Have you made the switch?

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yeah but can you Sed and Awk? :P

I bought a Macbook a few months ago and it's now my defacto portable rig
its small, light, good battery and does everything I need from a portable machine

I still use windows on my primary workstation, why? because I'm a gamer
ofcourse in my chosen career, the OS has become a moot point
with virtualisation I can have the best OS for the job, all on the same box, problem solved, this petty debate about whos OS is best is utter tosh, much like most tech debates about brands

Linux ready for the desktop? no sir, not even close

 

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Fergal,

I'm not enough a programmer to play with kernel code, or make major application modifications, at least not yet, but I fairly regularly modify system operation by hacking system scripts, and most of *nix is built on scripts.

Is having the code open so anyone and everyone can look, can see what is in there, a good thing for even those who can't program? I certainly think it is. It keeps things open and above board. It keeps someone from building functionality into a program that would benefit just them at the expense of others. It helps ensure that the system is going to remain what it says it is, what it claims to be. Open source isn't good for only developers and programmers.

Saying openness is only profitable to you if you're a programmer is missing the point of open source. Checks and balances that ensure honesty are great for everyone, and a major benefit of having the source code open. I don't have to blindly trust my system. I can know that there are many people out there who feel the same way I do about it, and who are checking the work of coders, and that when my skills reach that level I can do the same and make those types of contributions.

I don't know if you've ever followed any of the flame wars that erupt within the Linux community, but if you had, you would understand just how much this community values its freedom. We value it enough to work at it, to make sacrifices for it, to fight for, and over, it. The freedoms brought by open source aren't something we take lightly. Even the pragmatic among us realize their worth.

 

I have my home PC set up to dual boot between XP Pro and Ubuntu. I like Ubuntu and the challenge of getting things to work on it, although, I've been a bit lazy to be honest. I am making more of an effort with it though now and am determined to make the one game I play work in it as others have - Eve - which is also the main reason for my laziness As for XP, well, the wife and kids need to use the comp as well and although the kids could make the switch if I insisted on it, the wife really wouldn't stand a chance - hence the reason that I dual boot.

Trip, a confused question from me (and you probably got a very good answer) but why not use Open Office or am I just not understanding what programs you are using? I once tested Open Office for a couple of months at work with the help of one of the secretaries (exclusively XP systems) and you can set it up to open and save as a Word document by default. There were a few issues regarding default settings but that was mainly down to my lack of knowledge and the secretary managed to use it without too many problems.

 

Fair enough Freddy. I dont expect you to get in about the kernel or anything. I just find it funny that Linux advocates harp on about how its open, you can get the source and see what it does, and change it to anything you want yourself, yet some of these dont go anywhere near it. There are many things Vista ultimate can do that I dont really make use of, so I wouldnt really tout them myself as a major reason why I use it. Whilst these are in the minority for Linux, there are people that do just that.

 

i've tried but things always go wrong. the first time i installed mandrake my mate killed the disk in the machine and then i tried a few years later to install fedora core 4 and had trouble mounting the drives and gave up. last year i installed a dual boot system on my shuttle with vista and ubuntu and the trial version of vista ran out before i got a real chance to use it and i formatted the disk. i've also used knoppix on and off in one of my jobs to test cluster nodes because Windows didn't always find the faults. currently looking for a new kvm switch to get both my machines running so i can start playing again

grim

 

Here Fergal, come back to the good side, come into the light fergal....

 

I was introduced to Linux as part of my new job role.

I'm 22 years old and have been in the I.T Sector for nearly 4 years now being a windows boy and coming from previous job roles which used Windows extensively my initial response to Linux was Linux? wtf is Linux?

Oh How ignorant to the Open Source way of thinking I was

See I started out my computing adventure with a 286 Tandy complete with Windows 3.1 ahh those were the the classic days in which I wasted the majority of my childhood playing classic gaming greats such as wolf 3d, crystal caves, nighthunter,

I never was exposed to Unix?

If I could turn back the clock I certainly would of starting to dabble in the world of Unix at a young age but such is life!

So I now have been using Linux for nearly 2 years now nothing major i.e I'm not a programmer or a scripter I do like to dabble with administration such as webmin , editing config files and playing about with Samba.

I have to say with Linux sure there is a learning curve but using a windows box in comparison is a rather boring and tedious process it's hard to explain but you actually get a sense of achievment and when you learn how to actually do something you get a sense of awe.

My disto of choice of course is Debian and it looks like for me it's here to stay!