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Commander Spleen
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Post by Commander Spleen »

Spleen wrote:I wish there was a perfect operating system.
KeenEmpire wrote:Go open source lol. If you're a real keener (i.e. no modern games) you won't be missing anything
Spleen wrote:I've been using Linux as my primary OS for several years. It's not the perfect OS (yet) but definitely moreso for my purposes than other candidates.
KeenEmpire wrote:What do you think it (or your distribution) is missing?
I used to run Arch, but switched to Ubuntu last year. 9.10 is currently running on my desktop (Athlon 64). The EeePC was running 9.10 until recently when I updated it to 10.04 and it crashed out

So I took that opportunity to set about installing a lighter, more customised installation, but everything I tried with Debian/Ubuntu ran into trouble with drivers or installing from a USB drive. Arch worked straight out, but has a couple of irritating little details that need to be sorted out.

Ubuntu has served me well, but I'm finding it increasingly restrictive and prefab. Arch suits me better overall despite its quirks and higher maintenance requirements.

Now that I think about it, many of my concerns with Linux besides the hard-and-fast decisions made by certain distros and the inherently experimental nature of the evolving software, are not flaws in the OS itself, but the prevailing mindset of proprietary software developers, mostly games and drivers which result in significant incompatibility issues or limitations. If everyone made their software cross-platform, if not open-source, Linux would be pretty close to perfect to me.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

The question I want to get answered, though possibly I can't until I try Arch, is what do you mean by prefabricated?
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Commander Spleen
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Post by Commander Spleen »

1) Because of Ubuntu's "everything should just work" philosophy, there are automatic configurations built in. You can override most of them using the appropriate config files, so this is not a big issue. It just means you cannot start from scratch.

2) Certain combinations of software are packaged together in a manner that makes them annoying to separate if you don't want the extra features and would prefer to piece everything together yourself. PulseAudio, for example, gets installed by default even on a minimal install. So if you want to run off ALSA, you have to uninstall that first, which can be a delicate operation.

3) The version system makes things less flexible also. Though I'm not sure how to articulate why I dislike this feature. Basically, I prefer the rolling release nature of Arch, where everyone is running from the same set of repositories.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

I see.

Might it be reasonable to write a bash script stored in home, that changes the configurations to whatever you'd like? To a much weaker extent I already do this to reinstall my programs. Does Arch have an easier way than this? It sounds, just from reading, that you would edit its config files anyway.

(I haven't had much occasion to change the config, tbh.)
Commander Spleen wrote:PulseAudio, for example, gets installed by default even on a minimal install. So if you want to run off ALSA, you have to uninstall that first, which can be a delicate operation.
I believe I'm able to change this one easily. In terminal, try

Code: Select all

gstreamer-properties
Commander Spleen wrote:3) The version system makes things less flexible also. Though I'm not sure how to articulate why I dislike this feature. Basically, I prefer the rolling release nature of Arch, where everyone is running from the same set of repositories.
Yeah (and I notice your desktop's one version behind :crazy) I guess people use versions in case old computers can't support the new ones.

My vaio actually has some serious problems with graphics cards and recovery mode; looking online, it's symptomatic of vaio but mine's also more stubborn than usual. Basically, good thing I'm not a starcraft or compiz-graphics addict, and that reinstalling (in case I can't recover using an alternate distribution rather than recovery mode) is easy as hell.

When you only have one laptop at your disposal, it's really easy to get scared of change. I'm not going to try gentoo anytime soon, despite that I could really benefit from the battery power boost. If only I had a second computer I could experiment on and switch between, so to speak.
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Post by Keening_Product »

I recently installed Ubuntu 13.04 on my main system and have only booted into Windows once since, and that was to find a saved tab in a browser I didn't have synced.

I'm now installing Xubuntu on my netbook.

The whole OS for both systems has just worked straight out of the box. I have an AMD GPU in my PC and Ubuntu made no fuss about that, even while running on the live CD. Windows needed a number of installations to get that to work.

Everything is faster, even loading pages on the internet as it seems Chomium doesn't have to think for as long as Chrome does on Windows before it loads a page.

Even WINE is working better than Windows for some older games (read: AoE1).

