Linux

[fungusman]

Was wondering if we have anyone using linux on the board or people wondering about the OS.

Personally the only 2 computers I own are exclusively running linux. I honestly can't explain why I like it more then windows, there is just some sort of feeling of ACTUALLY OWNING something, kind of like having the original copy of a game or keeping old systems like dreamcast or nes.

The obvious downsides are hardware support. I wouldn't recommend it for media production. However, it is a beast for programming. Open GL libraries, pygame, perl, C,C++ you name it, it's on linux. All these are doable on windows, but there is something more compact about the way linux handles it's programming junk. If you want to set up a webserver or even just test php/server side code/ etc it tends to be more linear with linux distributions. Microsoft has great development packages and IDE's (asp.net etc) but it's cool to know that at anytime I can deploy my work without having to pay enterprise licensing fees and the whole works. Anyone who works in IT knows that a corporate MSDN/bizmark account doesn't come cheap ($10,939USD per year per subscription) lol.

Games.

It emulates everything, aside from that it's an issue. Seen some people run Call of Duty MW 2 on linux using some tweeks, but manly it's because the hardware manufacturers not releasing source code for videocard drivers. So you get people making makeshift drivers for videocards which cant really utilize the hardware.

All that aside, for programming,office,art,music, common use it's great and addictive.

For m$ games, m$ development platforms (.net/xna/IIS/etc), and movie editing, it's not so great.

I'm using ubuntu, though fedora always seems to run smoother for some reason. Anyway check out youtube clips of linux if you are curious what it can do and what it looks like.


tl;dr Do you use linux, do you like it ?