uuum....
my windows hasnt crashed in years? but it did yesterday, apparently because of hamachi, but if your smart enough to play with linux, your smart enough to use the event viewer and read the "hamachi broke your computer" line and realize that you should probably uninstall hamachi

other than that, no, nothing

insecure,
i rarely if ever get viruses, but my friends do, they need to stop going on weird websites offering them free ipads......

i have to say, in my opinion, linux is in a very weird place, its more reliable that windows, especially for laymen, but isnt user friendly for said laymen, so you wont end up killing your computer because you download ALL the programs, and since linux has one of if not the smallest user base, viruses are more likely to be targeted at you specifically (which NEVER happens) than downloaded through a website, which is nice again for laymen who dont know what websites to avoid, but yet again we come to the user friendliness, last i checked, ubuntu was something my dad could use if i set it up, so i think it has a great place there, but for gamers and professional users........... i love linux, but i wish some big company would have just given linux some love, adobe or autodesk could easily have made linux a thing a long time ago, i hope valve can accomplish what those 2 could have.

my point is though, people who use osx and linus seem to love bashing windows for being "unstable" but its not unstable, people just dont know how to be responsible and keep it clean, i'd say its more like glossy glass, its easily dirtied, but you can keep it clean if you bother to, dont download random shit, just take what you need, and stay away from fishy websites, and like glass its easily broken, but as long as you are or have a tech savvy friend, it can generally be fixed, and responsible people are much less likely to fuck it up


as far as apple goes, the ui is weird, coming from windows, but windows is weird coming from osx, the running in the background thing is however, quite stupid

i believe you meant bloated, not bolted

LOL FOXCONN, YOUR MAC IS A DELL

and that price tag...........

im going to watch this group now, i may not agree about windows and osx being bad, or at least as bad as people will say coming from a different side, i like to remain as unbias as i can (if im wrong, tell me :D ), but i want to see linux come out of the shadows and into my living room, i think its the os of the future, open source and free, i hope it happens soon.

"ubuntu was something my dad could use if i set it up" my dad pretty much uses youtube, facebook, and yahoo mail, once its set up, its never modified

He may want to see Google's Chrome OS.

Lucky you!

Windows is part of the DOS family which tends to be more venerable then *NIX SO like Linux and BSD. (MacOS runs everything as root thus loosing this edge.)

http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/

Windows can handle OK, but Linux is infant more robust.

True.

My bad, I'll fix it.

Dell? Are you referring to the Intel chips?

IKR!

Thank you.

foxconn makes dells parts, and apples parts, so technically, a mac is a dell, and a dell is a mac

Oh? I didn't know.

yeah they also manufacturer the xbox and and playstations

I have been running on various NIX systems without Windows for over 5 years now.
Most of the major distro's are actually a LOT more user friendly than Windows, and a lot more customizable.

I will say that of all my years on the stability side, NIX tends to take the cake. (Gotta love sandboxing)
With most versions and user accounts on Windows or Mac, you are a ROOT (Admin) which means its extremely easy to destroy your entire computer. (Can do it by deleting one file, actually. Back in 2005, we did a test in my college. To kill Redhat - which is now Fedora - we had to delete nearly 80% of everything in the root folder.)

Don't get me wrong, I love Windows. Without it, I would have zero job security. But being a certified Linux Distrubitor is nice, I gets to play around with many UI's and will have to say this. Things are very freindly on the NIX skies. Most people who use my computer actually think its some "hacked" version of Windows - to make it look different.

Security wise: NIX is more stable and secure, and doesn't release subsequent versions of the same software with the same exact backdoors that were forced to be patched in the previous versions wide open once again. Hence, much lower need of Security Software and routine maintenance just to keep things running smoothly. (No need to clear the registry of crap that's no longer on the machine---oh wait.. there is no system registry that tracks everything you do on it...)

Some say they have issues with support: I have seen support growing in huge chunks and have yet to find hardware that won't run on the most common distros. As for windows software, that's where wine comes in. Also...I compared 7 to a distro of NIX.. the UI for 7 was the same exact UI that this distro had been using for 3 years prior to 7's release.

