Using Linux As a Main Operating System

[ksigmtsu]

My windows OS died yesterday, suddenly. Will boot to safe mode, cant recover, wont boot.

They didn't ship it with a disk, so I can't even reinstall. I did, however, happen to have fedora 15 on hand, on a flash drive.

It took me less than 1 day to have everything I used in windows up and running in linux. Don't think I'll be going back.

The last holdout for me was I couldn't find a good screensharing program, took several hours to track one down, but I did find one.

Yuuguu.com, is not free, its 80 bucks a year, however, it works great, similar features to gotomeeting, and I'd rather pay 80 bucks a year for a great screensharing program than give microsoft 1 more penny of my money for making a substandard operating system.

For those that don't know it, fedora or ubuntu both come out of the box with an office suite like microsoft office, integrated instant messinging, drivers for most programs, free graphic editing that rivals photoshop, and virtualbox for stubborn programs that don't run in anything but windows.

All for free.

 

[sPetersPi]

Fedora is my Linux OS of choice too. I have never liked Ubuntu.

Wine (winehq.org) is a great tool for linux users that have compatibility issues

 

[ksigmtsu]

I've still not dug into wine too far, for the few windows programs I run, I have a crappy laptop running xp and 2 vmware boxes inside the fedora box.

 

[Sales71]

Windows always find ways to crash or get bugs.

 

[ksigmtsu]

I do have a windows machine still, its an old piece of crap lenovo laptop running a version of windows xp that has all the drivers stripped out of it that are unnecessary, like, sound, wireless, etc, and I use it to run 3 or 4 windows programs.

I notice that it is more stable than any windows machine I've ever owned, including that same lenovo when it was running "regular" xp. It's not a kosher copy of windows (technically my use is legal because I own 5 cd keys to windows), but it's funny to me that a group of pirates would sit around and fix the damn program themselves because microsoft wasn't willing to do it.