Trav, you clearly consider yourself to be more than a human being on the system level ...
there is kubuntu which would make it funner for you. However if a kernel recompile to
do something fancy, linux is not for your.

Closed document formats ... If you don't like them being used ... use the open standards.
'working out of the box' what freaking box, it's a free download.

=>Btw i must admit i had the same experience with kubuntu at first, i don't evangelise it,
i just suggest it's an option. For most people booting to shell without a click isn't a priority
if you don't like the choices use another distro.

Solaris is a Unix. And heres where it's bad, it has been written by sun it works OK.

belo, missed my little comparison?

Nope, I read it. Yes there are differences but I think they are not worth all the efforts (I mean the hours recompiling all the libs). I mean they are better things to do with all that cpu time than recompiling the same things with minor differences. Imagine all that cpu time spent on a project like F@H (just dreaming here )

if you use Archlinux it's compiled for x686 for you. You are just scared I find it a poor choice of the ubuntu people.
forking up percentages of performance ... for compatibility with machines that these days ...'

i really don't get it, people by machines with gigahertz of power, gigabytes of ram, and then they waste it all by using stuff like poorly compiled operating systems, bloated OS's (vista), runtime virtual machines which are slower.

granted, many complex instructions in newer instruction sets, have been proven over time to have been a bad choice. But still it doesn't cost anything .. so why use only small parts of your CPU's functionality. it just boggles my mind

Err...? What's so bad about an os written by sun? sun is nowhere near m$ right?

Trav, you clearly consider yourself to be more than a human being on the system level ...
there is kubuntu which would make it funner for you. However if a kernel recompile to
do something fancy, linux is not for your.

You miss the point entirely. Ubuntu has a strong push as an easy switch from windows. I don't think that is the case... there are others more suitable. btw I started using Linux back in '96 so recompiling a kernel is no big deal; but I think you will find average joe sure as hell thinks it's a big deal.

Closed document formats ... If you don't like them being used ... use the open standards.
'working out of the box' what freaking box, it's a free download.

'working out of the box' is just simple terminology for "after you have installed it, what will work straight away".
Anyway I digress, you think someone who has never even used anything else apart from Windows will give a damn? they will download and install, decide it's all to hard to get what they want working and say bugger it, and go back to windows. I've seen it happen time and time again.

Btw i must admit i had the same experience with kubuntu at first, i don't evangelise it,
i just suggest it's an option. For most people booting to shell without a click isn't a priority
if you don't like the choices use another distro.

I have done, for over a decade.

Solaris is a Unix. And heres where it's bad, it has been written by sun it works OK.

Of course it's Unix. I didn't think I had to be so pedantic as to point that out though

trav, you are right in most cases, and i'm no big fan of ubuntu myself, but you are wrong in thinking it isn't noob friendly . i have proof running around the house here .
- many computer noob does not have a palm
- many of computer don't know there is a console
- many of computer noob likes the sence of accomplishment, and has the skill of typing a question into google and finding the right 3 or 4 steps to get mp3 working, if they didn't they wouldn't of have installed an OS.
- complete computer noobs don't have mp3's on there computer.

If you have any, better distro in mind, which offers the same community support (and this imho is very important) as ubuntu, for complete noobs to prevent them from going back to windows? do tell

wow a decade ago 95/96 that was 5 years after they started working on the kernel, they didn't even decided on the penguin then and you compiled a hardly functional 300.000 loc or so kernel, respect


"So rhican you hate Microsoft and Sun?" Nah i don't hate any company, there goal is to make money, and as long as they do that ... I just recognise their downsides: M$ is evil, and produces ugly buggy closed source software(my computer does not have to call m$ every boot when i have a legal copy). Sun can not produce any software that is not at least a bit bloated imho The latter is not that important, just that usually sun sees things bigger than imho they are. making frameworks for this and that...
And how the licensing of sun evolved over the years .. at least now most of it is (going to be) opensource iirc.

Another company that i don't like these days is Novell (makers of SuSe linux) I didn't like suse before, but now that they are bought by microsoft ...

Rhican, so far I've had most success with new users trying Mepis (http://www.mepis.org) and I think this is mainly due to Multimedia ready to go, and Hardware accelerated drivers installed for you, also hasn't failed so far in automatically configuring the net connection. It now uses the Ubuntu pools but holds pretty well to it's deb origins (ie never had any probs using deb pools)

As to installing back in 96, it was Slackware 1.2.3 I think, and I didn't need to play around with the kernel except to get my CD drive working.. I'd used Sun Sparc's at Uni for some time before that, and although of course different I found it comfortable to use. I was introduced to it by a mate when I wanted to backdate the datestamp on an assignment for a script hehe.. he basically said "I won't do it for you, but I'll tell you what you need to do" and the rest is history He switched to BSD soon after that and I stayed with Linux I still have a softspot for slack!!!

if you repair many people that changes to linux after a while will change for BSD unless they really like linux, i''m one of the people who have changed for frebsd and i'm pretty happy whith my choice but well....

hi my cyber friends
i installed ubuntu four days ago, i had some problems with drivers but i fix that.
For me it is one new experience, in my opinion only what we must know to start using linux is, small knowledge about dos, linux commands, linux structure, googling and that is it!
This distro have good UI so, we can work many things in GUI!

rhican: which distro u suggest me to use?

regards
____________________
davs

Well, i tried archlinux and I am sticking to it

A big difference between archlinux and ubuntu.
Well yes in terms of performance: i686 optimized "package" + "--march=pentium" in the kernel makefile and voila, 2/3 less time to boot the kernel, 1/2 less time to boot the os.
It's a yes too for usability. The standard install of archlinux doesn't even have a X server. You have to select the package during the install. Compare to the "install and go" of Ubuntu standard install, there is a big difference. I wouldn't recommend it for beginners but it's definitely a change for power users

Thanks rhican for mentioning that distro !

Belo