Every driver working fine on every device from the start. I am well and truly impressed. The last time I attempted anything Linux was probably six years ago, having started playing around eight years ago. I was never massively impressed by what the OS had to offer but it did almost always install without complaint. The difference is that these days the open source programs are really good and the OSes are all really, really smooth.

I don't think I'll be buying another Windows license without a bloody good reason to!
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Post by tulip »

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 exclusively for a few months now, because it seems I don't own a windows installation anymore.
I'm relatively okay with it, but there are a few things:
- It is by no means faster. it boots faster than windows, but everything else (like watching videos in a browser) is slower than on windows
- It's not really stable (from time to time it locks up completely and I haven't found something like the simple windows ctrl-alt-del combination that helps in those situations. xkill works sometimes if its only a single program locking up, but the whole system locks up from time to time.
- Wine is a drag: everything to do with wine is awful, nothing works as it should, either it doesn't even start or it locks up. But yeah I've managed to run War Wind 2 much better than in native windows. So some old stuff may run better in wine.
- Handling my mp3 collection is worse in ubuntu than in windows: some of my programs I used and got used to aren't available in ubuntu, and nothing comparable is. I'm even more surprised there doesn't seem to be a simple multy-format-transcoder like format factory in linux. I like amarok and gmusicbrowser though.
- there is no simple drag&drop for dosbox. I have to go on a terminal odyssey if I want to load a game in dosbox or I have to use a frontend (which I do now, and I'm quite happy with that)
- the unity gui is only available in an ugly grey.

Some things I like:
- installing software through the software center is cool most of the time, as long as you're using stuff that's in there everything is bliss.
- I can uninstall anything. I don't have to keep stuff I don't like (i.e. internet explorer in windows)
- it tells you how much disk space is used for every update.
- preview icons work on every video format (as opposed to windows), and it's cute on text files

So all in all I'm relatively happy with it. I'm missing some of my old game favourites (Warcraft 3 and Diablo II) which won't run in the setup I want to play them (using special plugins), but I'm just playing scummvm & mednafen compatible games in the meantime.
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Post by lemm »

I tried a bunch of linux distributions and none of them felt "faster" than windows, despite the claims I've heard on the internet. Other than that, they were okay.

For keen modding, I think it's best to have a win32 environment at one's disposal. Currently I use Windows 7 XP Mode for that, although I'm sure a running virtual PC in linux would work just as well.
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Post by Levellass »

I tried Linux. It was strange, hard to use, unintuitive, had a weird interface and was cripplingly slow for anything.


They're not going to get anywhere if they just keep copying windows 8 like this.
What you really need, not what you think you ought to want.
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Post by MoffD »

I hate the new Gnome/Unity Desktops... I use LXDE with various Distros but I enjoy Debian a lot, mainly because they have a massive software repository and almost all linux developers make .deb packages for it (although *buntu and others are based off Debian and can use deb packages)
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Keening_Product
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Post by Keening_Product »

Levellass wrote:They're not going to get anywhere if they just keep copying windows 8 like this.
Haha, it was actually Windows 8 which copied its crippling interface from Ubuntu Unity, not the other way around.
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Post by Levellass »

Windows? Microsoft? Copy something popular? I must research this!


*Opens up tabbed browsing in IE*
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Post by KeenEmpire »

tulip wrote: I haven't found something like the simple windows ctrl-alt-del combination that helps in those situations.
Bind a system monitor to ctrl-alt-delete. You have a choice of several; I use mate-system-monitor.
tulip wrote: - the unity gui is only available in an ugly grey.
Don't use unity. lulz.

(or use themes)
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Post by tulip »

Thanks for the first tip,
but those themes all look ugly to me, and I hate to say it, the one emulating OSX looks best to me. :(
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Post by Keening_Product »

Why not change to Xubuntu? The Xfce interface is pretty neat.

Also thanks to KeenEmpire for the Ctrl+Alt+Del advice from me too.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

I use mate myself, along with a variation of the BlackBird theme. The site I linked to is not an exhaustive list of themes (there are probably hundreds more out there).

LXDE, XFCE: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/install- ... -1204.html
http://askubuntu.com/questions/162516/s ... vironments

Mate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMtf7DoDg_0&noredirect=1
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