Now I run Chromixium, and I love the UI. Could totally take screeenshots.

could my technologically impaired parents / grandparents download microsoft office with relative ease? and within a half hour without help? linux is the god of user friendly to tech savvy people, but most people arent tech savvy and dont understand why they have to download another program to download another program to download the program they want. and then they're probably not going to get why they have to use those programs or other programs to download other things as well. doesnt mean shit to me but my dad would throw the computer out the window.

no comment, linux is more stable

no comment not an argument

security isnt an issue unless your gullible enough to believe that ipad is free, and if you are, chances are all you do is go on facebook gmail and youtube anyways, probably dont have the brain to use amazon. Im not saying Im against improving security or anything, I just dont find it to be a very significant argument, I mean, whens the last time you got a virus on windows? last time for me in the past 2 years since I last posted here was about a month ago when my windows 10 key didnt work, so i downloaded watremover, and as always they have the backwards worded agreement to download 10 viruses, solution? reinstall again.

linux? support issues? who the fuck said that
lets now lets count off all the linux youtubers and forums....
fuck i lost count.

could my technologically impaired parents / grandparents download microsoft office with relative ease?
Most Distros come with either OpenOffice or LibreOffice preinstalled, and both are fully compatible with Microsoft Office Documents - Therefore there is no need to bloat down NIX with a closed source program running on Wine, but it can be done. As for the ease of installing software, most distros come with a package manager that will find and install software for you as you request or need it.

And so far on the virus issue, I have seen many many machines as a tech get infected, including an instance when a client bought a brand new Win7 device and it was infected BEFORE I even finished setting up the main system and getting logged in the first time - simply because it was already wired into his internet. The infection wasn't noticable unless you tried to update Windows or download any security software - at that point it would not be able to access those sites (or Windows Update, all while able to browse Google just fine. This is a variant of MS-Blast which is still evolving and hiding online.

Most "infections" these days may only be noticable with anti-virus software - simply because the hackers are not interested in making your machine useless. They'd rather have access to your accounts and banking now so they can steal your identity. So they sneak these "silent" viruses onto machines simply to observe your actions on your computer and use your information against you later. (Which is why I even have security software installed on all my NIX distros.)

Just wandering around.

Windows would be a fine OS if they really did what the buyers pay for. But looks like the money goes more on patents and enforcing their monopoly than actually improving.

At work we have and program several embedded devices, where the easiest thing is to communicate using an UART, on RS-232. I can't count how many times my mouse gone wild and the whole bloody system went up in BSOD from this. Microsoft for some reason still supports some crappy serial Microsoft branded ballpoint from the past century, and no matter how many complaints from any users having serial devices, they don't remove this crap. The OS would automatically recognize anything initiating communication on it's own without mercy and pee in it's pants, no matter if it is XP, Vista or Win7. This is at work, so I have to endure, the policy is the policy, no matter if it is a torture when trying to actually do the bloody job.

At my relatives I am just about to remove the last Windows installation, a WinXP literally falling apart on a 2GHz P4. Year by year I installed and properly configured Debian everywhere, for everyone, people who wouldn't touch Linux before with a ten foot pole. It is not like I could talk Linux on them, it was like Microsoft talked them down from Windows with their OSses going slow and unusable. We are not quite rich, have no money to buy decent computers, especially just because the OS thinks so we should do it. So practically now we happily use computers which would be probably very cumbersome to use with any version of Windows, and have no problems.

With Windows XP at work I recently had seen resurfacing an old problem: the update manager being constantly stuck at 100% CPU usage making the affected computer unusable. Again. There are records of this problem I can't figure out since how long, and Microsoft never cared to fix it properly.

The only sad thing is that this system is what people PAY for. And that system I can download for free just works. So well I carry my user profile with me since more than a decade, one who never had Linux probably can't even imagine how convenient this can be. Install a distro on a PC, just copy in your stuff, and mostly you get just what you had on your previous system.

And several things such as a properly working Office suite just can't be for this system because "someone" invests more in strengthening his monopoly (patents etc) than in actually making things better.

Well, may feel like a rant, but honestly I would probably even buy Windows if it was not only better than Linux in some aspects just because they ramified their positions from that money so OSS people can't legally implement those aspects.

That's OK, I've had bad time with Windows too.

