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Linux vs Windows

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SPDCHK

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Out of all the Linux OS packages available (eg. Red Hat, Suze, Knoppix, Ubuntu to name a few) which one do you prefer (use) and why would you rather use Linux vs. WindowsXP/Windows7?
 
The Linux system I have used and enjoyed was the Susie distribution. Why Susie? Simply because I had books for it and years ago it was given to me.

However, that said what you have here is a loaded question. It's not a matter of why I would choose a Linux OS over a Windows OS be it any Windows OS. The use of an operating system is based on what the end user needs or wants it to do. If I want to surf the Internet, read email and run simple office applications I can do that on any OS. I can run OO (Open Office) on a Linux OS platform or MS Office on a MS OS platform. My work is another story as most of the software I use for work is written to run on a MS OS. My odds are better with an Apple MAC OS 10.

For example take this list of CAD software and note what software runs on what OS. That is just using CAD software as an example.

Primarily I use MS products because the company I work for uses MS products. They work for me to get done what I need to get done using productivity software. I also get very good deals on home software through Microsoft's HUP (Home User Program) which is a nice incentive.

Ron
 
Debian. https://www.debian.org/

I'm not a gamer so Linux works just fine for programming and office type functions.
 
LTSpice was left at a very basic level to support WINE quiet well.
 
I posted the question mainly to see if there are quite a few Linux users out there and how popular the OS is.

Ron, I agree with you on the OS requirements for the applications to be run on it. I work for a big company that does anything to do with mining. From turning new soil for construction down to the final push of a button to start an automated plant. As with your work, 99.9% of our software too only runs on MS.

I asked the question because I see that Windows 8 is to be released sometime near the end of this year. It got me thinking; every time MS does an upgrade, all the vendor software packages that makes use of the OS platform has to be re-developed to run on that platform (32bit to 64bit applications to name just one of both hardware and software changes made to computers an OS’s recently). I refer now to companies like Allen Bradley, SIEMENS, ABB etc. for the PLC programming market.

Personally, I HATE MS! With a passion! Especially the new Windows 7. I loved XP. Had no problems with that. From what I hear, Linux does not have as much problems with viruses, worms and Trojan horses as MS does. Working on a Domain can be quite a challenge. When the IT admin team decides to changes your profile policy (to prevent you from running “CMD” from the command line) because of a virus that might be launched from the DOS prompt, I seriously start to worry about the effectiveness of MS as an OS?

But, anybody that use any Linux package, please tell me what you use it for, and share where you get useful applications for the Linux OS.

Thank you.
 
I'm currently on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (long in the tooth; gotta do something about that). I've been using Linux in some form or another since about 1995 or so. I don't know if I really hate Microsoft's software; what I hate is that they have never once apologized for all the crap they have pulled over the years; they could at least apologize for what they did to Stac (or how about SGI? Their implosion was partly a result of MS swindling them into playing with something called Fahrenheit, which ultimately became DirectX, but part of that was also fooling them into thinking NT was a real Posix system, and switch their workstations over to that away from Solaris, and it all went downhill from there; I mean, not all the blame is to MS, but there is some amount there). The list is pretty large; they've done some pretty sleazy things against Linux as well in the past as well...
 
Well over the years I did play with linux and got hopelessly lost but since we got this old puter from the school P4 1.6 gig with only 384 meg of ram XP was slow as. So I installed ubuntu 10.04lts and it has been plain sailing and this old puter is running a heap quicker. As Oshonsoft Basic won't run in wine I installed XP via a VM program and it works purfect as does all the other winblows packages I have.

Now i did build that 64 bit i5-750 puter with 4 gig of ram running one of the worse OS's out (7) and last week it crashed big time. Using a Knoppix disk I got in and found out where the problem was an fixed it. Yes it was a MS trojan and one really has to wonder why people make virus's, trojans etc..... Well if MS didn't rip everyone off in the world there wouldn't be a problem but the big problem with their OS is it is so easy to hack into and infect it.

What I'm going to do with our young girls first computers is run a linux OS then put XP on and then what ever they do as a user will cause no harm. Try that with a 7 yr old on a winblows system if she gets into the internals, in linux running XP a simple script can stop that easily.

Also the way the aRM chip is going the desktop puter is in the death throws where small boards running linux will out do a huge expensive winblows system that seem to need more and more just like Moore's Law.

For an old winblows guy like me getting back into linux was easy as but still wanting to use my winblows programs running the only decent OS microsucks ever brought out (XP) in a VM is easy to setup.

Well thats my rant and i'm sure it won't agree with some.......

Regards Bryan
 
Using Fedora but i've used most major distros at some time in the past. I'm an AIX sysadmin so I prefer a unix-like o/s, but I do use win7 in a VM so I have native support for domain related activities, office, exchange stuff like that.
 
........

For an old winblows guy like me getting back into linux was easy as but still wanting to use my winblows programs running the only decent OS microsucks ever brought out (XP) in a VM is easy to setup.

