Thanks...I need to get my act together and get a new op system.
Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, besides being ugly as homemade sin, is just as unusable as Macrosuck’s Windows 8 Metro abomination.
I’m running openSUSE 13.1 and I’m happy with it.
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I had been wondering what to do, you have made my life a lot easier.
I do all of my general internet stuff with Linux. I only use Windows when I have something that just won’t run on Linux and then only for very specific purposes.
I’ve tried a bunch of Linux distros starting with Ubuntu. I don’t like the user interface on that too much. My next was Linux Mint. With the Cinnamon desktop it was a bit buggy - text characters would not fill in correctly and, most of all, I didn’t like the idea of reinstalling every 6 mos to update.
I ended up with Linux Mint Debian Edition (LDME) which has rolling updates. Does all that I need it to do.
I have several XP machines that I use for ham radio (no internet) and some other work. Any Windows system that gets on the net is Windows 7. I plan to at least skip Windows 8 and might never go back to Windows.
There are probably 3 main areas of differences between the various Linuxes I've used. The big one is the "window manager" - it may be Ubuntu's unity (not a fan); Gnome (not a fan); Gnome classic (not bad IMHO); and KDE (wildly configurable but quite usable out of the box). I haven't used the xface etc. interfaces. For basics, Gnome classic and KDE are very usable, not exactly like windows but pretty close. The average user will pick up the differences quickly.
The next area of differences is in the supporting applications/configuration. Each distro seems to have its own take on where to put various configuration options. Generally it is somewhere under the main menus, in some kind of system/settings/etc. A little annoying to find where your distro puts them, but once found no problem.
Finally, the other difference is in the updates/packaging. Generally these fall into .deb or .rpm camps. For some users you may never know or care. Some will eventually end up at a command line, cutting/pasting arcane commands from a website trying to configure something or other.
I don't miss windows at home. I've been running one flavor or another of Linux as my primary home desktop OS for 6 or 8 years now. I'm writing this on an old Dell Dimension e510 running Mint 16.
Oh, and thanks for the post/sources. I'll be installing one of those on my laptop. For business/banking, I simply bought a new computer with Windows 7. Little did I know my fav Bible program is now unusable.
Nice list with brief descriptions, but 50 of them?
That is one of the main problems with Linux distros — 50?
Several years ago, I tried several different distros. They were okay for basics, but none of them fully recognized all of my peripherals.
I gave up on Windows a long time ago. Indeed, my Windows XP machine will need a new motherboard battery if I ever want to turn it on. For a particular client, I bought a laptop (used) and loaded Windows 7 onto it. I paid more for the RAM upgrade and the OS than I did for the laptop itself, by the way. I turn it on only when forced. Which is seldom these days. And my client wants me to move them away from the Windows-centric system they had.
Don't get me wrong, Windows has its place. But that real estate is shrinking faster and faster.
Because I have expensive applications that will not run on Linux, the new Windows crap, or in a virtual machine under either operating system. Those applications are the tools of my livelihood.
My not-Windows partition has been through a lot of different Linux flavors.
Fedora, IMHO, is quite variable in useability between different versions, depending on how bleeding edge the latest things are.
Linux Mint is nice, although I’ve had occasional hardware problems. Linux Mint also has a distribution that is Debian based, called LMDE. The nice thing about that is that it is a “rolling” distribution—meaning you don’t have to update your system every six or nine months to stay on top of things. You just do incremental updates.
So, I asked myself, “Why not go right to Debian?” And, that is another viable choice. Right now I’m running the Debian “testing” distribution with the lightweight XFCE desktop. Very nice, and aside from incremental updates, I expect it to have a life of several years. As a bonus, it’s easy to change the desktop system to KDE, Gnome, or whatever.
I finally converted to Ubuntu from XP and am kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
Simple to use, fantastically stable and don’t have to run script killers anymore.
After looking over the 50 OS I have decided on Windows 8....
bfl
bttt
I mean, just geek on out all the way and be a binary-head!
Like good shampoo, it tingles. ;-)
bump
“In addition, anyone can see the source code for Linux and modify it however they like.”
With a little programming savvy, one can ‘modify’ any OS. Computers are only as smart as their programmers. And there are programmers who are not as smart as the ‘user’.