OWN. Nobody wants to take the plunge and learn something new. Most of you here are too closed minded to bother trying something new. Yes, mr XP. Billy is feeding on your insecurities and making a quick buck off you fools. See, everytime he releases a new version, he stops supporting the last one. Win98: GONE! So you say: Who runs Win98 nowadays anyway? Well, Ill tell you: To upgrade from ME, you have to BUY XP, which isnt cheap (Upwards of 1500 bucks???). THEN you get home and find that it wont run on your machine cos you havent got enough RAM. So you go looking for more RAM, which costs about R1.50 per MB (SDRAM) and a little less for DDRAM. THEN you have to buy Microsoft Office 2003(cos youre used to it, and change is already difficult ) cos your version doesnt work too well with XP. And the list goes on. Then your processor isnt fast enough blah blah blah!

OR

Go to www.ubuntu.com, order the latest version which Canonical will ship to you ... and they even pay shipping charges. Installation of Dapper is easy as ... nevermind. I found this article on the net for you guys to read:
The Issue at Hand
It's entirely possible that you may not have heard of Linux. Maybe you own a Mac or Windows computer and don't read the technology news. You may have a TiVo, but it doesn't have a huge sticker on the box that reads "Powered by Linux" (even though it is). You may use Google, but it doesn't have any announcement on its homepage that it's run on Linux servers (even though it is). Whether you've heard of Linux or not--it probably plays a role in your life somehow.
In all likelihood (yes, even if you're reading this), you probably don't have Linux running on your laptop computer at home or your desktop computer at work. The "desktop market" is dominated by Windows. Mac has a very small share of desktop computing (arguably even smaller than Linux's market share--it depends on whom you ask), but it is high profile--Apple stores abound in the US (there are also locations in the UK, Japan, and Canada), Mac computers feature prominently in Hollywood movies, iPods are the portable player of choice, iTunes dominates the digital download market, computer peripherals that are Mac-compatible have a logo on the side of the box indicating that they are, and major software is available for Mac OS X (Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, for example).

So why are you probably not running Linux on your computer? Why have you probably not even heard of Linux? What's stopping Linux from being more high profile, being more widely adopted?

The Linux Desktop Myth
Every year--or perhaps several times during the year--if you read technology news, you'll spot a Linux desktop article proclaiming (or quoting someone who proclaims) that "this year" is going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Clearly, they were wrong,

Linux desktops come in various flavors (or distributions). Unlike Windows and Mac, which each have only one current version (as of this writing, those would be Windows XP and Mac OS X Tiger, respectively), Linux has multiple simultaneous and different versions. They all share the same core (the Linux kernel), but they differ in terms of development cycle, business model, default applications, installation method, and hardware detection. There are literally hundreds of Linux distributions--many of which are aimed at desktop use (as opposed to server or embedded device use) and which are under rapid development. Ubuntu, the top-ranked distribution on DistroWatch, for example, releases new versions every six months. Windows, on the other hand, seems to release new versions every three to six years.

Because of these frequent releases that each come with new features, people who proclaim that "this year" is the year of the Linux desktop subscribe to and continue to perpetuate a myth about Linux--namely, that it's Linux's features that hold it back from widespread desktop adoption. In other words, according to the myth, there are hundreds of millions of Windows users out there (and some Mac users as well) desperately waiting for Linux to match their current operating systems feature for feature, and when that happens, they will all download a disk image, burn the Linux CD, install and configure the operating system themselves, and then ditch their current operating system for a Linux distribution. (If you don't know what a disk image or an operating system is, then I think you get my point--the majority of Windows and Mac users will not be installing Linux regardless of how many features it has.)

What is holding Linux back?
In online support forums for Linux, there are frequent debates about whether Linux is "ready for the desktop" and also why it's not more popular as a desktop operating system. These debates can go on for hundreds of posts, and there's usually never anything resembling a consensus reached.

Some of the frequent charges against Linux's "desktop readiness" are its lack of commercial games, its lack of general commercial applications, its lack of easily installable/obtainable hardware drivers, its different software installation models, its variety of flavors, its lack of point-and-click configurations for certain tasks, its lack of "user-friendliness," and its bad marketing. That's not a comprehensive list of the criticisms against Linux distributions, but those are some of the main proposed reasons for Linux being almost unheard of on the desktop.

To properly evaluate these criticisms, you have to know a little bit about what desktop Linux is like and what goes into using desktop Linux. Afterwards, we can start exploring the path that Linux can take to desktop prominence... or why it may never get there.

