Thinking outside the box...Linux style.

xAkirax2004

xAkirax2004

2,932
I've decided to make a transition into a diffrent GUI, Linux. I have no idea how it works, since I've been feeding off the teet of Windows ever since I got my first 486 computer. But I've been looking for one type of Linux that has these traits.

- User friendly.

- Free, or really cheap.

- Live CD's for tryout reasons.

I really just want to try it out. If I do like them, I will buy a retail version and partiton my drive for it.
 
Distro Center

Go check out what features you truly desire from the available distro's mentioned at that site. It's the most efficient way to speak about it.

I'm choosing Gentoo on my Linux box, simply because of Portage (an automated update system).
 
Where's Sage?

I used Mandrake Linux on my PC for a good year, and RedHat before that. Both were pretty cool. Was looking into getting SUSE next when i've got time.

I'm sure i'll be corrected here, but most distributions seem relatively similar, looks wise, pratically, and software related. Just go for one that looks nice and is free for the time being. You can always pay for a different/better version once you've got into Linux a bit more.
 
Xandros is supposed to be pretty damn sweet. It offers decent windows compatibility and a good software library both on cd and through their online service 👍
 
toyomatt84
I'm choosing Gentoo on my Linux box, simply because of Portage (an automated update system).
Click to expand...
If you have a sense of humor, you might like Gentoo is for Ricers. :lol:

Just kidding, I ran Gentoo for a bit and portage is a nice system. Right now I have FreeBSD because it's easier to get a nice slick install with it (without being a USE and CFLAGS hacker) and the ports system also allows you to build everything from source.
 
toyomatt84
I'm choosing Gentoo on my Linux box, simply because of Portage (an automated update system).
Click to expand...
You my friend, are one damn patient bastige! It's taken me 8 tries on older laptops and not one of those attempts has been successful. The 1 and only time I came close, I messed up somewhere and I was unable to fix the issue :irked:
 
Ok... so it might have been a good idea to mention that I was thinking of using Gentoo, here. It sounds like a pretty bad distro, darn. :( Portage sounded so nice.
 
there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with Gentoo. I learned a LOT with all my failed installations. Most of the time it failed due to outdated and unsupported hardware. Namely issues with Intel and their obsession with Centrino wifi and ethernet cards. As well as issues with my really old linksys wifi pcmcia card which was completely unsupported. So long as you don't have Centrino or any really outdated stuff, you'll be golden.

It takes about 4 hours of working with the installer to do a stage 1 installation with maximum customization. Follow that by about a day of compiling all your software packages.

Stage 3 install is fairly simple but isn't custom built to your system's specs. That makes it about as fast as any other linux distro... but portage is still amazing. If you *want*, you can install portage onto any linux distro.
 
Portage makes sure that you get the most updated software, and I guess you could argue that the software will run a bit faster of you use full optimizations.

But nothing will compile perfectly, ever.

SUSE is a rpm based distro, so you can get all the benefits of custom compiled binaries if you build your own RPMs from source RPMs, which is a lot more likely to produce better results.
 
I'm going the way of Xandros Desktop sometime in the next 10-20 minutes. I just gotta burn and run the installer :D
 
I'm thinking of switching to Linux, i heard that Knoppix was good for new comers like me. What else is there besides Knoppix. Looking for User Friendly, easy to install and is Free. I was reading what was said in ths post above but i was too see if theres anything else.
 

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