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I switched from Windows to *nix cold turkey. I had no prior Linux experience, always used Windows. Fast forward 2 years and here I sit, and I cant bear to use anything but a distro on any of my own systems. Windows just feels like being stuck in a bird cage, and with Linux, youre free to fly as you please. Im not anti-Windows by any means, but I do prefer *nix. Being used to Windows, Linux had a steep learning curve for me, but after a few months, I settled in quite nicely. No looking back, the penguin is here to stay :).
 
Don't forget that OSX is based on BSD, which is actually less user friendly than Linux to a new user. They chose it because of its more permissive licensing, as the GPL would have prevented them from modifying it without making it open source and free.

The issue isn't the underlying OS, it's the amount of polish the company puts on it. Linux has gotten increasingly polished over the last several years, with distros like Ubuntu FAR more user friendly than the Linux distros of 10 yrs ago. Google may end up putting enough into it to make it very user friendly, like OSX perhaps.

It would be silly to reinvent the wheel and create a totally new OS when so much code exists that is freely available in the free software world. The only reason MS can do it is that they created theirs largely before, and then in parallel with, the free equivalents. When Apple needed a new OS, they did the only sensible thing and used existing code, adding to it to make it meet their needs.
 
Back to the OP too.
It's true every distributino is different. For ease of use I feel that Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other 'main' distros are great. For Ubuntu Nvidia drivers are a piece of cake. System>Administration>Hardware Drivers then select the version and install took me about 5 min on a new install. Though on 9.04 the Server Settings for Nvidia don't work quite right, but that can be fixed by two CLI commands when it needs to be changed.
I'm not out of WIndows 100% only 99%. ANd that so I can play Crysis.
 
Probably not. I bet it can play Torchlight though.

I tried linux about 12 years ago, never could get it to work well and eventually gave up.
More recently i got a netbook for my gf's mom that had ubuntu on it and played with it a bit before sending it on it's way, that got me interested so i installed ubuntu on my main box, and rarely boot XP these days, i like it much more.

I'm tempted to give chrome a whirl too, just for giggles. I'll have to read the licensing first though, google is the new microsoft when it comes to sneaky licensing.
 
I wonder...
The chrome browser phones home. So there is SRWare Iron. I wonder if there will be a SRWare Iron OS?
Anyway, will keep my eye out on this. I'm trying out Ubuntu, going to try Gentoo(want to really LEARN linux and I think I possibly hate myself, kidding).
 
You will definitely learn a lot with gentoo. A good gentoo install is also one of the most streamlined os installations I have seen.
 
The thing about Gentoo is that it requires constant maintenance, or it will go out of date and things won't build/install. Repairing is much, much more work than just keeping on top of it.
 
The thing about Gentoo is that it requires constant maintenance, or it will go out of date and things won't build/install. Repairing is much, much more work than just keeping on top of it.

Anything cron can't take care of?
 
Lol, yes. I have spent the last 2 days rebuilding Gentoo. It's done on the phenom box, but still going on the athlon xp boxes. You get blocks, bugs, things that won't build, need for manual resolution of conflicts, etc.

The more often you do it the easier it is; I have slacked for a month or two, and I could no longer get stuff to install. That's unusual for me.
 
Agreed, a Gentoo update requires human decisions - it's different from most any other Linux distro I know of in that way. For example, it typically wants to replace files in /etc/ after upgrading pacakages, and you have to reconcile what gets replaced and what doesn't - it uses a tool named etc-update to show you diffs between the versions and then asks for your decision. The tool can just automerge all updates, but if you do that you will break parts of your system eventually when certain packages are updated. That's just one example.

And like MRD said, it's much easier to stay on top of things than it is to get behind and perform a massive update (for gentoo, I'd consider not updating for a month or two a pretty massive update). The number of changes and possible issues you can encounter are minimized if you update every few days, making it more manageable.

MRD, do you think your problem had anything to do with broken libtool archives? This is what got me, though I thought I followed the instructions correctly when the update came down, once it was done I couldn't install or run anything:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/x/x11/libxcb-1.4-upgrade-guide.xml

That's the one which switched me to Arch Linux, since my system was already broken beyond repair and I was taking the time to do a fresh install anyways.
 
No, the biggest problems for me came from kde, qt, and myth. kde 4 has finally gone into the stable tree, but that caused me all kinds of issues as so many things are dependent on the kde3 libs, creating blocks. In theory that shouldn't happen with slots, but part of the problem is that multiple packages from kde3 were aggregated into singles in kde4, and vice versa. MythTV .22 now runs off QT4 entirely I believe, and there were lots of blocks between the Myth versions. Packages moved there too, with MythDVD being removed and integrated into MythTV and mythtv-themes causing weird blocking issues.

Also, I am running portage 2.2 (which is hard masked... don't try it newbies). I needed this to be able to use certain new functionality and install some needed software. I am a bit frustrated with Gentoo over the last year or two in terms of how badly they've done at getting kde 4 stabilized and transitioning to the new portage.

Also, compiz is a running issue for me. In my futile attempt to move back to the stable tree, I always unmask a specific package version only, e.g. compiz-fusion 0.8.4, so that as that version goes stable, it won't keep moving me to a new unstable version, and eventually I can remove it from package.mask, so I had to update all the various packages that are dependent on compiz-fusion.

Portage now uses a license restriction, so had to fix ACCEPT_LICENSE in make.conf, just using * for now.

Had a profile change (that was pretty recent), so that makes lots of things not work.

I went through and manually cleaned out package.keywords, package.use, package.provided, package.mask, and package.unmask.

Of course, had to run revdep-rebuild, emerge --depclean, emerge @preserved-rebuild many times. A few packages wouldn't build at all, so I just removed them and will re-add later (xine-lib comes to mind). TONS of broken library connections and dependencies on older versions of libraries. You won't have to worry about @preserved-rebuild if you aren't using portage 2.2. The @ denotes a set, which is not present in older versions of portage.

Lastly, I use the +doc useflag... again, don't do this newbies. You'd think it would be harmless, but you'd be wrong. Nothing creates more issues than the doc useflag.
 
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