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Which Linux?

post #1 of 12
3/31/10 at 7:50am
Thread Starter 
I am buying a new laptop and thought I might dual boot it with Linux, mostly for fun but also because I found its ability to run on my old laptop which was too broken down for anything else to run pretty impressive. I know next to nothing about linux, and don't want to spend my whole time tinkering I need something nice and easy to use, idiot proof.

I'm looking at Ubuntu, Mint and PClinux OS based on an article I read online but aside from using Ubuntu for a few months to run open office I have no idea. Its going to be on a samsung netbook along with windows XP. Any advice or suggestions?
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post #2 of 12
3/31/10 at 1:18pm
My opinions are covered in another thread but I think ubuntu is shite. For what purpose are you using linux? And why on eaerth are you loading XP as your other os?
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post #3 of 12
3/31/10 at 1:38pm
Most of the big distros have DVDs you can boot directly into a working system w/o having to install on your hard drive. Sure, it's slower, but would let you test drive different ones before going through the time and effort to install for dual-boot.

You could also grab a USB thumbdrive, format it as FAT-32, and use that to share data between the systems. For example, if you boot off a Ubuntu DVD and play with OpenOffice a bit, you can save the files to the USB thumbdrive. Then you can access those files in another distro or the Windows system.
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post #4 of 12
3/31/10 at 1:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by youngscientist View Post
I am buying a new laptop and thought I might dual boot it with Linux, mostly for fun but also because I found its ability to run on my old laptop which was too broken down for anything else to run pretty impressive. I know next to nothing about linux, and don't want to spend my whole time tinkering I need something nice and easy to use, idiot proof.

I'm looking at Ubuntu, Mint and PClinux OS based on an article I read online but aside from using Ubuntu for a few months to run open office I have no idea. Its going to be on a samsung netbook along with windows XP. Any advice or suggestions?
Perhaps I should start another thread for this, but I would be interested in hearing what I am doing wrong since I found Linux to run no better than WinXP on some older laptops for web browsing use. I tried both Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux and found that when browsing modern webpages with video, Flash, etc., they performed no better than Firefox under WinXP. Both machines that I tried were P3-850Mhz machines with either 128 or 256M RAM. Should I have expected Linux to run much better?

As an aside, both of those mini-distributions were pretty cool in that you can install them on flash drives and boot from them as long as your laptop supports booting from USB devices.
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post #5 of 12
3/31/10 at 2:24pm
Unlike most Linux/Unix users, I'm not a geek. I don't work with computers, nor do I understand the most basic of concepts. Bearing that in mind, I've found Debian Linux (currently running Squeeze) to be the best of the bunch. It's easy to install, configure, update and tweak. For a little more configurability try Freebsd, which again is pretty damned solid, very secure and a breeze to update. Off topic: Do give emacs23 a try as your text editor. It's almost an operating system in its own right. Combine it with a very lightweight window manager like ratpoison or stumpwm, and you'll be getting maximum usage of your computer screen real estate. No more annoying buttons, title bars or wasted space. This is a great setup for small computers like netbooks, as well as old slow ones. Lear (the ugly one)
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post #6 of 12
3/31/10 at 2:31pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by GQgeek View Post
For what purpose are you using linux?

I can't tell whether you mean what functionality I was after, or what my driving purpose made me want to use an open source os.
The first is the normal office type work, a bit of light photo editing, music listening to, internet browsing and video watching.
The second, well I am involved with ngo, nfp type work and open source is generally seen as a good thing.

Quote:
And why on eaerth are you loading XP as your other os?
netbook comes with XP, which I don't mind, would probably think of switching it to windows 7 at some point.
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post #7 of 12
3/31/10 at 2:33pm
If you just want to play around, rather than Dual Boot you can install something like VMWare (commercial) or Virtualbox (free) to boot up Linux inside a "virtual PC".

What do you want to use Linux for? If just web browsing and playing around, something easy (I like Ubuntu) and graphical is good.

To learn UNIX so you can add systems administration to your resume, something like FreeBSD or Slackware forces you to do much more by hand.
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post #8 of 12
3/31/10 at 3:14pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by v0rtex View Post
If you just want to play around, rather than Dual Boot you can install something like VMWare (commercial) or Virtualbox (free) to boot up Linux inside a "virtual PC".

What do you want to use Linux for? If just web browsing and playing around, something easy (I like Ubuntu) and graphical is good.

To learn UNIX so you can add systems administration to your resume, something like FreeBSD or Slackware forces you to do much more by hand.

I agree with this, in general. There is little point to dual-booting these days. I run all my linux from a VMWare server. I know little about netbooks though so I'm not sure if it would have the power to run vmware well.
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post #9 of 12
3/31/10 at 6:42pm
In the past I have used Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. Out of the three, I would go with Ubuntu, especially for new users. It has a large community base, which can be helpful if there is something you can't figure out, and there are several tutorials and guides that have been written for it. There are also some good repositories, updated regularly, containing programs you might have to make in other distributions.
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post #10 of 12
3/9/11 at 5:14am
Linux Mint with GNOME on the laptop here. Because I found it to be very reliable, quick and everything works straight away. I also have another laptop, which is a MacBook Pro. IMO Windows is just too unsafe to be using in China.
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post #11 of 12
3/9/11 at 6:22am
used Ubuntu for about three years. It's decent as a general user. That said, when the new version launches next month and does away with the gnome desktop, I'm not sure if I'll stay with it. I will test drive the new desktop pretty heavily before switching... G33K - cliffnotes version of the hate?
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post #12 of 12
3/9/11 at 3:18pm
Your safest bet is Ubuntu. Although I hate such distributions, whenever i need to set up a computer without spending too many time configuring things (i.e. Arch or Gentoo) I flip the Ubuntu CD in. For slower computers you might want to try Puppy (which is pretty damn ugly, tbh) or stick with Ubuntu for netbooks. I heard that, again, it's easy to use and all.
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