Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, notfred
just brew it! wrote:As much as I love Linux, if running commercial PC games is part of your use case, you probably *don't* want to run Linux as your primary OS. Yes, there are a few commercial games that have native Linux ports, and some Windows games will run acceptably under Wine (or other forms of emulation); but gaming is not Linux's forte.
For general use (web, e-mail, etc.) I'd probably go with either Mint, or Kubuntu (the KDE flavor of Ubuntu).
just brew it! wrote:Well, older games do have a better chance of being supported decently under Wine. But even if they are supported, they may not run as smoothly as they do natively on XP.
just brew it! wrote:Well, older games do have a better chance of being supported decently under Wine. But even if they are supported, they may not run as smoothly as they do natively on XP.
whats better for gaming and searching the web
Flatland_Spider wrote:Gaming: Ubuntu.
EA, sort of, and Valve are going to make that their Linux distro of choice, and it has the most mindshare, which translates into more software pre-packaged for it.
Try Kubuntu or Xubuntu if you don't like Unity. Just keep in mind, Unity is the official DE for Ubuntu, and as such, it will get more love then the others.
Mint may work with EA and Valve, but it's not a guarantee.
Flatland_Spider wrote:For a newbie, it really depends on what your goals are for Linux. If you just want something to replace Windows and you don't want to mess with stuff too much, Ubuntu is a good bet, and there is tons of stuff out there on how to fix problems. Try out Unity, and see if you like it. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about it, but it's easy enough to try it out since Ubuntu installs from a live disc.
For a newbie, it really depends on what your goals are for Linux. If you just want something to replace Windows and you don't want to mess with stuff too much, Ubuntu is a good bet, and there is tons of stuff out there on how to fix problems. Try out Unity, and see if you like it. A lot of people have a lot of opinions about it, but it's easy enough to try it out since Ubuntu installs from a live disc.
BobbinThreadbare wrote:Unity isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
Madman wrote:BobbinThreadbare wrote:Unity isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be.
If you're forced to use it, and have no other choice, yes, it's not that bad, you can bear it. But it's a real trainwreck.
Captain Ned wrote:The few Joe SixPacks who give Ubuntu a whirl will simply accept it as they did the varying Windows desktops and play within the environment.
Madman wrote:And then they're going to dich it completely because Unity is unusable for productivity work. It's yet another tablet interface for 30" screens.
Captain Ned wrote:And like most Linux evangelists you miss the point.
Madman wrote:I would turn into Linux evangelist if I could use Visual Studio level software on Linux, launch all AAA titles, have camcoder and digital camera software and have a clean Windows like UI.
And like most Linux evangelists you miss the point. Joe SixPack will never customize anything
RAMBO wrote:I do want to learn CLI. I was told by my friends to read some books before I delved in to it though. I am a newbee to the PC realm and my knowledge is limited to me just having Windows all my life. When I was a kid I used to screw around in dos before windows 95 came out, but it has been far too long. I will not be doing school work on this or any type of office work, at least not until next spring and I hope to have somewhat of a better build by then. I use Firefox mostly for Nova-PBS programs and the news. I will not be playing anything other than homeworld 1 and 2, Sim City 4 Deluxe or Command and Conquer the first decade if anything. I basically need this dinosaur to hold me over for a few months until my next build. I am completely new to CLI but not afraid of it, just of me screwing something up. Thank you all for your input-Linux does not seem as bad as my friends made it out to be.
Specs: Celeron CPU 2.66 4/1/2004 driver
2 Gigs ram. cannot go higher
High tech Excaliber 9250 VGA graphics card
140 G IDE HDD
mobo-trying to find manufacturer, 2003 Its an old Compaq a friend had in his basement.
Madman wrote:CLI is not some sort of a magic bullet or something. It's handy for some tasks, but it's not a do it all environment.
I am mostly using GUI, unless I need to do some specific tasks, and for those, CLI in Linux is super awesome, million times better than in Windows.
