Stuff for Linux/Ubuntu curious.

JDub

JDub

Mmm. Pie.
My job is fucking boring. So, a little more than for years ago I decided to try an OS that a programmer friend kept raving about - Ubuntu. I've been with it every since and have enjoyed watching it grow. New versions are released on a six month cycle with long term releases going from the previous two year to the current five year cycle. But I've really been impressed with how often this free OS has been ahead of the curve. For example: Around this time last year Ubuntu released it's first cross-platform OS. Windows 8 just now caught up. Ubuntu's always had a better software center with thousands of free apps. It's virus free and even if/when people write viruses for linux the ecosystem doesn't provide much of a chance for them to spread.

There are downsides. It doesn't have a lot of games. But that's changing with more and more game developers teaming up with linux. Steam is teaming up with linux and just finish signing up users for closed beta testing. Nvidia just wrote a new driver and claims it "doubles" performance on linux. Another downside is that some media formats are "restricted". It's a legal issue easily by-passed by installing the restricted codecs yourself. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to play DVDs or Blurays.

Anyway, I made this thread because I'm not preaching to the choir here. I'm interested in seeing if anyone else in this community has escaped the false dichotomy of Windows or Mac by using Ubuntu or any other Linux OS. (Linux Mint is pretty popular too).
 
Yes, I have been using Linux exclusively for about 10 years, in parallel with Windows for a few years before that. Currently using Gentoo Linux on my desktop and HTPC and Bodhi Linux on my netbook. The thought of using a closed source OS I have no control over, which someone else has put arbitrary restrictions on, seems very foreign now.
 
lightcycle said:
Yes, I have been using Linux exclusively for about 10 years, in parallel with Windows for a few years before that. Currently using Gentoo Linux on my desktop and HTPC and Bodhi Linux on my netbook. The thought of using a closed source OS I have no control over, which someone else has put arbitrary restrictions on, seems very foreign now.
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I still help out people who have a Windows or a Mac when they have software issues. Usually after and update. No system is perfect but I feel I've had less issues on Linux. Yeah, there's a learning curve and some things need to be done manually through the CLI but it's so much more solid than Mac or PC. Most the software on Linux has the email address of the developer under the "about" menu. They even write you back promptly if you have a problem. Have you ever had a developer of closed-source do such a thing for free!? And so far, any issue I've had, has been answered already in the Ubuntu/Linux forums or on askubuntu.com. And as far as I know, Linux is the only OS that works with Apple and Windows products and formats with relative ease.

Is Gentoo the smaller Linux for legacy machines?
 
What Gentoo has going for it is mainly a very sophisticated package manager, where packages aren't distributed in binary form (although some packages can be set to that) but instead in source code. When an application is installed in Gentoo it and it's dependencies are compiled from source. This makes it very flexible, in the sense that one can tailor exactly how the packages should be compiled, whether to turn on optional dependencies and features in packages, and also the compilation can be optimized for the specific CPU in the computer, which for some packages may be benificial for performance. It's possible to set systemwide preferences for what features should be enabled in packages. This makes it possible to get good performance with a Gentoo system, and to tailor the system to only install libraries and dependencies one really wants. Other benefits of Gentoo is generally very recent versions of software in the package system, and forums with very helpful and knowledgeable people.

The complexity of the package manager and the freshness of the software offered comes with a price though, sometimes stuff can break when doing updates, due to the large variety of Gentoo systems in existance thanks to the tailoring possibilities. When it happens it can be fixed of course, but stuff breaks a lot more than it would on a Ubuntu system. In that way, ease of use isn't really Gentoo's strength.

I don't know if I would say it's very suitable for legacy systems though. While it certainly would be possible to build a Gentoo system that would offer very good performance on legacy systems the installation of Gentoo and further installation of software would take time on a legacy system since most would be compiled from source, which can be demanding.
 
I might have been thinking of "Lubuntu".

I'm excited to try the new Nvidia driver tonight. For some reason on Ubuntu it isn't automatically updating. I found an easy work around as long as the new driver's been put into the repositories. Yippee!
 
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