My Linux Switch Story
My family's first computer, when I was growing up, was an NEC. I don't know the model number, but it was an all-in-one computer with a monochromatic screen and two floppy disk drives for 12" floppy disks. It had no graphics to speak of, and my parents used it mainly for word processing. My brother and I used it mainly for playing a text-only game called "Millionaire," in which you buy and sell stocks in the hopes of finally earning a million dollars. There was no mouse for this computer because there were no graphics. It was all text.

Over the years, my father built PC computers that ran MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000. My brother got a Mac for college in the early 90s, and I used that same Mac when I went to college in the late 90s. After I graduated college, I used Windows ME and XP at home and work, and I also used Mac OS 9 and OS X at work. Even though Linus Torvalds developed Linux in 1991, I don't think I'd even heard the word Linux until the turn of the millennium. I did see my father using Linux once--he was launching an application from a grey terminal screen--and my immediate thought in response was You have to type commands? How primitive.

[online14230]

I didn't touch Linux myself until the summer of 2004. During that time, spyware and adware were rampant, and I hadn't even heard either term until the laptop my wife and I had was infested with them both. The computer had slowed to a crawl, and pop-up ads would appear even when I didn't have Internet Explorer open (only later did I learn that Internet Explorer is always running on your computer, whether it appears open or not). I don't remember the exact details, but in searching for how to get rid of spyware and adware, I somehow came across Linux and had the silly notion to install it instead of Windows XP.

The first place I went (what I thought made sense) was Linux.org. It was a confusing site with many links. The download link takes you nowhere and asks you to go to the distributions link. Some of the download links were to older versions of distros. I didn't know which distro to pick or what distinguished one distro from another. There seemed to be hundreds of distros available. Eventually, I ended up with Blag. I chose it because all the Linux books I found in my local library were on Red Hat Linux, so I wanted to get something that was based on Red Hat (Blag is based on Fedora, which is the community-supported version of Red Hat, which is the more enterprise-focused, commercial edition). Blag was also only one CD. I didn't feel like (even with a fast internet connection) downloading four or five CDs. (Only later did I find out that multi-CD distros needed only the first CD--the other CDs were add-on CDs for more software.)

I had to do quite a bit of research to figure out how to burn Blag properly. Most Linux CDs come with an .ISO extension, which means they are disk images, not files. It's kind of like the difference between handing someone a Word document of an article as opposed to a photocopy of the article. Both have the same article contained within, but the Word document contains the actual words, which you can edit and remove at will; the photocopy appears to contain words, but it's really just an image of those words--you cannot add and remove words. A disk image is a single file--about 700 MB in size--that is an image of the CD, not a collection of the files in the CD. If you burn the .ISO as data, you'll get a CD with one big file on it. If you burn the .ISO as a disk image, you'll get all the files contained within. (If this paragraph confuses the hell out of you, then you're getting closer to the real reason Linux isn't more widely used on the desktop.)

Finally, I installed Blag on our Dell Inspiron 500m. I have to admit my first impression was a good one. I liked that there seemed to be a wealth of software available on one tiny little CD. The questions the installer asked weren't difficult to answer, and the installation was all point-and-click (no need to type in commands). The desktop looked very similar to Windows' desktop. I had a menu button to click (it was a red hat instead of the Start button) to run applications. There were desktop icons. There was a clock in the panel. Everything seemed fine except for two things. First, the screen resolution was terrible. The Dell's optimal resolution was 1024x768, and Blag was giving me something virtually unusable (320x480, or something like that). If I opened a dialog box, the OK and Cancel buttons were off the screen. So I did some web research and found a patch that fixed the screen resolution. When I tried to install a program, though, I ran into what's commonly referred to as dependency hell. I downloaded an RPM file and tried to run the command rpm on it (which all the books said would work to install it). But I didn't have any of the dependencies. One by one I tried tracking down each dependency, and I gave up after the third or fourth one. It was back to Windows for me.

Surprisingly to me at the time, the Windows installation was not as painless as the Blag one. Windows' installer had quite a bit of text-based interface (not all point-and-click), and it did not detect the monitor's screen resolution or the computer's sound card. I was also unable to play DVDs, as Windows did not include the proper codecs for viewing DVDs. It was then that I remembered we'd actually received three restore CDs from Dell--not just one. The first CD is Windows XP Service Pack 1, which has the basic Windows operating system. The second CD was Dell's drivers and utilities CD. The third CD was InterVideo WinDVD, the program that allowed you to play DVDs on the DVD-ROM drive. It didn't take me long to track down the drivers and utilities CD, and I was grateful I found it, but for a week or two, I still couldn't find the InterVideo WinDVD. So I had to search around a bit to find something that would allow me to play DVDs, since Windows Media Player wouldn't.