Well thats my rant and i'm sure it won't agree with some.......

Regards Bryan

Bryan, If I may, I would like to bug you someday to find the procedure on how you got the VM running in Linux, running XP on the VM all on a 1.6G PC with 384MB Ram? That just sounds in a word “Incredible”

My youngest (6) plays games on an XP OS, but the little s#&! has learned how to press the DELETE button on all the desktop icons he’s not interested in at that time, only to come and bug me afterwards to please re-install his games for him :)
I know, running XP on Linux OS via VM will not solve that “ID10T” problem but that still sounds like a solution I would use for all my requirements.

Regards
 
G'day SPDCHK,
The program I used is called virtualbox OSE so go have a search for that, I did have xp installed native on the hd so I used GParted to delete the fat partition then pointed virtualbox to that partition. You will need an xp disk to load it up and after that it should be plain sailing.

I hope this helps and if you need any further info just let me know...

Regards Bryan
 
I can't say I never used Linix, but I did make a Knoppix CD to boot on a machine, but I didn't try very hard to get the wireless to work.

I've used Unix since the mid 70's and Solaris not to long ago without administrative rights. Most of the work I had to do was without a GUI, but I did have an X-term running. I wasn't able to get X-term running using the secure shell stuff when the admins changed it so it was more secure.

I did email using Pine before html was popular and I read Newsgroups using rn and trn.

I did have Cygwin installed on my laptop at home and my PC at work to make it easier to interoperate with the Solaris hosts and I did create a man in the middle exploit using Cygwin running on a PC. I liked the ability to be able to list windows directories and files using Cygwin
 
Whilst watching and contemplating the remarks on this thread... I may have noticed a few who think Windows is absolutely diabolical..

Well!! Some I agree with, some I don't....

I've played with several versions of Linux, none were easy.... I would download a program... I wouldn't install... I check the web... That package is "Broken"... I need a patch.... The package on red hat works fine... blah blah blah..

How can Jo Public work in these conditions. Open office (sorry Libre Office) needs updating, what are you going to do..... The only way is to HOPE an installer works on your particular Linux version....

As some already know.. I don't like windows.... XP was, and is still a good OS... I remember when It came out, everyone said it was crap, Windows 2000 was the most stable!!! I have been using Window 7 on my home computer, all my family get on with it... All software written for the OS tends to work... All the software witten for Linux and ported to Windows, seem to work.

When I bought my laptop, It came with Vista......................no comment, suffice to say over the two years I've had it, Its become more stable and runs more programs... I haven't winged about it for ages now..

To summarise.... Windows may be a figure of disappointment for a great many people... But think of it this way..... The amount of non computer literate people that use the PC, Linux is a great big no no. The automation that comes with windows is truly a feat of its own.... How many peripherals can you attach to a Windows based machine compared to Linux.... You go out and buy a graphic card... no-one has written a driver for Ubuntu... AAARRRGG!!!

If you have to live with a devil.... Well you know the saying....

Thanks for listening....
 
Just out of curiosity how many users here are set up and configured for dual boot where the option of booting into a Windows or Linux based OS is available? When I was using more Linux I had a liking for the Grub boot loader over the LILO boot loader. Likely the best system I ever had was an old system running Susie 9.0 in a dual boot with the old Microsoft 2000 Professional OS.

Ron
 
I dual boot (fedora/win7) mostly for the running programs like Cubase, BFD or even some games where you need all the processing power and memory and no latency that comes with a VM.

I have my drive partitioned 40GB for linux and 250GB for win7. However when linux boots I can mount the large partition (linux has good ntfs support now) and have access to a large pool of storage. Also in linux I have the large 250GB mount setup in samba so all my VM's can write to a common mount and I don't duplicate outlook .pst files.

I agree with some of the comments about linux support over the years but it has gotten MUCH better. In the late 90's you had dependency hell when building packages, not many drivers. Unless you're bleeding edge there is support for MOST things.
 
I have tried linux many times, only to always come back to Windows...

first time i installed it was in early 90's when my HDD was mere 40mb and distro came out on bunch of floppies. getting linux to install was easy, getting X to work was not. one had to manipulate settings with video timing, sync signal etc. but got it to work. next part was to get it to work with my modem and that was total b***h.

over the years many things changed for better, installers and boot managers got smarter, there are installation package managers, graphical interface works out of box - and you get to choose among plenty of windows managers. thanks to ethernet, getting online is piece of cake.

one of the weaknesses used to be just plain text editor (i admired and hated vi), file browser etc. but now one gets to choose among bunch of different ones, not to mention that each distro comes with bigger applications like web browsers and office.

clearly linux has matured and there are plenty of distributions that will make nice desktop for home use for example. i have no problem installing it for my mom's computer because i know it will have everything she will ever need. the problem is still with applications, specially commercial software as used in work environment (by work i don't mean IT where usually all you need is networking and few servers like mail, file, web, ftp; or programming such as C). But software I use is not available for linux (and may never be).