What I recommend, is to start from good GUI, Mint or Mageia or Kubuntu, and just start using it. Soon enough CLI will creep up at some places, like when you want to copy files effectively, or install some packages, change password. You'll learn that some things are just 1000x faster with "alt+ctrl+t, ctrl+r, type few letters, enter"
RAMBO wrote:Madman wrote:CLI is not some sort of a magic bullet or something. It's handy for some tasks, but it's not a do it all environment.
I am mostly using GUI, unless I need to do some specific tasks, and for those, CLI in Linux is super awesome, million times better than in Windows.
What I recommend, is to start from good GUI, Mint or Mageia or Kubuntu, and just start using it. Soon enough CLI will creep up at some places, like when you want to copy files effectively, or install some packages, change password. You'll learn that some things are just 1000x faster with "alt+ctrl+t, ctrl+r, type few letters, enter"
Great, I will start with Mint and try all the others you guys have suggested and see how it goes with this old build.
Madman wrote:RAMBO wrote:Madman wrote:CLI is not some sort of a magic bullet or something. It's handy for some tasks, but it's not a do it all environment.
I am mostly using GUI, unless I need to do some specific tasks, and for those, CLI in Linux is super awesome, million times better than in Windows.
What I recommend, is to start from good GUI, Mint or Mageia or Kubuntu, and just start using it. Soon enough CLI will creep up at some places, like when you want to copy files effectively, or install some packages, change password. You'll learn that some things are just 1000x faster with "alt+ctrl+t, ctrl+r, type few letters, enter"
Great, I will start with Mint and try all the others you guys have suggested and see how it goes with this old build.
Use a DVD+RW, as most of distros run from live DVD. Download, burn, boot from DVD, play for a few hours, repeat.
The performace running from live DVD will be a lot worse than actuall install though.
EDIT: For Mint, there are two desktop flavors, Mate and Cinnamon, I'm running Mate, but Cinnamon is supposedly more modern. Haven't tried it, I guess I will have to try a live DVD too.
l33t-g4m3r wrote:I'd suggest Mageia, being it's pretty user friendly, and has a gui interface for almost everything. I don't really want to mess with Ubuntu after hearing all the negative news, and that it updates slower than the rest. Mint or Fedora would be my second choices.
bjm wrote:Hey Rambo,
Having reviewed your specs and requirements, I heavily suggest sticking to Windows XP as your primary OS. You can dual boot into Linux to play around with the distros, but both Wine and gaming in VMware will run terribly slow with that video card. If you have any intention of running Windows games under Linux with that configuration, I would kindly suggest that you delay those intentions as you'll likely disappoint yourself so bad you'll never touch Linux again. Instead, dual-booting Linux or installing VMware and assigning 512MB/1GB ram to the VM will likely result in a more positive experience.
Once you get a beefier system, if you want to make the jump to Linux and wish to take your Windows applications with you, especially as an entirely new Linux user, I recommend doing it using VMware and not Wine. You can download VMware Player for free and install a Windows XP installation within it and play your games. Playing games like Homeworld and SimCity 4 will be walk in the park even for VMware for any modern video card. The stability of the games within the virtual machine will heavily depend on the drivers you use. AMD's and Nvidia's proprietary drivers will be sufficient. (You'll lose Kernel Mode Setting, but I don't think you'll care much given that you want to game at all)
Once you've become familiar with the rest of the Linux operating system, you can start playing with Wine. But just be realistic in your expectations. Assume that things will work 20% of the time, requiring 3x the amount of configuration effort you expect, and once you get it to run, expect it to function half-normally. With those expectations, you just might be satisfied with the outcome. And that's not a jab at the Wine project at all, but more of a recognition that what they are trying to do is extremely difficult.
Ideally though, given your system specs, you being new to Linux, and your desire to play games, my recommendation is: Stick with Windows XP as the native OS, grab a copy of VMware Player or Virtualbox, and install Linux distros using that. That way, if you hate the distro, it's as easy as dragging the VM directory into the trashcan and creating a new one. And further, you'll still get to play your games.
Aside from a default packages contained on the ISO and pre-configuration, Mint *IS* Ubuntu. The update infrastructure, packaging system and main repos, drivers/kernels, userspace software stack; Mint is the same as Ubuntu.