I'm building a system, and I was wondering which OS you would recommend. The few restrictions are that it has to be relatively cheap, say free to $50 (American). I have a distrobution of Red Hat Linux 7.3 (I know it's a bit old, but it came free with the book) and one of Gentoo.
I don't know much about Linux, but am willing to learn, and have a little bit of experience with it. I like options. Did I mention that free is good?
Any advice would be appreciated, and it needn't be one of those two.
Last edited by Icarus; 07-11-2004 at 08:34 AM.
What are you looking to do, just general desktop tasks or something specific?
r1zeek is right, you need to know exactly what you want from an OS.
Pro's (for Linux).
---------------------
Cheap as the proverbial.
Huge amount of free, good quality software avaliable.
Highly customisable.
Enhanced performance over XP.
More stable/reliable than XP.
These are all advantages of ANY distro.
Con's (for Linux)
---------------------
Potentially steap learning curve.
Can be difficult to install and setup - ESPECIALLY GENTOO - avoid like the plague if you are new to linux.
Iffy hardware support.
Difficult to install some software i.e. dependancies, if you are a newbie.
Poor support for games.
No support for de rigeur apps like MS Office.
If you still want Linux i'd go for Ubuntu -if you're a newbie- as it's soooo easy to setup, it's comes with synaptic - so things like installation problems (due to failed dependancies) are not really an issue and it's very, very quick....
If you can't stomach the problems with linux, i'm affraid XP is the only other option.
SO for general Web/mail, word processing, MP3/DVD duties in Linux i'd go for Ubuntu second to that - Fedora Core 2....
Last edited by Red10; 07-11-2004 at 02:26 PM.
mandrake is n00b friendly. Install wizard is good.
Twigman
Originally Posted by Twigman
Forgot about Mandrake - scratch FC2 then - Mandrake it is!
red10 has summed it up pretty well
whatever happens, _ALWAYS_ get the very latest version of something. red hat 7.3 is less than completely useless - trust me, i'm paid as a redhat 7.2 admin.
Pretty much, with a bit of programming thrown in.
For a while we had a dual boot, so I'm not a utter noob, but just barely.
Last edited by Icarus; 08-11-2004 at 03:02 AM.
you need to decide whether you want an easy off-the-shelf style distribution, or one which is more rewarding if a little steeper to start with (such as debian or gentoo). i run debian on my desktop boxes at home and at work, for the flexability and effortless administration
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