There are KiCAD and C programming, and there may be alternatives to generic products. For example usually mentioned replacement for AutoCad is bricscad which is cheaper and natively works with DWG files. Proprietary products like PLC & HMI programming (AB/RockwellSoftware, Siemens, Omron, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Keyence....), safety products configuration (light curtains, laser scanners, safety controllers...) are another story. Some have reported getting CodeSys to run in Wine but that's not native support.

Btw. I am interested to hear about any alternatives to mentioned products (free or commercial) that natively run on Linux (and are supported by company that makes it)

VirtualBox is one very useful product that allows use of other OSs so application can be run within its native environment. This is great and I use it on windows to run ... windows. It allows me to isolate various windows applications, specially ones that are pain to get to work conflict free with other software.

So what are the killer apps you use on linux?
 
I used Ubuntu for a while on my laptop, it worked ok until an update made it incompatible with my laptop's graphics card, so it was then 50/50 wether it would boot up to garbage. The only reason I had it was because I lost my XP re-install CD. I switched back to windows when a Friend in IT let me use his OEM disk.

Saying that though, I did like Ubuntu and have it on a dedicated media computer downstairs full of media, so it's all good :)
 
Hi,

Hey i must have missed this thread originally. Hope it's not too late to reply.

I used Mandrake Move version of Linux for a little while back some years ago. I was able to use it for the web and some other things. It was nice to fool around with. It was a 'Live" version so you dont have to install it to hard drive, just boot up with the CD which you download and burn yourself. I've written so many programs now for Windows though that im almost stuck with that now.
Then the makers of Mandrake changed it and called it Mandriva. The only thing i didnt like was that it would not allow anything over 16 bit color with my graphics card. IT also required a PS2 mouse and PS2 keyboard.
Then they updated it again, still Mandriva, and the new version is much cleaner running and uses USB stuff like mice and keyboards.
It's not bad and i might install it to hard drive one of these days. For now i use it now and then in the "Live" mode where you dont have to install it to run it. Dont know how it works with my DVD burners and stuff like that though cause i've never tried that with it.
 
Hey i must have missed this thread originally. Hope it's not too late to reply.

Not sure how you can be late on such a thread; it's still active, it seems...

I used Mandrake Move version of Linux for a little while back some years ago. I was able to use it for the web and some other things. It was nice to fool around with. It was a 'Live" version so you dont have to install it to hard drive, just boot up with the CD which you download and burn yourself. I've written so many programs now for Windows though that im almost stuck with that now.

So - what'd you write them in (language)? If it's a .NET language, there's always the possibility of Mono, if VB then Gambas might be an option. If C/C++, then you'll likely need to do some major porting. Same if you interfaced to MSSQL. If they are based in QBASIC or similar - there's always QB64...

You could try using them under Wine (or Crossover - which is Wine with a nicer interface). Or you could just re-write them (if they aren't too huge and really useful - maybe you could open source them and get others to help?).

Then the makers of Mandrake changed it and called it Mandriva. The only thing i didnt like was that it would not allow anything over 16 bit color with my graphics card. IT also required a PS2 mouse and PS2 keyboard. Then they updated it again, still Mandriva, and the new version is much cleaner running and uses USB stuff like mice and keyboards.

The easiest-to-use distro out there is Ubuntu (though I've heard good things about Mint, too). It too has a Live CD edition if you want to try it out. I think Mint does too (I'd bet all distros have such now, though). There's very little that I've found that didn't work with Ubuntu (though some of it you still have to poke-n-prod, but it's nothing like the "bad-ole-days").

It's not bad and i might install it to hard drive one of these days. For now i use it now and then in the "Live" mode where you dont have to install it to run it. Dont know how it works with my DVD burners and stuff like that though cause i've never tried that with it.

What you need to do is get yourself another box and install it, and really make an effort to use and understand it. When you need a particular app or something, try to figure out a way to do what you want to do with what is available. Take the time to -really- understand it. Yes, there will be cases where you can't find something to replace what you had on Windows; in those instances, try Wine/Crossover - or set up a 'doze box just for those apps. I've found over the 15 years or so I've been using Linux that there are very few apps that I couldn't find something workable on Linux. In fact, in many cases, most of the work could be done with command line tools. That or a bit of Perl scripting. For everything else, I either bit the bullet and used a Windows box, or just waited a few years for something to be developed, or developed something workable myself if I was really desperate for it. However, in my case I don't typically do a lot of "mainstream" stuff, so I don't miss anything Windows would provide.

The one area, though, where you'll find it most tough (outside of a few niche markets) is gaming. There's a lot of great games and such for Linux, but not a lot on the "mainstream" side of things. What is there, though, is more than a few "independent" productions, so you can find some interesting stuff out there. Also, there's always emulation if you care for old-school stuff.
 
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