I got fed up with windows and formatted and installed Slackware a couple years ago. I've been programming with g++ and KDevelop on the KDE interface ever since. But now I'm kind of wondering, like, what's the difference between the different Linuxs'? If I used a Linux box with Ubuntu and and the KDE interface would I even know the difference? And at the risk of starting a flame war... why does microsoft even exist? It was kind of a drag to find Linux drivers for my printer and video card and get CUPS and stuff but it wasn't that big of a deal. What does Microsoft sell that I can't get for free? Slackware was supposedly like a bare-bones OS or something, that's what everybody said. But it came with everything. It had KDE and g++ and Kdevelop and Gimp, SDL, OpenGL, SDL_mixer, SDL_image, Amarok. That's everything I need. I love it. Microsoft seems like bottled water to me. People buy water in bottles even though the free stuff is better. I'm just sort of mystified I guess.

try playing games on linux.

any game that isn't designed for linux can be hard/impossible to make work. and thats when you use wine.

although this project looks very interesting. http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

its like a free version of windows. :D

Quote: Original post by icecubeflower
And at the risk of starting a flame war... why does microsoft even exist? It was kind of a drag to find Linux drivers for my printer and video card and get CUPS and stuff but it wasn't that big of a deal. What does Microsoft sell that I can't get for free?

For me, an OS that works first time, every time.

Every single time I have ever updated Kubuntu or Mandriva, it's broken. Usually a failure to configure my graphics card. But not a simple failure where it reverts to default settings and I have to change the resolution back, or even a slightly more complex one where I would need to reinstall drivers, but a completely opaque one where it either appears to hang during boot, or dumps me to the command prompt saying it couldn't find "screens". Not good enough, at all. Or there was the last time I updated Kubuntu, where it insisted that I must not interrupt the upgrade process, but it crashed out with a segfault half way through when the C runtime it was using ceased to match up with the Perl build it was using. It's not like C and Perl are obscure aspects of Unix, yet this show-stopper still got through 'testing'.

Then there's the fact that audio on Linux is still horrifically bad. Which system do you use... ALSA? Jack? OSS? ESD? aRTs? Do you need to set one up to pipe through another? Apart from the fact that most of these have abysmal latency compared to Windows, this is also incredibly fragile - during an upgrade, my system found a USB microphone, added that to the list of sound devices, and thus I lost sound output, because the default device is device zero, but when you enumerate USB devices, it makes no guarantee as to which order they will come in. So it's pot luck as to whether your settings that worked before will work now, until you find the problem and edit the conf file.

And the fact that Linux developers are terminally incapable of developing a useful GUI program to edit settings. Probably 98% of problems I've seen come from someone doing some tweaks in the GUI, being unable to fix a certain thing, and then being told to go to the command line to fix it. So you have to learn 2 methods instead of just one.

Oh, and copy and paste is still inconsistent after all these years. Some apps copy when you select text, some don't. Some paste on middle-click, some don't.

Quote: Microsoft seems like bottled water to me.

MS Windows is like bottled water. Linux is like trekking out into the countryside to find a natural spring. Yes, it's better, but damn it's hard work sometimes.

Sadly I could never get Slackware to work on any pc I used. And I always wanted to atleast try it. But I use Gentoo now and more than happy with it. I get around the limitations debian, red hat, suse etc uses. Which don't allow customization of applications or make them specially optimized for you particular processor. And Gentoo lets you be able to do that and much much more. The only thing I have lacking on my system is a firewall. I can't understand how to set a firewall up for shit >.< pisses me off.

Quote: Original post by xZekex
The only thing I have lacking on my system is a firewall. I can't understand how to set a firewall up for shit >.< pisses me off.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Iptables_for_newbies

Gentoo Wiki is a great resource for all linux users - even people not using gentoo..


so a few people have put in their 2cents but just to recap on the OP questions:

Differences in distros mainly means:
Very different community feel
Different levels of control over system tinkering
Different customized sys admin tools
Different repository size, quality, and bleeding-edginess
Different crazy effed up names for releases.

What's so great about Microsoft? How about DirectX and Visual Studio for starters? I mean I wish I could drop Windows and stop dual-booting, but I can't because of those two things...
So Microsoft makes at least 2 Programs/APIs which are so freaking awesome that, even though there are decent alternatives, those programs still keep you dual-booting and using an OS you don't even like... That's one thing they seem to be doing phenomenally well and I'm very glad they're around for that.

One thing particularly applicable to this thread/forum/website is that Linux doesn't support gaming very well in general, something I hope to see change in the near future. Audio was one aspect already mentioned. I already see this changing as more distributions are integrating sound servers from the start now and tweaking their packaged software to be preconfigured for said servers (Ubuntu, for example, is transitioning to Pulse Audio, but I think it'll take another release or two until it works properly out of the box).

Another issue is... well, distributions. The differing packages and libraries (versioning) create an instable ABI and a very fuzzy target for developers. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't have a true analog of DirectX, at least not one that simply works with Linux (instead, it must be engineered for certain distributions or configured by end users, which is unacceptable for most gamers) or provides access to all the necessary services needed by games.

I develop for Linux and use it at home on all my systems, but I think it will be some time before gaming opens up on the platform. It will take some big changes to make gaming as easy and painless (both for developers and end users) as it is (and has been for awhile) in Windows. After rereading the previous sentence... well, I'm not sure what the heck I was thinking there! [embarrass] As for history, start with Google and Wikipedia, of course. :-)

EDIT: Note that these points are much more serious for only really apply to projects that are not open source; shipping binaries (and only binaries) on Linux is more difficult. If source is available, most communities build compatible packages quite easily.

[Edited by - GenuineXP on October 10, 2008 11:44:03 AM]

Quote: Original post by icecubeflower
People buy water in bottles even though the free stuff is better. I'm just sort of mystified I guess.

Bottled water is safe and predictable/consistent, and not everyone knows how to make potable drinking water out of the "free stuff".

Quote: Original post by c0uchm0nster

What's so great about Microsoft? How about DirectX and Visual Studio for starters? I mean I wish I could drop Windows and stop dual-booting, but I can't because of those two things...
So Microsoft makes at least 2 Programs/APIs which are so freaking awesome that, even though there are decent alternatives, those programs still keep you dual-booting and using an OS you don't even like... That's one thing they seem to be doing phenomenally well and I'm very glad they're around for that.

You can use VirtualBox for emulation of windows ^_^. But yeah I like KDevelop but I can't wait for KDevelop4 its going to be way better than Visual Studio ;). And DirectX meh, I hate its api it is so bloated and ugly. Anyways thats not the point.

I dropped Windows for full blown Gentoo ^_^. I might have to install Windows Vista just to play the games and thats it but will be on my other hard drive.

Yeah there are no decent games for Linux that I own :( But meh.