Recommend me a distro!

[RESmonkey]

- Have used Ubuntu before (dapper drake). Went back to XP because of lack of Flash support back in the day.


Now, getting new laptop w/ Vista and want to dual boot.

Laptop specs:
C2D P8400 2.26Ghz (1066Mhz FSB w/ 3MB cache)
3GB DDR2-800 RAM
Radeon 3470 w/ 256MB vRAM

How I use PC:
-Lots of Firefox tabs
-Photoshop
-Possible school program (major is EE)

 

[nsafreak]

There's nothing wrong with Ubuntu, if you ran it before and liked it I don't see any reason not to pop it back in. I really should load it again myself but I just never could get Ventrilo working so that I could use push to talk without having its window have focus.

 

[The Keeper]

Those who are inexperienced enough not to make their own decision as to what distro to try, should choose Ubuntu. It is at the moment the most overall new user-friendly distro out there. Other major distros may have a thing or two done better than in Ubuntu but overall Ubuntu takes the cake.

Back in the dapper times there was no Flash Player 9 for linux, flash player 7 for linux sucked and was badly out of date. Flash works relatively fine in Ubuntu these days. Upcoming Flash Player 10 that will be released at the same time for windows, os x as well as linux should solve remaining problems in linux environment.

 

[scttgrd]

Ubuntu is a good second step, I started off with PClinuxOS and kind of graduated to Ubuntu. Once you are used to the difference in OS with the first, Ubutu is a breeze. Make sure you check out the Setup thread on ubuntu forums to get things started once you make the plunge! Alot of the multimedia is copy and paste. Don't let it scare you. I was a noob and followed the guide, I'm up and running for 6 months now and the wife is happy. No small feat let me tell you. Looking for the link now.

 

[Sylvanas]

I have only been in the world of linux for a few months now but I am really enjoying it, I am using Ubuntu 8.04 64bit. It's great- recognized nearly everything (only wifi needs some mucking about) in my new Dell Inspiron 1525 out of the box and have been running it ever since. Not sure about Photoshop in Linux but if there is no native linux client then I am sure Wine will let you get it running seeing as Photoshop is a popular app.

 

[Net]

do you want a distro that has apt-get or are you okay with compiling to install programs and doing a little configurations?

my favorite is slackware. its known for being more unix like then other distros.

 

[Net]

you know what would be fun to try out is solaris 10

 

[QuixoticOne]

I'd probably say *buy* a copy of the commercial SUSE version on DVD;
it comes bundled with a few more integrated media
capabilities than the fully open source version does, and it is easy to work with and a good general distribution.

UBUNTU is OK but I prefer a DVD based distribution like SUSE or Fedora because the chances are most
of the programs you'd want are already on the DVD so you can just "install everything" and be almost all set.

With a single-CD based distribution like UBUNTU you get a good basic desktop after installing from CD, but
there usually are hundreds of optional add-on packages I end up wanting to install which involves a somewhat
lengthy process of selection, downloading, et. al.

UBUNTU's got less good support built in for firewall and various server related things than Fedora or SUSE.

Flash 10 and I believe Flash 9 are recently out for LINUX and I believe they work pretty well in general on
the modern 32 bit distributions. IIRC there are still some rough edges with 64 bit LINUX OS + 32 bit flash plugins
on some distributions, but I believe that has been worked-around fairly effectively through various means on
various distributions.

If you prefer to use nearly 100% UNIX as a main OS, you can always just run UNIX/LINUX and then
even run IE6 in Wine or a VM, or you could just run XP in a KVM / VirtualBox VM to run internet explorer 6/7 or
the Windows version of Firefox or maybe iTunes(?) / MS office / or whatever in the VM.

If you do major video gaming, though, you might as well just dual boot to Vista or XP since that's not going
to work well just under UNIX or even with a VM or WINE.

There are also projects like GNASH that replace a lot of what flash can do for LINUX, but if you're talking about
youtube type video etc. just run flash 9 / flash 10 plugins with firefox.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...ge=news_item&px=NjIzNA
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...ge=news_item&px=NjU2NQ

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: net

you know what would be fun to try out is solaris 10

NO! No! Bad dog! No!

 

[Nothinman]

you know what would be fun to try out is solaris 10

If by fun you mean annoying and frustrating...

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

you know what would be fun to try out is solaris 10

If by fun you mean annoying and frustrating...

Agreed, wait for it to be a bit more polished, I wasted some time on that side project...

 

[RESmonkey]

I want apt-get. I've only once attempted to compile my own from some tar.gz and failed horribly. There was no guide on how to do it, though. There probably is on, by now.

 

[ultra laser]

If photoshop is important to you, then why would you bother with linux?

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: RESmonkey
I want apt-get. I've only once attempted to compile my own from some tar.gz and failed horribly. There was no guide on how to do it, though. There probably is on, by now.

