Comments on: 10 Things a Power User Will Love about Linux

By: Harry Barracuda

Harry Barracuda — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:35:22 +0000

No. 7 is tosh. If your build doesn’t support your wireless adapter out of the box, Linux is a pain in the ar*se, it’s biggest failing in my book.

By: karsten-cph

karsten-cph — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:23:57 +0000

@Andy

Have a look at Puppy Linux and Deli LInux (look them up on http://www.distrowatch.com and their homepages)
Puppy is a complete system, to be run from a live-cd or to be installed.
Deli Linux is (up to date and) for old pc’s with 32 MB ram and is to be installed. Deli has a limited amount of software.

By: Boycott Novell » Links 27/01/2009: IBM for GNU/Linux; Tories Support Open Source

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:00:37 +0000

[...] 10 Things a Power User Will Love about Linux If you’re a power user but haven’t yet given Linux a shot, you should definitely try it out. Here are 10 things that you will love about Linux over Windows or OS X. [...]

By: carolinason

carolinason — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:08:48 +0000

Andy,

Anything with Xfce as the desktop. I run Xubuntu, but it’s demands are a little high for a low end pc desktop.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:47:40 +0000

I actually have an old pentium II given to me recently. What distro should I look at?

By: Mark A. Hershberger

Mark A. Hershberger — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:39:50 +0000

Tim,

Ubuntu delivers a journaling filesystem out of the box and plug-n-play devices like my camera, usb headphones, usb drives, etc. all work out of the box and are scriptable out of the box.

So, at least on those issues, Ubuntu is at parity with OS X.

Why would anyone *want* to install KDE et al on OS X? That way lies insanity. Use the native apps and the native UI. If you want to use KDE, I’d suggest giving Kubuntu a try.

By: Everandanon

Everandanon — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:03:23 +0000

Anon, that’s a flaw with Windows and OS X. KDE, pidgin, and The GIMP have no control over the software updaters and installers in Windows and OS X.

By: Anon

Anon — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:27:31 +0000

TIM,

I have to disagree with you on 6. 6 (read: package management) is one of Linux’s greatest strength. I know OS X will give you automatic updates for OS X and the bundled apps like Safari, but do you get them for the programs you mentioned: KDE, pidgin, and The GIMP ?

By: TIM

TIM — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:26:04 +0000

As a long time linux user and an OS X convert, I’d say that: 2,4,6,7,8 aren’t valid when proving the superiority of linux over OS X.

I love Linux, I really do, but I have all of the GNU tools on OS X, I have X11, I have KDE (this was kind of tricky), pidgin, The GIMP, etc.

Also, on OS X, the ruby and other scripting bindings in the environment are amazing. I can access my contact book, react to events like a USB drive plugging in, or change my networking profiling via ruby script.

And finally, the journaling filesystem is integrated into the OS and all of the apps, and the power of mdfind is amazing. Granted, I’m not an expert user of reiserFS or ext3fs/ext4fs, etc., but for an out of the box user OS, it’s amazing.

So… I do love linux, and I still use it. But watch out saying its superior to OSX, because OSX is just a (very) different flavor of BSD. The only two ways I think that Linux is truly superior right now to OS X, is in that its free (as in speech) and free (as in beer), but that’s saying quite a bit (and the more draconian Apple becomes, the closer I am to ’switch’ing back).

By: Kenneth Finnegan

Kenneth Finnegan — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:08:11 +0000

Note on #4: Even if you can’t do everything from the command line, with X forwarding, you can run single GUI programs remotely, and it’ll be in it’s own window on your local desktop (assuming you’re on another computer with an X server). This is useful when you’re behind nasty firewalls (work/ school) or open access points, since you can run Firefox on a computer on your home network, but it’ll be on your local desktop (be it a little laggy, still better than an entire desktop).