Why aren't you running Linux?

[darxus]

It's a sincere question. I'm curious what I can do to help reduce dependence on closed operating systems.

And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with not running Linux, I understand it's not best for everybody. I'm just curious about making it best for more people.

Ubuntu is the most user friendly Linux distribution. It's also the one I use for both desktops and servers. You can download and burn a CD image, and boot into it off the CD without installing, to try it out without installing it. It is very slow that way, because CD drives are slower than hard drives, and everything in the image needs to be decompressed as it's read.

cathijosephine did the install herself when Windows etc. got too slow on her computer.

http://www.ubuntu.com/ (CD image link is right at the top - download.)

Let me know if you would like me to burn an install CD for you or look over your shoulder while you install.

Freeing up hard drive space under Windows and then repartitioning it for Linux will probably be the hardest part.

Comments

I run all three

[drwex]

My Windows box is my primary UI because it's faster and smoother than any UI I've seen on any Linux box (except the Mac, but hold that thought). My windows box is mostly for playing games and work in Photoshop or Visio.

I run a headless Linux box as an SSH-reachable host and mail server.

I have a Mac OS laptop that's sort of a games machine and sort of a portable everything station, for playing movies and music and such.

I use the command line on all of them. (Just to take a ferinstance, I've not found a GUI that lets me create and manage mailman lists and aliases in any reasonable way. Plus some tools like netstat have just the SUCK for UIs. Also, I still can't use a UI to string together things like taking a half-gig log file, grepping out a particular string, sorting and uniq'ing it and then counting how many lines I get. Find me a UI that does that and I might give up the xterm.