You don't really need a guide.


Extract source then cd to the directory... read the README files if there are any, otherwise just ./configure && make

If all goes well, make install

and you are done.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Originally posted by: ultra laser
If photoshop is important to you, then why would you bother with linux?

Why not? CS2 has a gold rating on WineHQ now. It runs quite well.

 

[QuixoticOne]

IMHO -- Firefox + LINUX + lots of tabs = LOSE.

I've seen it speculated (I'm not SURE if it was a joke or not) that Microsoft secretly partners with Mozilla to make Windows look good by
making Firefox on LINUX work so poorly. If I baby it it'll last a couple of hours before crashing, otherwise MTBF = 20 minutes.
The same happens on UBUNTU and FEDORA with or without OEM GPU drivers, so I know it's not just issues on one PC.
Maybe it is a 64 bit thing, IDK, I don't see how it got out of QA being this bad ever since version 2.x though.
And it isn't due to 3rd party plug-ins (which DO cause a lot of flakiness), since I don't use any, and I even mostly keep scripts of any kind turned
off and ads / sound / animations / video blocked.

You'd be happier with OPERA or Konqueror or something if you are a heavy user.

Photoshop CS2 works well in WINE, and IIRC CS3 was getting to the "sort of working" stage. In fact I seem to remember Google even
doing some sponsorship to help Photoshop work better under LINUX according to some slashdot article several months ago; I forget
the rationale and consequences.

Photoshop CS3 might just work in a VirtualBox or QEMU/KVM running XP or Vista or Win2K under a LINUX host, so that's another option for
occasional use of Windows software under LINUX.

If you're into EE, LINUX is nice for running SPICE and other such things, many of which work better under LINUX than Windows.

 

[ultra laser]

I don't see the purpose of running linux as a desktop OS if you're just going to be emulating windows apps. Why not just run windows? Windows is also a lot better at managing laptop power.

 

[sourceninja]

Ubuntu on my dell laptop has much better life then windows xp, and it hibernates properly.

 

[Nothinman]

I've seen it speculated (I'm not SURE if it was a joke or not) that Microsoft secretly partners with Mozilla to make Windows look good by
making Firefox on LINUX work so poorly.

FF is completely OSS so why not just take a look instead of spreading information that you're not sure is correct?

I don't see the purpose of running linux as a desktop OS if you're just going to be emulating windows apps. Why not just run windows?

If you only need the 1 Windows app then it might be worth it since I'd much rather deal with WINE than Windows.

Windows is also a lot better at managing laptop power.

That's not really true any more. There's a lot of variables but generally Linux is very close to Windows now and hopefully will surpass it in the future since power consumption is a major target for a lot of Linux developers these days.

 

[Net]

i thought i'd mention out of all the distro's i've used. i always go back to slackware. so if you decide on a different distro i highly recommend putting slackware on a small partition to see what its like. play with it for a bit. its known as the most stable and unix-like distro. good luck.

 

[Nothinman]

its known as the most stable and unix-like distro. good luck.

I'd venture to say that Slackware is only known as the most stable by it's own zealots, most unix-like I'll give you but IMO that's a con and not a pro. The lack of decent package management ala Debian/Ubuntu or even RHEL/CentOS really kills it.

 

[Net]

slackware does need a package management tool.

its not a big problem though, you can find plenty of precompiled binaries at http://slackbuilds.org

personally i like writing scripts, doing configurations, compiling and learning how the system works. if that isn't your hobby then distributions like gentoo and slackware could be a big pain.

 

[Nothinman]

its not a big problem though, you can find plenty of precompiled binaries at http://slackbuilds.org

But it is, if updates don't come from an authenticated, trusted source what good are they?

personally i like writing scripts, doing configurations, compiling and learning how the system works. if that isn't your hobby then distributions like gentoo and slackware could be a big pain.

I liked doing that 5 years ago but now I prefer to just run aptitude and let the DDs take care of the heavy lifting for me. And there's just way too many downsides to compiling your own software to make it worthwhile.

 

[Net]

But it is, if updates don't come from an authenticated, trusted source what good are they?

as good as you have faith in them like torrents and wikipedia.

and if its a real concern for you then you just compile.

I liked doing that 5 years ago but now I prefer to just run aptitude and let the DDs take care of the heavy lifting for me. And there's just way too many downsides to compiling your own software to make it worthwhile.

it comes down to what you want. its not a downside for me. i enjoy it. my brother has the same argument about linux.

 

[Nothinman]

as good as you have faith in them like torrents and wikipedia.

I take wikipedia with a grain of salt and I don't usually torrent software. Once in a while I'll torrent an Ubuntu disc or something but then gpg signatures are provided to prove that the copy is legit.

it comes down to what you want. its not a downside for me. i enjoy it. my brother has the same argument about linux.

If you've got that much free time...