Linux Discussion Thread

[Shizzy-]

I want to find out some peoples insight and experiences.

Also if any gurus are around?



Also if you have any questions I can answer them regarding Linux if you're %100 clueless on what it is and how it works.

(Even though Google is a thing)

[OMG_its_a_NAME]

Had Ubuntu for a while on my netbook, before University forced me to get Visual Studio for C# (not really forced, I had a course and it was a lot simpler to follow on windows.)

It was good enough, usable, and certainly faster/more responsive then windows. I mostly liked it for the virtual desktops (tried the compiz cube for a while, but I ended up using a flat 2x5 plane), they made the small screen a lot more bearable, let me keep different "work-flows" (4x uni desktops with presentations, compiler, browser and notepad, and 4x entertainment with some music, videos, blogs, whatever, and 2 empty extras in the middle for whatever) open at the same time and they just seem to work far better for me as a person than alt-tabbing.

Cool feature, since the graphics are completely independent from the underlying OS. I've searched for a while for a PC window manager application like this, I found nothing that felt as smooth.

Probably going to re-install it this summer when I get the time.

[XaTrIxX]

Got Dualboot: Windows and Opensuse 12.1

Windows to play

Linux to work.

On my Opensuse I have Gnome 3, but I'm not making too much use of it, as I am programming in my console with emacs most of the time. On command line I found out I'm classes quicker than with my mouse.

[Shizzy-]

What brought you guys onto it?

Any prior experiences/knowledge you learned before hand?

[OMG_its_a_NAME]

I was browsing youtube and found a video about the compiz fusion window manager. The effects looked really cool, and what I also found interesting was the scaling resolution that you could set. At the time I was running a crappy graphics card (fx 5200) via VGA, which meant that I either played in a low res window on my 1680x1050 display, or the screen looked like crap because of bad build-in scaling in my monitor. I was hoping to run games in Wine, and set a custom scaled resolution in xrandr or something. Anyway, it turned out to be too much of a mess/hassle, and after I got fed up with it I just got out and got a new graphics card.
Still, compiz looked nice and worked fine. In comparison to XP it looked and felt awesome, and it made me feel like graphics effects finally had a use other than just gaming.

About half a year later, my mom got an eeepc netbook as part of a government project and it had EduBuntu on it. I decided to wipe it and install Ubuntu to try it, and like I said, I was pleasantly surprised. People often talk about Linux like it's nothing but wrestling with the console and obscure code, but it works fine as an OS for normal use.

[Shizzy-]

Originally Posted by OMG_its_a_NAME

I was browsing youtube and found a video about the compiz fusion window manager. The effects looked really cool, and what I also found interesting was the scaling resolution that you could set. At the time I was running a crappy graphics card (fx 5200) via VGA, which meant that I either played in a low res window on my 1680x1050 display, or the screen looked like crap because of bad build-in scaling in my monitor. I was hoping to run games in Wine, and set a custom scaled resolution in xrandr or something. Anyway, it turned out to be too much of a mess/hassle, and after I got fed up with it I just got out and got a new graphics card.
Still, compiz looked nice and worked fine. In comparison to XP it looked and felt awesome, and it made me feel like graphics effects finally had a use other than just gaming.

About half a year later, my mom got an eeepc netbook as part of a government project and it had EduBuntu on it. I decided to wipe it and install Ubuntu to try it, and like I said, I was pleasantly surprised. People often talk about Linux like it's nothing but wrestling with the console and obscure code, but it works fine as an OS for normal use.

Normal Use.

The fun part is trying to configure it to make stuff work on it.

[Linux_Xp]

i'm ok, use me.. use me fully!

[Shizzy-]

What :O?

[SmellyJelly]

Wouldn't mind using it if it didn't have problems with ATI aka AMD video driver support.

[Shizzy-]

Originally Posted by SmellyJelly

Wouldn't mind using it if it didn't have problems with ATI aka AMD video driver support.

On Ubuntu, the software center has updated ATI drivers that I installed and work perfectly.

[Shizzy-]

PEW. Nobody uses Linux >.<?

