Do you like Linux? (If so. Why?)

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Debian is much more resource-friendly than Ubuntu. My laptop running the default Debian install (with GNOME) idles at 200-300 megabytes of memory usage with a web browser, Evolution, and chat client open. It hardly registers any CPU usage, but then I'm on a quad-core processor. Flash and Java are available in the repos. If running older programs is a problem, Debian's Testing branch offers a very solid rolling release that stays fairly up to date without getting unstable.

If I need the use of an older PC, Debian is my preferred distro. From comparison it even manages to be more resource friendly than my current Gentoo installation. Furthermore it has the modability and flexibility that's standard with most linux distros.

Is there such a thing as a pure Debian liveCD so I can try it before installing?

The problem with ubuntu these days is it's too disneyfied. It's all *oooh shiny* and *look, sparkles!* instead of the heartache and headache that is trying to make linux work properly (which, by the way, ubuntu still doesn't without some tweaking).

My preferred distro has got to be arch with gnome, I'm getting a new computer at work next week and I thing I might dual boot it with linux authenticating via ldap (privilege of being second in command of an IT support department ... of two).

http://live.debian.net/ Don't know if that is a proper representation or anything. If you want you can of course try the real thing within a virtualbox

i like backtrack 5.

are the reasons obvious :trollface:

I'm not crazy about the change... I just don't think either the Unity interface or the Gnome 3 shell is robust enough yet to use on a production machine. Plus, neither is very configurable, which is something I consider important in linux. That said, I'm not an expert in either: maybe it's more configurable than I realise. Hopefully it will get better as more love and code gets poured into it, which was certainly the case for KDE 4.

Change is always hard. I'll reserve judgement on Unity/Shell for a couple of years.

Nope; Gnome 3 really is not at all configurable. It's probably less configurable than the Windows shell at this point, though I assume that will change in future releases.


It's a bit different though... early KDE4 releases were slow, bloated, somewhat buggy, but it was definitely a nice idea. After a bit of cleaning up (and more powerful computers becoming common) KDE4 is certainly a usable and fairly intuitive interface. Most of the objections to GNOME3 are not bugs- there were design decisions that were plainly wrong. Deliberate choices were made, such as getting rid of the idea of "minimizing" windows, getting rid of panels, altering the organization of the application menu, etc, and these are the problems in GNOME3 more than anything actually "wrong" in the code. As such, I'm less confident that GNOME3 will be better once it matures. The project introduced change for the sake of change, and it was extremely radical and disruptive change that leaves the desktop virtually unusable. Perhaps some of their decisions will be re-evaluated in later releases, but I can't really think of any more functional interface layout than the classic GNOME 2 design, and they aren't going back to that.


I'll be watching GNOME3 for progress, but I'm pretty much done with Canonical at this point.

I upgraded from Fedora 12 to Fedora 15 recently and Gnome 3 has been driving me nuts! The only GUI applications I use are a web-browser, an instant messaging client and the calculator. Other than that I just use terminals for pretty much everything else. The biggest problem I have with Gnome 3 is that they changed how alt-tab works, I can no longer press alt+tab to switch through my windows the way I like! I like how the old way alt+tab worked you could use it to flip between any two windows easily (whether or not they we the same program or different programs). Now with alt+tab you can only switch applications and alt+` lets you between windows within an application... why? Plus you can alt tab between virtual desktops now too? How strange is that?

Other than that I am a big fan of linux!

This is basically the behavior of the application switcher in Mac OS X. One more detail in GNOME's sadly misguided attempt at mimicking the Mac. Except that they didn't even get it right, and the switcher is a lot kludgier than OS X's.

I can only hope some coders will see the light and fork gnome 2

I like linux for many reasons. Ubuntu to be specific. It's free, open source, less bugs, less viruses, no crashes, INSANELY easy to set up, has all software i'd need setup in there by default, and it's on many platforms, from my netbook to my phone. That, and tux is awesome (Penguins FTMFW)

Ken Thompson, primary creator of Unix, claims Linux contains some shoddy code.

http://www.disc.ua.es/~gil/thompson.pdf

I would agree with this... in 1999 when the interview took place. But twelve years later I'm not sure Ken Thompson believes this. Linux has come a long ways since 1999, I remember how difficult some things were when I first started using linux...

Unlikely. From what I've read, the old GNOME codebase is very crufty and nearly unmaintainable- they had to switch to gtk+ 3, etc, and now that they've made the interface changes along with the necessary code clean-ups, it's hard to go back. There might be attempts similar to the KDE Trinity project, but those are not a long-term solution.

From 1999? Pfft, ancient history.