(Vista on 1.87GHz with 1GB or RAM.)

Had? :)

And by the way what motivated you to change?

For me to be honest about more than a decade ago it was that I didn't quite like Windows, that time we had only Win95 with all it's problems. First attempts with Linux destroyed the system, later I successfully got Slackware running (including compiling kernel etc). Then my decision was reinforced seeing the radical changes WinXP brought, which that time basically mean I couldn't play any of the games I liked any more, neither could mess with QBasic and such since DOS ceased to work "properly". With Linux as a primary system I could afford to keep Win95 around for games since with Linux I could browse without fear of viruses, just using general common sense, and I could pull the plug and switch over for a play whenever I liked.

For home use Windows for me practically ended with Win98, I never even got to install WinXP on any of my computers. This was about four years ago realizing most of the old games (such as POD or Drakan) would cease to work on new hardware (some LAN parties with Drakan were epic!). Since then I don't even have Windows, Wine is just as good (or bad) regarding running those games I like(d) like a Windows partition on which they mostly would also refuse to run properly anyway.

Truly in my case (and my relatives' case) it is not like we like Linux because it is so good. We have Linux because the other alternative appears worse (and we would even have to pay for it).

For me what Linux clearly lacks are:
- A properly working word processor with truly cross-platform file formats (impossible due to the attitude and patents held by Microsoft).
- More stability and clarity when upgrading (still have to take a rather deep breath and prepare for a few days of hacking when upgrading Debian between mayor versions).
- Better support for working with 32bit applications in a 64bit install.
- Proper sound system (many apps. still use OSS, PulseAudio frequently messes up, sometimes I just have to kill processes around to get sound back).

What Linux I think lacks for "regular" users:
- User friendliness. However once I install it for someone, I barely hear about problems with it!

Where Linux feels superior (to versions of Windows):
- Any area regarding configuring and setup: With Windows if it doesn't want to do what you need, you better forget it. With Linux, given some time, it is doable.
- User profile and application configuration storage. Just a single directory to worry about.
- Interface consistency and stability. On Linux (and the usual OSS applications) radical changes are rare, you can easily keep up with them.
- Backwards compatibility. It is rare I can't get something to run or open which I had ten years ago.
- Resource management and scalability (I even have a working usable Linux installation on a Pentium MMX 233 MHz)
- The OS truly stays in the back letting you doing your bloody job (or having your fun).

What any current system lacks for me:
- The ability to run applications (mostly games) from the Win95-98 era.

Where Windows and Linux feels somewhat equal:
- Stability. May sound strange, but in overall I perceive that the two perform equally well in this aspect. It is a different story that Windows reboots itself for upgrades about once a week.
- Usability of the UI. Both systems have some problems at different areas, in overall I think it is possible to work just as well with one than the other (Here I don't refer to Windows 8's interface, thankfully I didn't have to endure it enough to see whether it works. In Linux I use WindowMaker and the bash shell from Xterm heavily).

End result for me:

Linux is the winner. It is a silent system just doing what it is supposed to do with minimal intrusion, barely needing any maintenance (and even if it does, it is almost always possible to prepare for it), so I like it. Not to mention it is free. But if a Debian cost the same as, say, Windows 7 (which is the Windows version I mostly base my judgements), I would still buy Debian.

A little too much, just my thoughts to share.

"Had? :)"

Installed Linux and never looked back.

"And by the way what motivated you to change?"

Other than all the normal bugs... One day Skype would only open links in IE and that just wouldn't do. All I had was some black CDs (On DVDs.) and didn't know how to make a live USB, (I was a durp.) so I burned a copy Fedora LXDE hoped around for a bit tried and failed with Gentoo, kept moving batched an Arch install played a bit more, gave Gentoo another go got it somewhat working, comp broke, got a new one swapped the drives, reinstalled Gentoo (Old one broke during a reinstall.) had to use Puppy until I git the network manger working, and now I'm in a school library with the only Gentoo box in class.

:3

Let's see:

"For me what Linux clearly lacks are:"
1) IKR.... But the Chines will have a MS Office clone for Linux soon, and it will be open source with an English translation I think.
2) Debian uses Aptitude which is still in beta. I normally recommend using an RPM distro. (Or portage if you can install Gentoo.)
3) Odd... I've never got anything like that...
4) I use ALSA and it seems to work OK.