[Hey00]

I do. Started with ubuntu 7 years ago, but didn't use it much. Then I tried fedora a bit more than 4 years ago and switched to debian that I use principally for 4 years. I'm probably going to switch for mint (debian edition), because they have a fork of gnome 2 and I just don't like gnome 3.

I learnt how to use it through friends advice at first, forums, and by myself. Actually, the same way I learnt to use windows.


Edit: btw, ati cards aren't that well supported on linux, compared to nvidia ones, especially when using it with wine.

[Shizzy-]

What features of Debian did you find most appealing? I've never tried/used it.

[Hey00]

Originally Posted by Shizzy-

What features of Debian did you find most appealing? I've never tried/used it.

Well, first it has a lot of documentation and help thanks to the huge ubuntu community, since nearly everything related to ubuntu is relevant to debian.
Second, it is a lot less user friendly than ubuntu which try so much to be user friendly that it hinders me more than anything. Those two points make it a great distribution to learn a bit more.
Third, it has three versions available: stable, testing and unstable. The stable and testing mostly get security updates (like ubuntu, but with a life cycle of years instead of 6 months), and the unstable is in rolling release, so it doesn't need huge upgrades or reinstallations and still get up-to-date softwares.

[Shizzy-]

Say if i were to give Debian a try. How much experience do you suggested I should have? Is mostly everything through terminal?

And are the commands the same except maybe 1 line swapped out?

[Hey00]

Originally Posted by Shizzy-

Say if i were to give Debian a try. How much experience do you suggested I should have? Is mostly everything through terminal?

And are the commands the same except maybe 1 line swapped out?

It depends. Unbuntu is based on debian, so every command that works on ubuntu should work on debian. That's why it's great, if you have a problem, a solution working for ubuntu will most likely work on debian.

But debian has less automatic things and is free, meaning things like wifi or graphic drivers that are non-free will need to be installed manually (it's not hard, there are plenty of docs about it).

It also has less graphical interfaces, so you'll have to do a few things through the terminal instead of graphically, but if you know your way around .deb based distributions, and are able to use a search engine, you'll do fine.

[Shizzy-]

Nice man. Thanks for giving such good insight. I might create a partition and give Debian a try. I want to try and deviate away from the user-friendly GUI and start doing a little more through LUI.

So sudo apt-get install [google chrome name] works.

Also, do you know if there is a repository directory?[Lists all the things available via the apt-get install commands?] I haven't really been able to find anything.

[Hey00]

Yes and no, actually.

First, sudo isn't installed by default, that means that graphical apps like gparted that must be run with administrative powers will ask you the root password instead of the user one.
And in console, if you want to run apps that require admin powers like apt, you'll have to switch to root with the command "su", and then do what you want (without the sudo).
But you can install sudo if you want (you'll have to configure the sudoers file), but graphical apps will still ask for the root password (they use gksu instead of gksudo, I don't know how to automatically change that everywhere in the menus).

Second, debian wants to be as free as possible, so some programs like firefox, thunderbird, chrome, who have some non free parts (logos and names, for example) are replaced by free ones iceweasel, icedove (those are firefox and thunderbird but with free logos and names), chromium-browser (the open source browser that google use to make chrome).

For the package list, here: http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

[Shizzy-]

Much appreciated. I'll dig into it possibly over the weekend.

[Francis]

I run a custom Linux Mint build on KDE. I use it primarily for web development, and I run a local database and web server. I don't use Windows anymore, except for games, which is why I still have a 10GB partition for Windows 7 purely for games, the rest of my hard drive is for Linux.

As to my experience in Linux, I started with Ubuntu 6.06LTS back in 2006, I think. Over the years I've gone distro-hopping to SUSE, openSUSE, Debian, and now Linux Mint (which is basically a spinoff of Ubuntu, but which I prefer over its predecessor.) Since then I've been playing around Linux Mint, and have familiarized myself with Linux to a probably intermediate to advanced level. Right now aside from having a local Linux for web development, I also administer a remote CentOS web server and another remote database server. All this I do over SSH, with no tunneled X server.

I'm planning to move to Arch Linux to even improve my mastery of Linux, but right now I have no time for that venture (the setting up alone could take days.)