| Author |
Linux vs XP? |
kenetiks
Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: November 21, 2001
Posts: 1130
From: Bandcamp
|  Posted: 2005-12-23 16:27
When I started getting out of serious computing a few years back, I went to single win2k system and got rid of my other computers. I only did mostly gaming by then and almost all major games are released for windows anyway. So I kept my one system.
A few days back my one box died(power surge I think) and after nosing around I found an old box(AMD 1ghz athlon, 512 PC133 RAM, 40gig ATA HDD) and after a little tinkering I was up and running.
I had downloaded a new distro of linux about a month back and burned it to disk thinking I may give it a try. It proceded to collect dust for the next month or so untill my box died.
So since I was obviously not going to be playing any of my games on this old one which is severely underpowered. I decided to give the latest linux a try.
One word, wow and I can't emphasize the wow enough.
Used to be with linux, which is a unix style operating system that started out a text based multi-user networked operating system, that you had to do alot of configuring and tinkering to get all the hardware up and running. Then maybe after another session of hours you could get xwindows up and running. We wont even discuss the headache modems where...
What happened after I stuck the cd in the drive this time was nothing short of astonishing...
In 15 minutes I was kicked into X(x windows) with sound, video and networking up and running. And let me tell you, KDE has come a long, long way since the last time I used X.
http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d150/kenetiks/snapshot2.jpg
After about a day of nosing around, this thing has all the power of linux, and KDE has the ease of use and 100 times the configurability of windows. And not only that, this old athlon is S M O K I N G fast.
Now all that being said, I have to give it some more boost. After figuring out that wm9 files wont play on it(I frowned at this part as video was hardly great on the old linux and I had almost resigned myself to not getting video), I did some looking around, after 2 minutes I found a codec pack, in another 2 minutes it was installed and I could play all the up to date video files.
Kopete is an amazing little peice of software, it integrates, yahoo, msn, ICQ, IRC, GADU-GADU, Jabber and even SMS messenging into one messenger.
The synaptic package manager is mighty handy as well. And the opensource office suit is great.
One pitfall that is without a doubt driving me nuts though, I cannot get GCQL to run on wine  Oh well, a little more tinkering and I'll find the problem. But I've been doing some digging on wine and it turns out, alot of things I would not have thought even possible are being run on wine, MS office is one I'd have thought someone was crazy to even attempt. But folks are indeed running it.
All in all, it's not for the novice, unless you have some experience with nix based systems, I'd still shy away because alot of it is still old school stuff, but it's made leaps and bounds as far as usability goes. And as far as I'm concerned, it just flat out smokes anything redmond can come up with, period, they aren't even in the same league anymore.
But I'd recommend this over XP anyday to anyone who's an intermediate computer user. It's just flat out awesome.
So I'll be over here figuring out how to get GCQL up on wine.
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Philky!
Joined: July 19, 2004
Posts: 90
| Posted: 2005-12-23 16:44
I have lost all respect for you.
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JolesMan
Grand Admiral
Joined: June 01, 2003
Posts: 17
From: Michigan, USA
| Posted: 2005-12-23 17:10
Love Linux/Unix or Work. Love windows for Play.
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Grimith
Grand Admiral
Templar Knights
Joined: August 09, 2003
Posts: 836
From: Your local future farm.
| Posted: 2005-12-23 17:13
...
I find myself harbouring a deep hatred for you. I don't know why. Must be because you've found the power of Linux.
That desktop looks awesome, though.
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-RevenG-
Raven Warriors
Joined: March 03, 2004
Posts: 2673
| Posted: 2005-12-23 17:16
Ken....Linux....I find myself looking for an axe and a plane ticket.....<3
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Crim
Fleet Admiral
Sundered Weimeriners
Joined: March 16, 2003
Posts: 1336
| Posted: 2005-12-23 17:25
 Hey..What ever keeps you in touch m8
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Doran
Chief Marshal
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 29, 2003
Posts: 4032
From: The Gideon Unit
| Posted: 2005-12-23 17:49
ive got a knoppix disk, very handy to have around
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Philky!
