Quote: Original post by Raduprv
The kernel itself is stable, but the GUI (as in, Xwindows) is anything but stable. It crashed on me quite a few times in the past, and once it managed to crash the whole machine (absolutely everything was dead), but that was due to some Nvidia drivers problems.

You've had problems with X. I haven't. Anecdotal evidence does not illustrate a trend.

That's not to say X is bug-free, or anything like that. It's just that there is no guarantee that any one person will suffer from the same problems as any other person. They might have the same problems, or they might have no problems, or they might have entirely new problems.

Though I would guess that most people have little trouble with X. And it depends heavily on the version you run, your distro, a whole shipload of factors.

Quote: Original post by Raduprv

Quote: Original post by UltimaX
Just on a side note it is very stable. We decided to use RedHat on one of our servers where I work and never once had a problem with it. The only time we needed to restart it was when we ran out of ports to access PICK. Since we fixed the problem of it not releasing the ports we have not restarted yet.

The kernel itself is stable, but the GUI (as in, Xwindows) is anything but stable. It crashed on me quite a few times in the past, and once it managed to crash the whole machine (absolutely everything was dead), but that was due to some Nvidia drivers problems.

The only time I ran XWindows was to setup the netork printers and that's about it. The rest of the time it doesn't run in XWindows so we have had no problems.

Quote: Original post by Ivyn
Does Linux support NTFS partitions?

Reading: Yes. Writing: Dodgy - don't push your luck.

If you want a shared area, best to make a FAT32 partition somewhere.

Quote: Original post by Ivyn
I just want a few opinions on the pros and cons of Windows vs Linux from those of you who use it. How stable is it and how memory intensive vs Windows?

My purely anecdotal evidence: I have no complaints over stability. Once or twice I've had KDE die on me, but then I can just switch to a text window, kill the 'X' process, and it boots straight back into the windowing system without a hitch. (Admittedly this is not such a benefit if you only ever run apps from within KDE.) In terms of memory I have 256MB here and have never found it to be a problem within Linux. It seems to manage the swap space efficiently enough for everything I do.

I find the dependency issue annoying; if I upgrade certain system components I am usually compelled to upgrade everything that uses them too. This seems to be an artifact of the RPM system, but I don't think I have a real choice about that with my distribution. Software availability is the main reason I don't use Linux 24/7: I don't like any of the Linux IDEs (admittedly, I haven't tried Eclipse, as I fear it it probably too resource-hungry for my system), I can't run my music software like Fruityloops or Cakewalk in Linux, and so on.

Quote: Also, what's the best version of Linux to start with? I had no idea there were so many and I have no idea where to start. What's the big difference between them? If I decide to go for it I'll be using it for all the usual: word processing, browing the web, graphics, programming, and a bit of gaming.

I have stuck with Mandrake this far because it seems the lesser of several evils. Red Hat seems ok but all my friends who use it complain of it lacking key functionality that Mandrake has out of the box (eg. MP3 playing ability, mounting your Windows partitions automatically). Debian sounds like it would solve my dependencies issue but sounds more complex in other areas. Mandrake feels a bit thrown together at times; it is biased towards KDE but uses a lot of Gnome apps, the look and feel of which I seem to have no control over (ie. massive ugly fonts!)

kylotan try Code::Blocks at codeblocks.org i beleive is the webby, cross platfrom, open source, imo better than Dev-cpp in windows.

I'd try Slackware, if I were you. Debian's apt-get dependency checking system may be nice for small things, but can cause problems, especially on full system upgrades. It's best to do those things yourself. Besides, Slackware is as fast (if not faster, some people claim) as Gentoo, and is more "Unix" than most distros (which is a good thing). Very robust, very veristile - just not entirely newbie friendly.

EDIT - I mention Debian since Ubuntu is Debian based, AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong, however.

Quote: Original post by Captain Maple
Besides, Slackware is as fast (if not faster, some people claim) as Gentoo, and is more "Unix" than most distros (which is a good thing).

If you're going for more "Unix" you may want to try a BSD (OpenBSD, FreeBSD or NetBSD). I've tried basically every major Linux distro (excluding Fedora because Red Hat, RPMs and me got into a fight that resulted in my beating my computer's power supply with a baseball bat [the power supply because everything else was too valuable to hit]) and finally tried out OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I got both of them working properly on my first try and have settled on using OpenBSD as the only OS on my laptop. The pros and cons of OpenBSD follow:

Pros-

• Easy installation off one CD, everything else downloads


• Centralized filesystem (almost everything is run out of /usr, very few programs install to /sbin or /bin)


• Berkeley FFS is better than ext2 because it uses synchronized metadata writes so it is unlikely to become out of sync (yes, ext3 and reiserFS both fix this)


• Run most software designed for BSD Unix, FreeBSD and Linux


• Services default to off (and most not installed)


• "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!" (www.openbsd.org)


• Centralized configuration files... most system services are configured by editing /etc/rc.conf


• pkg_add/pkg_delete make installing/removing software easy


• ports are pretty cool too

Cons-

• Poor driver support for new products (don't support RT2500 wireless cards)


• Slow to catch up with the rest of the world in software (Firefox 0.8 is latest FF version that will run on OpenBSD)

[Edited by - jperalta on March 8, 2005 10:47:45 AM]

Quote: Original post by H_o_p_s
I just installed Ubuntu. Absolutely love it :)

Ubuntu is really really good!
you should try it!
it even dont hate my sound card and can play 2 sounds at once!
incredible!
but seriously, I tried something like 5 distr, and I liked Ubuntu the most, he's the most stable yet, no crashes!

OpenBSD does seem pretty awesome, but don't you have to pay for the CD's (x86)?

Anyway, Slackware uses the /etc/rc.d/rc.whatever type of thing. Like I said, it's the most true to Unix Linux distrobution out there - besides BSD itself. [smile]

You've made me want to install OpenBSD, however - can it handle X and all that fairly well? What about running on an old P3 (I have one lying around somehwere)?

Either way, Slackware has to stay on my main machine (dual booting with Windows XP Pro SP2), since the ATi drivers are for Linux only (and they FINALLY don't suck).

Makes me kind of frustrated, but I highly doubt ATi is going to go to any trouble to support the BSD crowd. :\

Quote: Original post by Captain Maple
OpenBSD does seem pretty awesome, but don't you have to pay for the CD's (x86)?

Anyway, Slackware uses the /etc/rc.d/rc.whatever type of thing. Like I said, it's the most true to Unix Linux distrobution out there - besides BSD itself. [smile]

You've made me want to install OpenBSD, however - can it handle X and all that fairly well? What about running on an old P3 (I have one lying around somehwere)?

You can download the OpenBSD install CD ISO at www.openbsd.org

It runs X and KDE perfectly well on my P3 700ish laptop with about 248MB of RAM

Edit: Oh, yeah, on other con that really irks me...
BSD people are in love with csh and vi, both of which I can't stand
the only shells that are installed by default are sh, csh, and ksh (iirc), and no bash... and your default editor is vi