Thinking about going to linux
- Thread starter cindrix
- Start date
patrickv
Active Member
welcome to the forums friend.Yes there's a lot of positives and a few negatives on linux.
Number one is that NO more GAMES.
NO more of your favorite WINDOWS APPS.
a few games will run via CEDEGA -->www.transgaming.com/
a few decent apps through wine --> www.codeweavers.com/
anyways since you're a newbie i'd recommend UBUNTU linux www.ubuntu.com/ or BLAGLinux www.blagblagblag.org/
Number one is that NO more GAMES.
NO more of your favorite WINDOWS APPS.
a few games will run via CEDEGA -->www.transgaming.com/
a few decent apps through wine --> www.codeweavers.com/
anyways since you're a newbie i'd recommend UBUNTU linux www.ubuntu.com/ or BLAGLinux www.blagblagblag.org/
leeroyMarv
New Member
Positives: Fast, reliable, most distros are better quality and a lot more high tech than Windows, comes with compilers for many languages, a lot of distros comes with tonnes of codecs, and really good media players.
Negatives: Incompatible with alot of things, not inherently able to run .exes, Unzip,configure,make,install is a pain but i guess you get used to it, no games, if you have dial up it really sucks
Negatives: Incompatible with alot of things, not inherently able to run .exes, Unzip,configure,make,install is a pain but i guess you get used to it, no games, if you have dial up it really sucks
Draco Malfoy
New Member
It depends on a lot of factors. For example, on my computer which is 2.8GHz with ample RAM, and hard disk space, Windows XP runs wonderfully. It is extremely fast. However because I have a dial-up connexion, I need a modem. Unfortunately most Linux distributions are wholly incompatible with my modem. Therefore no internet. Some are compatible with my network card, and thus I can run a proxy server on my other computer that has a modem, however, the other computer's modem is significantly slower, so it is a big pain. My monitor does not like Linux, and most distributions that I've tried will only run at about 800x600 tops, whereas Windows XP runs just fine. My sound card is also completely incompatible. So no sound at all. I can't record either. My video camera is also not compatible. Happily my keyboard and mouse are compatible at least. On my computer, every distribution has simply crawled, even the really small ones, and applications such as OpenOffice take several minutes to load (last time I tried 3 minutes 43 seconds), as opposed to MS-Office on Windows which loads in seconds. While Windows loads in under a minute, Linux takes several minutes to even get to the console, and takes much longer to load up X Windows. Also, I need to have both Windows and Linux on my computer at the same time. So, I need to dual boot. However that is a difficult feat to achieve, because it means shrinking a very large NTFS partition, or deleting my much smaller recovery partition (which doesn't give Linux much room). I need Windows on there too, when I want to do anything useful, like use the internet at a decent speed (I have an dial up accelerator), or play a game that requires sound, or use greater than 800x600 resolution, or play audio cds or video files, or listen to internet radio, or to use software like IM or Skype. So that pretty much means that the only reasonable thing I can do is text edit on linux using pico or nano, since loading up anything graphical on Linux takes an unreasonably long amount of time. Unfortunately Linux is not compatible with my USB pen drive, and of course cannot write to my cd-writer, and I do not have a floppy drive. So if I want to transfer files between Linux and Windows, I have to either turn on my other computer and transfer them to it over the network, or use a buggy program on Windows that will read from my Linux partition, which has ended up destroying it several times. So, as you can see, I haven't had much luck with Linux overall. The only reasonable way is to run it in a virtual machine on top of Windows, but of course that makes it significantly slower than Windows (although surprisingly much faster than if I boot directly to Linux.) So, for example, whereas I can switch tabs in Firefox on Windows in a matter of microseconds, it takes about 5 seconds to switch on Linux. That is just plain annoying, and I might as well be using Windows. (And this is using D***smalllinux). So my only hope is to use the Dillo web browser, that unfortunately lacks in features such as HTML 4.0 and JavaScript, so it is practically useless, and it is still much slower than on any browser on Windows. So, hopefully your Linux experience is much better than my very traumatic one.
