Why Linux?

[Easty]

It's free.. Every time I see it in the store it's about £30/$48.. comes in a redhat/suse/corel box.. Is there somthing extra you don't get with the free copy in these boxes..?? If so..where can I download the freeware.. ? Also is there any reason I cannot install it on my Vaio Z600..I'm running win2k on it at the moment!

[The PIT]

Well I download two CD images of Mandrake 8 and they didn't cost me anything. Just loaded Adaptec CD and burnt the image onto a couple of CD's. To find it I did a search for Mandrake 8 and download. You'll need a fast connection though.

[Easty]

Is mandrake the best option? or are they all pretty much the same thing?

[Dr Mordrid]

IMO Red Hat has more hardware support. Promise makes Fasttrak drivers for it for starters.

Dr. Mordrid

[Alec]

I guess I´ll try Red Hat one of these days... everyone seems to agree that it´s the best option.

[Pace]

More free-ness....

If you refer to pirate software as free...um, it's not - it's stolen. And crime can sometimes pay...sometimes it costs. With Linux, you don't have to worry about anyone banging down your door to raid your software collection.

All you have to worry about is the Gov'ts of the world banging down your door because they haven't cracked your system

Oh yea, and free doesn't just mean free of charge. It also means you are free to look at the code, to modify the code, to distribute the code as much as you want...

However, as much as I'd like all those benefits, sadly the Linux world is still behind in some areas - as far as workstation and home desktops are concerned, Windows (2000) is really the main OS, offering 99.9% stability compared to Linux' 99.99%, but mainly offering the so-called killer apps...Word, Excel and now Outlook to a certain extent. My killer apps are Photoshop and Dreamweaver, at a stretch I could do without them...but I wouldn't earn as much money from what I can produce by handcoding my GIMP designed pages...

Regards,

Paul.

[Easty]

I wasn't really considering using Linux as my primary OS, I'm a designer and my main apps are Catia V5, 3Ds Studio Max and Photoshop V5.. I don't imagine these will be mature under linux.. Not for a few years yet anyway.. And to be honest I think NT is pretty dam Good.. I started using NT4 at uni for CAD and web serv/design and never really looked back.. It's only when I started working and had a little more time to spare for playing games ect.. then I started to have problems... But now they seem to be overcoming that problem also. The only reason I wanted to view linux was curiosity.

[MultimediaMan]

Linux for the desktop...

Linux is cool and all, but what can you DO with it?

E-mail and web browsing are great and all, but support for everyday desktop business apps is just not there (yet).

Maybe if we did have a real suite of desktop apps that didn't require a sysadmin to setup and maintain, the O/S would go somewhere.

But there is where the Holy War is being fought: The Linux Elite want a fast, stable O/S to do anything and everything they want it to (from the command line, of course...). The Linux Evangelists want something easy to use, with pretty, easy to understand interfaces and point and click simplicity. As a consumer, which would you buy...something half assembled WITHOUT MEANINGFUL INSTRUCTIONS, or something that worked Okay and had all options?

I work on Unix machines 8+ Hours per day now: let me tell you, that UNIX is no more stable or reliable than the programmers who write the apps for it (Scary, isn't it?). Sure the kernel is stable, but if your program eats up every byte of a 16GB 4 Way XEON system (which happens to be the keystone in a cluster), you're kinda screwed (but your kernel is still stable!), even if you can telnet into it to fix it, it's gonna take all kinds of time to get the system back up and running. Don't laugh or scoff, it happens.