I’m currently doing something I would have sworn a week ago would never EVER happen. I’m writing this pointless shit from an Ubuntu Linux installation on my home PC rather than the usual Vista Ultimate or XP arrangement and I have to say I’m really quite pleasantly surprised. I can only hope that I won’t entirely lose my social skills as a result of this unplanned foray into the world of nether geekdom.
Who’d have thought it? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to admit that there are several alternatives to Uncle Bill’s software and it’s not just because I earn a living through fixing implementations of the fruits of his labours that I’ve been perhaps twattishly sceptical until now – in fact I largely blame Mac OS (although I have a secret sneaking regard for it) for putting me off the concept of viable alternatives.
This stuff actually works, it costs nothing, it’s really well supported and while it takes a little adjustment I’ve been stunned by just how little.
I have it dual-booting with Vista and it took about 15 minutes to do this from start to finish, with little or no previous Linux experience. It even installs it’s own boot-loader – you can’t actually get Vista and XP to play this nicely together on the same machine and have to jump through hoops to dual-boot them to get them to co-exist.
I’m far from being converted or won-over hook line and sinker, but I am really quite seriously revising a few assumptions I’d made about Linx and open source software in general.
Sorry, that was a bit too serious and had some kind of a point. Normal service will be resumed shortly no doubt.
L
*edit* I’ve actually changed my mind a bit. Getting anything done with it is a total cock-ache, drivers don’t work properly and you have to twat about endlessly with ludicrously syntax-heavy command-line shite to achieve the most basic things in many cases. It’s still a good platform but ultimately a decent GUI is better that twatting around for 3 hours googling the hell out of a problem to change one option on a video driver using a raft of nonsensical commands. Give me a decent intuitive GUI any time.
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re: *edit*
As they say in the trade “STFU n00b”
Seriously, though , try “Linux Mint”. it’s just like Ubuntu but with even less BS (more drivers installed by default, along with all the stuff like flash and mp3 support sorted out of the box) as well as being a bit prettier.
The whole “twat about endlessly with ludicrously syntax-heavy command-line shite” is an oft repeated diss and it isn’t really fair. You usually don’t *have* to use shell but in forums, etc people will usually give answers to questions using commands instead of gui instructions just because it’s much easier all round (and useful to a broader range of people searching for answers) to say:
“Paste this code block into a terminal [and then paste your results back to the forum]”
than saying:
“Which desktop environment are you using? Well in that case, Go to system> administration > package manager and install the gui-based-bloated-thing-youll-only-use-this-once package. Now click here, there and everywhere, spin your mouse in an anti clockwise spiral for 3 revolutions, zig zag for 3 seconds then press all five buttons at once. [Now can you please describe what you see?]”
You only find your Windows GUI so much more “intuitive” than any other because you’ve been using it for over a decade; OSX is supposedly renowned for its plastic scissors and crayons, but I bet you found it somewhat counterintuitive the first few times you used it, I certainly did and I’ve used (and supported) dozens of operating systems over the last 24 years.
Your graphics settings probably would have been a non issue if you had installed the official driver package from the vendor website – heaven forbid! If you rely on Ubuntu to find a suitable driver it will do just that – get a suitable (but not neccessarily optimised) driver without any of the extra fluff like a dedicated control panel with all the tweaky tweaks, etc. You wouldn’t expect Windows to magically have all that shit out of the box so why do you expect it from Linux?
Other than that, nice one for at least giving it a go but I must insist, dear Loz, that you don’t give up just because the first time you installed it, you had one issue that took you three hours to fix – that’s really fuck all in the ocean.
[/geekrant]
Damn. Random italics have made me look incompetent and ruined my authoritative tone.
Yawn!!