Draco Malfoy
New Member
I have had good luck with eCommstation on Live CD however. It's sort of a remake of OS/2, and even running completely on CD it seems to run 50x faster than any distribution of Linux. It even comes with Firefox, and a bunch of other useful programs. It is also like Windows in many respects, such as it has drive letters, and similar filesystems. Even on LiveCD, it copies itself to memory, and thus runs blazingly fast. For example, I can switch tabs as fast on its Firefox, as I can on Windows XP. It loads really quickly into a graphical user interface. It supports my sound card, and automatically loads at a high resolution. And it has many more features than LiveCD versions of cut down Linux distributions like DSL.
Draco Malfoy
New Member
Another thing you can do is get a shell account and access it from your Windows computer. You may even be able to forward an X session or run VNC software and access it all from your own computer. Or you could install Cygwin on top of Windows and have a very Linux like computer running all on Windows, so you can run both Linux and Windows programs at the same time.
*sigh* Not true.
The majority of games won't work because there were designed for Windows, however Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom III and Quake 4 all work.
There are of course free games that will run e.g. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory.
So it's not true that moving to Linux means the end of gaming.
exe's are a windows format, why would you even expect them to run?
I've been using Linux since the end of 2005 and have NEVER had to use make & install.
See previous post re games.
Really, you'd be better off googling Linux for a few days, too much misinformation doing the rounds. Don't let people scare you off, Linux is easy to use and you can still have fun with it.
The_Other_One
VIP Member
I'm start starting to try Linux a bit more myself... I must say, I played around with the Sabayon LiveCD some this morning and I'm very impressed. Unlike Ubuntu, it will play MP3s without any additional software, and it even had some fairly decent games to boot. Oh what's that 3rd Person shooter they included... I was rather impressed by it 
tlarkin
VIP Member
technically file extensions mean nothing in Linux/Unix environments, they are only there for the user distinction. For example if I run script.sh and then rename it just script with no extension it will run the same way in Linux.
So file extensions have nothing to do with it, the problem is you need windows API support through a software package like WINE, which is not an emulator.
As for gaming, companies like ID port all their games to linux natively. WINE has come a long way and will only get better, the problem is no one donates any kind of large amounts of money to these open source projects because they are a threat, and any dev company who makes money off of sales wants you to buy their product.
So file extensions have nothing to do with it, the problem is you need windows API support through a software package like WINE, which is not an emulator.
As for gaming, companies like ID port all their games to linux natively. WINE has come a long way and will only get better, the problem is no one donates any kind of large amounts of money to these open source projects because they are a threat, and any dev company who makes money off of sales wants you to buy their product.
Draco Malfoy
New Member
How fast is it? All the distributions that I've seem to be very slow.
patrickv
Active Member
dude i know unreal and doom works and probably a few others but to sum it up, probably the ones he will install won't work.
patrickv
Active Member
dude i've been using linux since earlier. and make and make install are TRUE processes of linux. yes you're are a big ubuntu and thats why you don't see MAKE & MAKE INSTALL .We are not scaring him off we just provide information in OUR point of view. and by the way SIMON stop using ubuntu. learn REAL linux
patrickv
Active Member
no, not neccerarily the case depends on your hardware, suse on my machine is fast so is Blag, but PCLinux OS drags a bit. at least in my point of view
patrickv
Active Member
I'm start starting to try Linux a bit more myself... I must say, I played around with the Sabayon LiveCD some this morning and I'm very impressed. Unlike Ubuntu, it will play MP3s without any additional software, and it even had some fairly decent games to boot. Oh what's that 3rd Person shooter they included... I was rather imprtaessed by it
totally true. i'd give you a 100 points there
I've also used SUSE and never had to make & install.
I didn't realise you were one of the anti Ubuntu brigade but your "REAL Linux" comment says it all.
If you want "REAL" Linux then stop using a GUI...
As for the games comment, if you know some games work, why tell him that none do? You may as well tell him that nothing works because you can't use *NIS
* insert programme here.
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patrickv
Active Member
don't worry simon i can use linux without gui even though my back is against the wall nearly all the time, but i try and please don't get mad we need to help this dude who started the thread
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