• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Operating System Ubuntu, Xp or Vista

Using slackware here, the original Linix Distro.
Xp was the MS OS that drove me away, it was less stable and slower than 2000, every MS OS up through 2000 was an improvement, XP just got worse.
 
XP is more stable then Vista & less complex
This is the only reason I like Xp more than Vista..
And now will upgrade to windows 7 :D
 
Solitary said:
what do you guys think of Gentoo Linux?
Click to expand...


From what I've read comparing major distros, Gentoo is good if you need to squeeze out every bit of performance on a system since it compiles everything. Or for an embedded system where you need to customize a lot of options during compilation. For a standard sever or desktop where you don't want to tinker much, I wouldn't recommend it.

Some say it's also a good learning OS for Linux because of all the compiling required. I'd say Linux From Scratch would be for that kind of learning, especially if you're new to it. It comes with a fantastic guide that tells you what to do and why you're doing it.
 
Hi everyone.
I am buying a new notebook soon having elegant skin so while searching on internet i found a website *moderator edit*, Is this website is really good in providing notebooks with nice skins?
 
I iike Linux Mint. Im running Linux Mint 8 on my laptop and desktop. Everything works great out of the box. The only thing I had to tinker with to get it to work was my printer.
 
So definetely the top three distros for first timers in my opinion

Linux Mint
Ubuntu
Fedora

Very easy at the beginning with lots under the surface, and they all have Live CD functionality to try them out.
 
I've heard some rumblings that Ubuntu Koala is junk. They switched the hardware layer from hal to DeviceKit and udev and it's giving many people fits. I tried to virtualize it in Parallels 5 and it's stuck in some crappy resolution like 640x480. I've never seen a virtualized OS, whether XP, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Windows 7 utterly refuse to accept the native host's display settings and be stuck in 640x480 or 800x600. I haven't booted it in like 2 weeks but that was the word back then. If you're going the Ubuntu route I'd stick with Jaunty Jackalope until Koala gets fixed.
 
XP is a great system and Ubuntu is great as well. If you can afford Win 7 I would recommend that, but you can't go wrong with XP or Ubuntu. Thing with Ubuntu you have to learn how to install software differently, but not that difficult.
 
I started to get curious about linux when I saw the spec of a PC running vista and my jaw dropped when i saw its the same as getting a porche and towing 6 caravans.

At first I though "its free, so it cant be that good, bet its easy to break", so I installed it onto a 466Mhz Dell with 256 Mb of ram, and it still beat the vista thing is the race of 'from power on to google home page' buy around 5-7 minutes.

I tried to break it. I really did, but it refused to die, and when i witnessed that a update sped the system up I was hooked.
Then i discovered that I can write a program using any part of the pc i want and there was no looking back..... want a program to send you a message to your mobile skype account when someone trips the PIR sensor you've rigged to the parallel port? check?
What to rig the bluetooth scanner to the text to speech program in under 10 minutes? check.
Want no virus,registry hassles, 'scan' disk nor 'defrag'? check.
Want your pc to behave just as reliably as your moby phone or radio? check.
Want to be part of a community rather than a faceless/powerless customer? check.

The choice is yours, and at the end of the day until you install it and try it you'll not make up your own mind.

GIR
 
GIR said:
I started to get curious about linux when I saw the spec of a PC running vista and my jaw dropped when i saw its the same as getting a porche and towing 6 caravans.

At first I though "its free, so it cant be that good, bet its easy to break", so I installed it onto a 466Mhz Dell with 256 Mb of ram, and it still beat the vista thing is the race of 'from power on to google home page' buy around 5-7 minutes.

I tried to break it. I really did, but it refused to die, and when i witnessed that a update sped the system up I was hooked.
Then i discovered that I can write a program using any part of the pc i want and there was no looking back..... want a program to send you a message to your mobile skype account when someone trips the PIR sensor you've rigged to the parallel port? check?
What to rig the bluetooth scanner to the text to speech program in under 10 minutes? check.
Want no virus,registry hassles, 'scan' disk nor 'defrag'? check.
Want your pc to behave just as reliably as your moby phone or radio? check.
Want to be part of a community rather than a faceless/powerless customer? check.

The choice is yours, and at the end of the day until you install it and try it you'll not make up your own mind.

GIR
Click to expand...

Great post I agree 100%. You have many of the same reasons I do for switching to Linux. I now run Linux Mint on all of my computers. I recently bought a new netbook and tried to use windows 7 for about 5 min. Man what a bag of worthless crap that is. I couldn't get Linux Mint loaded on a USB stick fast enough.
 