Joined: July 19, 2004
Posts: 90
| Posted: 2005-12-23 17:54
I can't stay mad at you forever, Ken. I have to admit. Even I have Linux. I have an Unbuntu live-CD that I use ocassionally, but I still haven't found a good use for it yet.
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kenetiks
Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: November 21, 2001
Posts: 1130
From: Bandcamp
| Posted: 2005-12-23 18:09
Not sure why everyone wants to have me headless over linux.
I used to be quite the geek when it came to linux, as a matter of fact, several years back my lan consisted of no less than...
2 linux boxes, 1 HP-UX(very old, very), 1 NT, 2 ME, 2 2k.
I really wish I'd gotten pics of it back then. I was up to my ears constantly in networking.
As far as networking went, MS was horridly unstable, buggy and highly prone to intrusions by anyone over the age of 5 and had 10 minutes to spare.
As a matter of fact, I wish I still had my logs but I actually was watching my servers when Code Red and Nimba hit(if anyone remembers those).
The progression of those worms was enourmous due to slack windows admins and a complete failing by microsoft to include even minimalistic security precautions.
Going farther back to pre win98 days, I watched laughing my arse off when BO first came out. The progression of that remote admin tool was so widespread even 2 local ISP's didn't escape that one. One of which I had to notify because a friend wanted me to check his comp for it, in the insuing scan I found that many of the ISP's own systems responded as being infected.
And we'll not even get into the DoS days of IRC when OOB and various other horrid network attacks were rampant.
Now it's all about Zombies of course.
Worm infected home computers that will connect to a remote IRC server and join a pre-specified channel.
When these worms are released they infect thousands of computers which will then join that channel and can be given any number of commands through simple text based chat.
I found one similiar on my mom's computer once, in which I tracked down the little creep, join his server mimicking his zombies names "so-and-sobot6234" and logged his chat for the next 2 hours while he gave all his little zombies commands. Nothing to that, other than netstat and a little thinking. I wish I had the log of the chat he started spewing after "one of his bots" started up a conversation with him. You want funny, that was hilarious. But even so, this kid who I can only guess was a teenager on his parents computer had at his command, better than 5,000 computers. The server channel that I looked at had 3,000 and another room had another 2 to 3,000. And he had as much or greater control over each computer than if he was sitting at the keyboard.
Used to, I wouldn't even have a windows based computer online, I would use my windows comp to play games, and if I needed to get online with it, I did it behind a severely limited connection with a strict firewall.
Things have gotten alot better since then, redmond has started addressing many of the more serious security flaws and keep regular with updates so it's alot easier to keep them online nowadays, but it didn't used to be.
Either way, Nothing redmond has offered yet can hold a candle to strides that linux and bsd have made since then. And in my opinion, if linux were to support windows based games, MS would be sunk nearly overnight.
Problem with that though, linux doesn't support windows native applications. Although that is changing as I've quickly learned in the last 2 days. I can run windows based applications on linux and another company is pushing a windows native gaming platform on linux specificly designed to run windows DX based games.
Feel the love 
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BackSlash
Marshal
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 23, 2003
Posts: 11183
From: Bristol, England
| Posted: 2005-12-23 18:34
Windows = Superior graphical and memory management and interfacing.
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kenetiks
Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: November 21, 2001
Posts: 1130
From: Bandcamp
| Posted: 2005-12-23 19:18
Quote:
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On 2005-12-23 18:34, BackSlash *Jack* wrote:
Windows = Superior graphical and memory management and interfacing.
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Windows never had superior memory management that I've ever seen. Windows memory management and all resource management for that matter has always been atrocious. Back in the day you had to seriously tweak windows to get it to manage memory efficiently.
I don't know about XP's resource management but I do know 2k's, and all in all it's pretty good, but it doesn't hold a candle to linux 2.6 period. Even 2k was resource intensive on this system. But linux just rockets, even running multiple resource intensive apps I can switch desktops and go about doing something else without it even breaking a sweat.
