Destructionator XIII wrote:RThurmont wrote:In my opinion, for a total n00b to attempt to use Slackware OR Gentoo would be a complete disaster,
Slackware isn't that hard, once you get to know it, which admitably takes some effort, but Linux is not Windows, it is going to take some effort to actually understand it anyway.
If you are willing to actually change things with your OS and dive into the differences, why leave Windows at all?
that unlike Slackware and Gentoo, are actually optimized for use on older hardware in the default install.
If I put a slightly beefier harddrive in my P1 box with 16 MB of RAM, a full, default install of Slackware would run just fine. Since the hard drive isn't big enough for that, during install, I uncheck a few of the fat programs I don't need, and it still works fine. What is the problem with that? Slack can also be easily installed from floppy disks, for those machines that don't have bootable CD drives, which as far as I know, is not a common feature.
Actually, bootable CD drives are a pretty common feature nowadays, at least since the Win98 era.
I ran Linux from scratch though, and I shudder at the thought of 16 megs of RAM- even running a lightweight WM on 48 megs of RAM, it kinda blew chunks. That said, browsers using the gecko engine tend to be fat. I'm not a big fan of text mode browsers, since the layout becomes messed up when viewing pages that are formatted only w/ CSS instead of tables. And nowadays, I can't stand not having my bloated apps (firefox/thunderbird, netbeans, java software, etc (Java's packaging makes it annoying to wade through all those directories w/ vim)).
RThurmont- Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. That said, that's kinda the basic idea of making it more user-friendly. Also, most people do have a few proprietary apps they'd like to keep using, or games, so Linux isn't really for them.
That said, I personally prefer Linux since the command line is actually usable w/o too much work (using CLI on windows is somewhat annoying due to the huge # of flies w/ spaces in them), free dev tools (MS has them too, but usually cut down in some way, and CLI tools suck), huge customizability of everything, SSH and SSHFS, easy scripting already learned for free thanks to knowing the CLI (no need to learn stuff like WSH).
It just "feels" more stable (eg, explorer will often hang on a certain tasks, such as looking for a network drive that is down (although Linux apps will hang too on NFS disonnect, the lack of integration alleviates this somewhat, and I can always do lsof|grep [mountpoint]; killall [processes having files open on said mountpoint] to fix the problem)). Oh, and computers envitably will run into problems, and when they do on a Linux system, I usually can pinpoint exactly what the problem is, while it is a pain on Windows. That, and beryl/compiz
Most users don't really have a good reason to switch (other than it makes it harder for them to compromise their systems w/ malware, at least before malware devs catch on (security through obscurity is still some security). Most of the above doesn't really apply to the average user. The other biggest reason to switch is the large library of free software that is bundled/only runs (well) on Linux, but a large number of those (Pidgin, gimp) have windows ports.
And if you think crackers have few reasons to attack Linux boxes, think of all the Web servers out there. Shouldn't there be a lot more Linux malware on the loose by now, if it was as vulnerable as Windows?
A lot of people don't even scroll (on Web pages). Reading is out of the question. But that's not the operating system's fault.
Seriously, ever heard of Code Red?