"What Linux I think lacks for "regular" users:"
1) Maybe with a different desktop environment?

"Where Linux feels superior (to versions of Windows):"
1) You can say that again...
2) Yep yep!
3) Here here!
4) Odd... Not for me...
5) Yes! XD
6) As any OS should.

"What any current system lacks for me:"
1) Debian's repos are out of date. Get Wine 1.6.2.

"Where Windows and Linux feels somewhat equal:"
1) Odd...
2) Can be.

Keep in mind: There are 100's of OSs out there so go nuts and try as many as you like.

:3

Eh, some bits of backgrounds I will share, since it is a lil bit deeper than that you see :)

Nice to see even having to hammer it through, you did not give up, and set up your Linux machine!

So the stuff:

1): Well, the Chinese don't much care for patents, after all with their enormous economy in place, who cares even if whole America shuts the door on their software! Too bad OSS people can't do this since most of their audience is from there...
2): Eh, true, but I still like it. Normal updates never gave any trouble, only complete distro upgrades, rare, but can be a bit frustrating when it is time. I use Debian since more than 4 years (Lenny -> Squeeze -> Wheezy), previously used Slackware. Guess I won't go in evaluating how a real-use RPM distro fares with a distro upgrade just to see :)
3): For example right now it is SDL. I either have the 64bit developer libraries or the 32bit ones, but not both at once (I am working on an OSS project I will release in about a month, need to test it on both).
4): Yes, it is ALSA underneath all, but compatibility layers and such (for example playing OpenTTD which would take both OSS and Timidity) piled upon it not necessarily live happily ever after. Maybe my own system have some problems I should look after, but so far it is less annoying than I would take a dive in attempting to fix these up (if possible).

For regular users:
I usually just install Gnome for other people (I use WindowMaker). It is not the desktop which is the problem here, rather when one would want to get some piece of hardware or some weird network connection working (here there are some arcane setups, it is not as simple as enabling Wifi or plugging in the wire and let DHCP solve it. PPPoE and various hybrids exists including USB modems which would only have software for Windows etc). These types of problems still require an advanced Linux user. But these are thankfully rare (so I don't have to solve someone's Linux problems every week - usually I install it, set it up, and it just works for those I did it). Other problems may rise, for example the case of my sister who wanted to use Google Chrome (and some other third party software). That's also more than a few clicks to get properly in the package manager (at least it was when I did it two years ago).

Debian's repos are out of date
Yes, I know they stay on the safe side, so whatever I need fresh, I compile from source. With Wine at times I even ended up with multiple versions since like there was one which worked with Heroes II (until I bought it from GOG, thankfully a DOS version), an other to deal with Drakan, yet another which would run an independent RPGMaker game which I liked. They improve it, but in the process games which previously worked may break, or in cases it may be just that there was a version with which a game was "acceptably playable".
To tell the truth Syobon Action (Cat Mario) is even more fun to play with Wine with all the quirks! :3 (Probably one day I will upload a video of this utter masochism)

Well, happy hacking!

Yes and you too!

As for RPM, it's about the same as Aptitude but more well developed.

I think the only Windows I ever used where I never got a bluescreen was 3.1. I used it until 2009 because I couldn't afford a new computer. But now I mostly use Gentoo with Common Desktop Environment. But I don't like Windows because it's bloated, mostly. It runs my computer hotter, and it takes 10 minutes to fully boot, with all the Terminate and Stay Resident stuff, if it's still called that. You know, the stuff that goes in the taskbar.

It takes longer to start equivalent programs too, like Firefox and LibreOffice.

Yep yep!

^-^

Windows, can still randomly BSOD and is the ONLY OS to completely rewrite its system and core files every time it shuts down.

Ever wonder why it'll boot fine one day, then the next its claiming some DLL went corrupt?

Mac OS is weird and can be bloated, however there is a new exception to the aforementioned about Mac.
OSX IS BSD now.

The entire OSX project is based on BSD with component from NIX added in.
Even some of the visual aspects, which were originally from previous MACs, are starting to change to the more common setup for BSD.

Hu... Why would they do that?

Hmhmhm.