Eventually, I tried VLC, which was unstable (kept crashing) but at least had a codec for playing DVDs. I also found a web browser called Firefox, which was supposed to be more secure than Internet Explorer. In the end, I recovered even the InterVideo WinDVD, and Windows XP was back to normal, and I didn't encounter any more spyware/adware issues while using Firefox.

My second Windows installation experience involved a self-built computer my father had. I was visiting for Christmas, and I wanted to install iTunes on a spare PC my parents had, but the PC was running Windows 98. In order to run iTunes, I needed either Windows XP or 2000. My father had a copy of Windows 2000, and I tried installing that. Still the text-mode installer. Still no drivers found for the sound or the screen resolution. I also had no idea where to get these drivers or which drivers to get. I had no idea whether the screen resolution was messed up because I needed a driver specifically for the monitor or for the computer's video card--the yellow question marks in the Control Panel were not helping. I ended up taking a screwdriver to the computer and opening it up to find out what the video card's and sound card's models were. When I did internet searches for these drivers, I came up with a lot of sketchy websites (with a lot of hyphens in their URLs). I wasn't sure which links were legitimate or not. Some links, instead of having actual drivers for download, would just take me to other links, and the hardware was so old the manufacturer's website no longer had drivers for them. After several hours, I did finally get it all sorted out. Another painful Windows installation was behind me.

[online14230]

That year, I was a pretty happy Windows user. My wife, meanwhile, had purchased a Mac G4 Powerbook for school, and I was a bit envious of her computer's "eye candy." When I looked at my Windows themes settings, there were only two themes available--Windows Classic and Windows XP. The XP theme had three colors--blue, silver, and olive. There was one option to find more themes online, but that just took me to the Microsoft page for buying separate software from them that would allow me to install more themes. No thanks. There was a project I stumbled upon called WindowBlinds. It allowed you to customize your Windows desktop easily--installing new themes, getting a Mac-like dock, and changing icons. I had two problems with WindowBlinds, though: it wasn't free, and none of the themes integrated well with each other. If you didn't pay for WindowBlinds, you got nagware--a pop-up every now and then reminding you to buy it. And the pixelated icons I could do without.

I saw a few other programs to help you customize Windows, but all of them looked a little too complicated to install and involved hacking the Windows registry.

I don't know why, but suddenly I got the urge to explore Linux again. Things might have actually changed, or I may have actually gotten better at doing web research, but my migration to Linux seemed a lot smoother this time around.

First of all, I came across a site called DistroWatch. It has rankings based on number of hits on a page for different Linux distros, and it displays prominently on the front page the top 100 distros. It's not a scientifically accurate ranking system, but it does give you a general idea of which distros are popular, so if there really are 400 distros, you can check out only five or six.

The local library also happened to then stock a non-Red Hat Linux book called Point & Click Linux, whose title appealed to the Windows user in me (who was deathly afraid of the command-line) and which featured a distro I hadn't heard of before--Mepis. To be continued...

Mepis seemed magic to me at the time. Blag was one CD that had a wealth of software, but Mepis one-upped Blag. Mepis was one CD that was a live CD that could also install itself to your hard drive and include a wealth of software. For those of you unfamiliar with live CDs, a live CD does not affect your hard drive, but if you boot to it, it creates a session from the CD itself and your computer's RAM (temporary memory). In that session, you get a preview of the operating system--how well it detects your internet, sound, video, what software it includes (you can actually use the software during the live session). The live session may run more slowly than an installed session, but it usually has less to work with.

The bulk of Point & Click Linux was too elementary for me. It showed you how to use OpenOffice (a program very similar to Microsoft Office) and how to browse the internet with Firefox (which I had already been using in Windows). What helped me, though, was its explanation of partitioning and how to set up a dual-boot with Windows. When I installed Blag the year before, I had installed it right over Windows, replacing Windows. With a dual-boot, I had the option to use either Windows or Mepis. The book also explained a new way of installing software. Synaptic Package Manager would take care of all dependencies and download and install them for you. No more dependency hell.

Mepis recognized my screen resolution, and software installation was easy. Best of all, customization was easy. I could right-click an icon and just browse around for a different icon. I could download icon sets and themes from KDE-look and not have to buy and install a separate program to use those themes. The themes integrated well, and the icons were not pixelated--many were SVGs or high-resolution PNGs.

Eventually, the customization bug took me away from Mepis. The software in Mepis is great, but the user community was generally unknowledgeable about intermediate issues. No one, for example, could tell me how to change the boot-up splash screen from the Mepis pyramids to something else.