anyone here run linux?

[crassius]

Looking for a good linux distro. I have ubuntu running, but can't deal with it except in emergencies. Also have mint running here, and can use it, but with near constant aggravation.

Spending way too much time installing & testing, and before I try fedora or slackware, I'd like some opinions from folks not trying to get famous by pushing their own distro : )

My *nix days were mostly in the 70s & 80s, but I can still script the shell & write in perl. Looking for something as windows-like in the gui as possible.

 

[Going2Hell]

I had one for you up until you said you already use Ubuntu...

Have you tried any of the other family of buntu like Xubuntu? It really depends on how you use or want to use your system. Desktop or Laptop? What are the specs?

 

[crassius]

I need easy root access, and a windows-like gui (my current ubuntu has window controls in upper left corner & makes it hard to run it on a machine that sits side by side with my windows machine with me going back & forth all the time.

 

[stinkfoot]

I'd stay away from slackware unless your as hardcore as you say you are with *nix. Slackware needs a lot of dependencies and configurations from out the box.

As for windows-like orientation your not going to find better then DEBIAN, Debian based ( ubuntu), and fedora. All the new distributions are pushing GNOME 3.0 or KDE4 for x window GUI. However, there are a lot of other GUI's for the x window such as xfce, compiz, and fluxbox. As for root access? cd / in terminal isn't fast enough?

 

[crassius]

the ubuntu I have is the one with the root acct locked - got xfce on the mint machine, but not happy with their ver of the start button - I'm much too old to invest 10 hours a week just in getting sys setting right

 

[Rich909]

I personally like Mageia which is a distribution developed by the original Mandriva team and is a "fork" of Mandriva that was created in 2010. Mandriva is Red Hat/Fedora derived. I am running KDE-4, but you will need to have about the same hardware system as would be required to run Win-7.

Head over to: http://www.mageia.org/en/downloads/ ...and download one of the LiveCD images and test it on your hardware to get a quick idea of how it will work for you.

HTH.

--Rich

 

[crassius]

thanx, my test machines are very old, but I'll see what the look & feel are like

 

[Going2Hell]

If you want something small to run on some older machines and also look and operate somewhat like Windows; I had seen Damn Small Linux ported over to the old T-Mobile G1. It looked kinda like Ubuntu but the boxes were on the correct side and it was pretty much a full OS.

 

[silverbear]

I don't really have anything to add. Tried running linux of one variety or another some years ago, but the learning curve was too great for an old guy. I was getting burned out with microsoft and didn't like the idea of one bloated big brother OS without challengers the little guy can afford (which eliminates Apple).

I have two machines running three systems. My laptop runs Ubuntu and XP and a Samsung chromebook is the system I use for most of my email, internet, etc. I like chrome quite a lot, but it has it's limitations such as when I want to upload photos from my iphone, edit them and that sort of thing. I post photos to this forum with XP, watch DVDs from either Ubuntu or XP, avoid XP on the internet as much as possible to keep it alive for as long as I can free of garbage. So far there's no magic OS for me. Easy and intuitive is good, so I like chrome for that.
SB

 

[Intrepid Wheelwoman]

I ran Fedora for quite a while and liked it. Now that I've upgraded to slightly more modern machines I'm using Windows 7 which I've found to be good and an improvement on XP.
My daughter uses Xubuntu running in a virtual machine for some aspects of the software development work she does from home and she seems to like using it.

 

[crassius]

while I'm currently testing on old machines, the goal is to find an OS for a new machine I plan to buy - I can't spend money on a new box just to have to put up with the current M$ OSs

I'm on a winME machine to do real work, and inet server & file server inhouse are win98 - these are all 20 or so years old & work just fine, but not up to new s/w or current inet standards - hassles of keeping them running tho, are much less than dealing with newer win versions.

 

[crassius]

well, search is on hold while I continue to test what MINT can be used for

WINE is a real savior here, as without winzip I can't open my encrypted files, the few games I load are all win-only with no acceptable nix versions, all secure-delete tools I've found are incredibly slow compared to the heidi - eraser

many of the .bat files I use to control win are hard to shift to mint, since it has many cmds that do not honor the "-a" flag to check for an access control list - not sure yet if I can grab binaries that do & add them into this system

all-in-all, the mint beats ubuntu, but I'll keep looking once this machine gets to a point at which it becomes useful for everyday tasks

 

[AssembleThis]

Hi crassius!

Having tried many operating systems including Linux. Third party manufacturers have still not embraced Linux to a level to get me to go back to it. I stayed with windows xp pro and windows 7 ultimate. Why? Well mostly because of third party issues and running errors. For instance, most third party manufacturers hardware and software prefer xp because it works and is easy to use. Vista on the other hand was rejected by almost everyone because it doesn't work and is famous for the BSOD, Blue Screen Of Death. I purchased 3 Vista retail and after many days on the phone with MS decided that even MS can't fix it. Windows 7 I love unfortunately some older software will not run on it. Since I have 2 operating systems that work on my three computers I think I'll stick with them till something better comes along. I understand the desire to use Linux, it's free. But all the time you spend with it, for the time being, to get it to work on everything negates the free part. I buy all my os software from here. Ive made over 100 purchases from them and can say without question, they have some of the best customer service I've ever seen with any company.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416808

Know this, if you buy OEM you can install and activate on 1 computer. If you change the computer and try to activate MS will reject it. But if you build a new computer and can figure at least 5 years of use, which comes to less than $40 per year for the operating system, which is very reasonable. The reason windows 8 is cheaper says volumes about the fact your better off with windows 7.

Dave
AssembleThis

 

[crassius]

we're pretty different in this - usually takes me 6 weeks or so to get the hundreds of small scripts that control the machine running and the screen & access points laid out as I like

I've bought some h/w from newegg, but have never purchased any s/w from late 70s till today, OSs or otherwise. You're right about s/w tho - had to push a .jar file over to a win9x machine yesterday to edit the way my browser ran because nothing on linux would open it (either an error in the file or an attempt by mozilla to prevent folks from having what they want) - finding many needed item failing to run on wine with no linux equiv.

Knew there would be some s/w problems like that, but still hoping I can at least find a decent GUI out there somewhere.

 

[Going2Hell]

Firefox? Is that what you get when you rub two chix together?

 

[AssembleThis]

Hi Going2Hell!

Very funny. But Firefox is the only browser I will use. Using Explorer is like putting a bulls eye on your computer and waiting for the kill shot lololol.

Dave
AssembleThis

 

[crassius]

wouldn't touch it - for the real power of mozilla, one needs the original (now named seamonkey) - lots of room for your own tweaks to the s/w plus many tweaks that are listed around the inet

 

[The_Aleman]

I've played around with many Linux distros in VM and multiboot over the years, the two I like most are Slax Kill Bill (for older, simpler PCs) and SUSE.

For Win browsers, if any of you use an x64 version of Windows, you might want to check out Waterfox. Firefox is old-hat

For everything else there is SRWare Iron!

 

[crassius]

suse sounds interesting - used to use novell a lot in the old days & always liked their stuff

 

[Going2Hell]

I really use pirated Win7 and when that crashes, I recover with Ubuntu Linux 9.0.4c. Its reliable and operable on almost EVERY computer I've used. F10 ( or applicable key ) into the BIOS settings and turn off all boot devices except Floppy Drive. In my HP Pavillion laptop, this is also the USB boot option. Haven't lost a file since 2009. Yes 9.0.4c is very dated but has the best support files of all versions since.