Even I was just blown smooth away at how well this distro actually performs. It's really utterly amazing. I had never thought they'd refine linux enough to be a everyday usable desktop platform.
But I'll give you one analogy I think will get your attention. My mother runs XP on her system which is twice as fast as this one and has nearly new components. And she only surfs the web and does office stuff, defrags regularly, etc.
Going from her rig, or my gaming rig to this one is like going from a Ford Pinto to a Corvette. I'd like to benchmark it, I really would, it's that uunbelievable.
KDE dusts windows in graphics, period.
KDE's interfacing just blows Redmond all to crap.
http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d150/kenetiks/snapshot2.jpg
Linux wins.
In fact, the only arguement I can see now against linux is not running windows native apps effeciently. But even thats changing.
So if superior graphical interfacing is the best arguement, well then it's that fight is decided before it ever hit the ring...
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Philky!
Joined: July 19, 2004
Posts: 90
| Posted: 2005-12-23 19:31
What's so special about showing a screenshot of your desktop? I can do that. http://www.antdizzle.com/desktop.png
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Eledore Massis [R33]
Grand Admiral
Templar Knights
Joined: May 26, 2002
Posts: 2695
From: tsohlacoLocalhost
| Posted: 2005-12-23 19:53
my own experiance i wil say this.
-=-
Windows its user friendly and of most problems you can just click trough them, kill them whit the task manenger and if that fails just reboot. and it wil stil work.
unless it is realy bad.
Linux it is user friendly as long as you know the ROC of linux. somtimes trouble with hardware if drivers for linux are avalable at all.
-=-
I prefer my working in windows but all my servers are Linux and all VM-servers about 60% linux.
When i work whit linux (once every month.) the most time i spend 90 % would be driver installation and reading linux driver forums.
becous in linux all hardware is supported, but not all hardware drivers support linux.
(Last time mid October. when a company bough 5 laptops and wanted linux standalone workstations. the ATI 200M is not so functioning under linux yet.)
-=-
if i have to name one problem on linux i would say. complete and standalone software packages.
why? : I stil use a Windows Mail program becous i have yet to find somthing in linux that supports both SMTP. IMAP. Groupsystem. personal IM. Webmail. etc.
If i have to name one problem on windows (XP) i would say. Windows XP Home.
I just hate the Home edition. why. you can't properly set Map shares with access levels. no map security. and lots and lots of things you wil miss from the package witch makes fixing problems somthimes hazardous for my sanity.
-=-
Last and the least.
Microsoft - Windows.
Most
Inteligent
Customers
Realise
Our
Software
Only
Fools
Teanagers
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lightning[Voyager][ A ]
Cadet
Joined: August 04, 2004
Posts: 419
From: CANADA. QUEBEC
| Posted: 2005-12-23 20:47
I use both Windows and MAc and i just love Mac. YEs, Maybe for some it sucks... But for me that makes movies, thats the best for movie editing...
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kenetiks
Admiral
Galactic Navy
Joined: November 21, 2001
Posts: 1130
From: Bandcamp
| Posted: 2005-12-23 21:54
Quote:
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if i have to name one problem on linux i would say. complete and standalone software packages.
why? : I stil use a Windows Mail program becous i have yet to find somthing in linux that supports both SMTP. IMAP. Groupsystem. personal IM. Webmail. etc.
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kmail supports imap
kopete is a linux based: yahoo instant messenger, AIM, Jabber, ICQ, IRC, and even MSN, etc. You can use any of the IM networks with it or almost all.
Webmail is a function of the webserver/browser, I have no problem using webmail with mozilla or konquerer.
Ant, there's nothing fantastic about screenshots. As you should well know. It was in responce to the question of KDE's interface and usability. As such the point was not the screenshot, but what it showed.
Edit: this is amusing though 
http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d150/kenetiks/snapshot3.jpg
[ This Message was edited by: kenetiks on 2005-12-23 22:01 ]
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