Originally posted by: Nothinman
I'm probably going to echo a lot of the statements already made here, but what the hell...
IMO it has been for a long time, my primary desktop has been Debian for at least 4 years now.
And every time I read this, I think "You know self, maybe it has improved. Maybe you can run it at a res other than 1024*768. Maybe you will be able to install things easily. Maybe installing the OS will be easy without useless identifiers instead of something more familiar for the drives.
I'm running 2560x1024 across two monitors over here. Yes I had to edit my xorg.conf file to make it work but I can't really complain since I only had add one line: " Option "TwinView" "true"" and the binary nVidia driver did the rest automagically. The next version of Xorg is supposed to have automatic display hotplug stuff so if it actually works that single step might not even be necessary, no idea if Ubuntu included it or not though.
Frankly I find the Windows method of installing software (i.e. hunt around, run setup, click next blindly, etc) more difficult than installing most things on Linux. Add onto that the need for installation keys and the amount of spyware and just plain crap software and it's way too much work to figure out what's worth it and what's not. I actually do like using aptitude and will even go out of my way to find an alternative that's been packaged by Debian if something I'm looking for isn't there. OS X wins for simplicity since a lot of things come in bundles that you just drop somewhere but I'd say that apt still wins overall because it's one central location for installation, removal and updating so I don't have to worry about watching for security updates in a dozen different places.
I don't think I've seen anyone complain about the Ubuntu installer, it's usually one of things that most people rave about. The drive naming is a little odd but in Windows "C:" means absolutely nothing to me and the whole drive letter thing causes more problems than it addresses. I believe Gnome shows filesystem labels in Nautilus whenever they exist like OS X does so that's really a non-issue there.
My friend and I run a computer repair service, i figure it would be good for me to be familiar with Linux in addition to OS X and Windows.
It's not a bad idea, but if 99% of your work is fixing, reloading, etc Windows then I wouldn't worry about it. I personally can't stand fixing Windows any more, every time I have a Windows problem I end up thinking "Man, if this was Linux I'd be done already." or I end up booting up an Ubuntu LiveCD to make sure the hardware really works, image the drive, etc because it's just so much simpler in Linux.
Now, to my understanding, Nautilus is the file browser, analogous to Explorer on Windows, and Finder on OS X. My main issue with the drive naming came when I went to install the latest version of Ubuntu, which by the way, has a lot of really cool things, like reading the My Documents folder so it can import the user's pictures, music, and whatnot all automagically. (at least I had heard that it does this), and how it will (i believe) import a user's bookmarks as well. However, when it came time to partition the drive, I was having a really hard time with it. My understanding was that you could dynamically partition drives in the installer, either I was misinformed, or I simply couldn't figure it out.
And in all honesty, we have, to date, only worked on Windows systems. And I would be of the opinion that if we ever had a customer that was running Linux, they wouldn't need us for Linux troubleshooting so much as a hardware issue (fried PSU, bum RAM, that sort of thing). However, as another option would be to be able to pitch to our customers that need to have Windows reinstalled on their system, the option of installing Linux instead, because it is free, and it is (last i checked) virus and malware free, but if I, a relatively intelligent and savvy computer user, have trouble installing and running Linux, how can I effectively 'sell' the idea of it to my customers?
My partner and I already promote the use of free software when it will take the place of for pay software. We install AVG Free since it does just as well as Norton, we install free alternatives to Reader for PDFs, we usually recommend that they use Firefox (except on OS X where I recommend Safari), and the list goes on. However, I do not recommend anything unless I myself either do use it, or can use it, and since neither of those are true for Linux, i figured I would find out from some of the Pros here whether they thought the time had come for Linux.
My previous statement about the difficulties with running the correct res mostly centered around a 6800LE graphics card that I had. I tried numerous different nVidia drivers straight from their website, none of them worked. I tried editing the Xorg.conf file, to no avail.
My newer system, in my sig is mostly used now for media center work, and in all honesty spends most of its time headless since my monitor is usually set to HDMI for PS3, or VGA for my MacBook (though that may switch to DVI soon, with the desktop on VGA). It has a 7800GTX, a card that I hope will be able to run proper resolutions better, especially since my monitor now outputs at 1920*1200.
So, do you think that installing Linux (I will take distro recommendations, all I have really tried is Fedora and Ubuntu I believe) will be able to replace Windows for me? Hosting media to a PS3 and MacBook, and it has to be able to quickly and easily convert MKVs to h.264 AVIs for use on the PS3.