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Best linux OS?


Kozak

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it's the non-comercial VMWare, it's free if you dont use it comercially (unsure what they meant by that). Linux Mint well, parents, I thought about it but they don't really want me to do that because, one i've never done it before, and two I'll probably break my pc lol

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it's the non-comercial VMWare, it's free if you dont use it comercially (unsure what they meant by that). Linux Mint well, parents, I thought about it but they don't really want me to do that because, one i've never done it before, and two I'll probably break my pc lol

By 'commercial use' they mean using it in a business setting or any venture where you're making money through its use.

Linux Mint is no different than attempting any other distro; And that's likely why your teacher wants you to use VMWare, because if you break your Linux install it won't trash your Windows OS. VMWare provides a 'protected' environment. There are a number of people trying out Win10 with it.

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Ok. Well, that went right over my head lol. :blush:

Good point.

It's even slower in LFS. You have to set/remember the compiler switches you want to use and manually download the source for every piece of software you want to install. On the other hand, you get really good at compiling software and know pretty much exactly where everything is on the system. LFS is good for a learning experience but it's not exactly user-friendly (even Gentoo is more user-friendly).
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It's a comment on how a Gentoo system has to compile everything from scratch.

Yep. Build the entire thing from scratch. Mostly. They took away our stage-1 bootstraps 10 years or so ago though, which still feels wrong. Most of it is quick, but some things take a good deal of time. X.Org. GTK and the other Gnome bits. But most especially Libre Office and Fireox. I eventually arrived at a point where I had to just use the bin packages (borderline blasphemy...) as they would max out the RAM on both of the desktop Gentoo systems I was using. Not so much an issue these days on my MacBook with its obscene amounts of RAM, but my AMD K8 "netbook" is forever capped at 4GBs....

I have no idea if the effort is worth it, but I've only ever used Gentoo, Arch, or RedHat/Fedora at home. And I get plenty of time with Debian-based distros at work... and CentOS. Debian-based distros still seem alien after 13+ years of using Gentoo. They do have their niceties though. (Such as not having a massive wall of "Huh?" just inside the door.)

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Well, for school i was told to go get VMWare and make a virtual pc using linux. I can't figure out which one is the best, or how to get the darn thing to work. (Sucky teacher)

Just in the spirit of providing virtualization alternatives, I'll drop this here:

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

I'm sure there's good reasons for using VMWare, but Virtualbox has serviced my needs admirably.

Also, in addition to the myriad dual-booting options, you can run most distros from a live cd, or even boot from a USB thumb-drive. However learning to run stuff in a virtual environment is a learning experience in itself which will probably benefit you in the future anyway, so you're probably best going in that direction to begin with.

EDIT:

Oh yeah, we're talking about distro preferences. I have to say I learned most from Slackware, but for day-to-day use, anything Debian-derived is fine by me.

Edited by pxi
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All of them.

Which distro is "best" depends entirely on what you are intending to use it for... and how much manual configuration you like.

As anyone who has built a LFS install will know, GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux - distro differences are mostly in package management and default configuration as all the core components come from the same upstream sources.

Which distro you prefer is largely a matter of taste.

On the 'desktop' I've used Slackware (first Linux), Gentoo, LFS (on a 486, for optimisation reasons), Redhat, Vector, Debian & Arch, as well as several highly specialised non-desktop/networking distros.

I think I've pretty much settled on Debian for most applications though, the automation is sweet (particularly for headless systems) and the software repos are extensive.

Curiously enough, I've never used any of the *buntus, don't see the advantage over Debian tbh.

Edited by steve_v
Dang phone keyboards.
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Which linux would be the best for gaming? And preferably an easy to transfer from windows linux. I'm thinking about doing a linux system to save $100 for an OS.
I would say Mint XFCE, personally. It's pretty lightweight with all the benefits of Ubuntu. I'm using it for development and gaming right now and I'm much more impressed with its performance than I was with Ubuntu or Kubuntu.
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I would say Mint XFCE, personally. It's pretty lightweight with all the benefits of Ubuntu. I'm using it for development and gaming right now and I'm much more impressed with its performance than I was with Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

How easy is it to use for gaming? Steam works alright I hope? (Sorry, never had any experience with Linux)

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I tried Ubuntu awhile back, to dip my feet into Linux...It was pretty, and seemed like an easy x-over from Windows...I didnt stick with it learning the ins & outs of Linux, and Win7 has been fine for me ever since, so I removed it before doing doing anything with it.

About a month ago, I wanted to play heavily modded KSP, and Win 7 & 8.1 (I have them dual-boot), werent cutting it...I knew I wanted a low-footprint Linux distro, and came up with 3 choices: Kubuntu, Lubuntu, & Mint...

So I tried Kubuntu...That was a nightmare getting it installed for some reason...So I tried Lubuntu, and am pretty happy with it, so far just playing KSP and websurfing. (havent tried Mint)

I like that at idle, it uses just over 200MB of RAM...Leaving me almost 5.3GB of RAM for playing KSP... :D

Where as stripped down versions of Win7 & Win8.1 on my laptop use 950MB & 1.2GB (respectively) of RAM at idle... :o

Also, using Firefox uses only about another 200MB, where it uses just over 300 on either Win OS...Loading & surfing Firefox is much quicker, too.

Oh, and I have Win 7, 8.1 & Lubuntu all installed at the same time (tri-boot)... no issues... The Linux loader is set as my default...It has a Win boot loader option, which then loads the Win7/8.1 boot loader... I thought there might be issues with installing Linux on top of a pre-existing Win7/8.1 dual-boot, but it went seamlessly... This is all on a non-UEFI BIOS, too...

Edited by Stone Blue
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