  • Like
Reactions: GIR
If I was you I'd upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista that's what I did and added an extra 4g of ram to my computer and it runs flawless and fast. But then again so does windows xp which is also a great but out of date operating system.
 
8andsand said:
Great post I agree 100%. You have many of the same reasons I do for switching to Linux. I now run Linux Mint on all of my computers. I recently bought a new netbook and tried to use windows 7 for about 5 min. Man what a bag of worthless crap that is. I couldn't get Linux Mint loaded on a USB stick fast enough.
Click to expand...

I am definitely booting from dual-booting Linux Mint on my next laptop, I believe Windows is still needed for somethings though, I find openoffice very slow compared to MS Office, and some issues with going on certain websites without IE. The biggest hurdle for me was not having chrome on Linux, now I use chromium on Linux Mint And Windows, that sync to the same profile for easy browsing between to computers! I believe that Linux Mint is a great desktop Linux, with lots of easy setup for beginners, it looks amazing(!), and it has mp3 support built-in which leads me to believe its the best distro for begginers, but 8andsand are you KDE or GNOME? I am GNOME here.
 
deman89 said:
I find openoffice very slow compared to MS Office
Click to expand...

Start it up, go into preferences and disable java, and notch up the amount of memory used by openoffice - this will improve speed a lot!

Remember that half of office is shoe horned into ram on ms machines during boot, which gives the illusion of being faster than openoffice...

Hope this helps,
GIR
 
ABM (= Anything but Microsoft)...[NB People will feel like that about Google in a few years time, if not already...]

Using Ubuntu wherever I can.


Cheers!

Lodger
 
I use Ubuntu about half of the time and Windows 7 the other half.


I upgraded to Vista in 2008 and never looked back. Vista SP1 in my opinion is far superior OS than XP. I upgraded both of my machines to 7 Ultimate 64-bit and for the most part is a better OS but I hope SP1 fixes the bulk of the annoyances that persist.
 
Ubuntu or other Unix distros- Does not meet my needs. I'm a gamer. I game hard.

XP, xp64 was garbage. I have 4 gb of ram. My system is going to be able to use it all(even if my programs can't)

Vista, I liked Vista a lot. I never had any issues with it. Upgraded as soon as it came out.

7, loving it. Wouldn't switch to another OS. 7 greatly meets my needs.
 
ok Ubuntu gurus, quick question. I just installed Ubuntu on my hp pavilion zd8000, but y wifi cadd was not installed. How do i go about acquiring that? Just download the one from support.hp.com and put it on a flash drive and hope it works?
 
Find out what hardware you are using, exact model, and google it. Anytime I had a question about getting something working, that is seriously how I got it working. I'd say 50% of the time, I would end up on the Ubuntu forums.
 
ttaylor0024 said:
ok Ubuntu gurus, quick question. I just installed Ubuntu on my hp pavilion zd8000, but y wifi cadd was not installed. How do i go about acquiring that? Just download the one from support.hp.com and put it on a flash drive and hope it works?
Click to expand...
If your card is a Netgear WG311 you may have a problem. I've never been able to get that one to work with Ubuntu. Most every other card I've used Ubuntu found and installed without me doing a thing. Like the earlier post said, check out the forums and see it your card is compatible. As a general rule I've found the lower end peripherals have more driver compatibility problems than the better grade stuff. I always check before I spend a lot of money on a new gadget for my Linux box to make sure it will work without a lot of hassle.
 
If you are heavily into proprietary gaming then Windows XP or Windows 7 is your best bet (forget Vista, think ME :))

If the above does not apply to you then you really should be running GNU/Linux, to not you are just paying hard earned cash for an O/S that locks to in to a way of working that Microsoft believes is right for you. GNU/Linux gives you the ability to do whatever you want with your O/S for free.

There are so many different Linux distributions that it can be very confusing for people starting out.

Stay away from Gentoo, Slackware and other ones in that category as they require some knowledge of Linux and will make for a steep learning curve.

For a beginner I highly recommend Ubuntu but would also recommend Fedora or Suse. These distributions have a much smaller learning curve because you can do pretty much everything without needing knowledge of the Linux terminal. This gives you a chance to get into Linux and slowly become proficient in the way it works.

Ubuntu also has an option to install it as a Windows application (Google Wubi) so you can try it out without even having to format or partition your hard-drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom