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Re-exploring Linux after ~15 years & even back then I didn't use it all that much. Man has it changed. I threw Ubuntu on a disc to play around with it. I only spent 10 minutes clicking around just to see what was up & I know I've got a lot more digging to do. I know Drew is obviously a fan from his avatar, anyone else? Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc? So far I'm not all that impressed. The general first impression was like the massive downgrade from XP to Vista, not that Win7 should be winning any prizes. Any of the other platforms worth trying?

The nice thing about Linux is you're not tied to any one graphical interface. Ubuntu defaults to Gnome, with this new Unity crap. The other most popular one is KDE, and a third is Xfce. Some people have packaged these together with Ubuntu as a new distribution (Kubuntu and Xubuntu, respectively), so you can download those disks and play around. Maybe one of those is more to your liking.

I use Fluxbox as the window manager, and my distribution of choice is Gentoo, for what it's worth. But it tends to have a steep learning curve. I've heard good things about Mint as a user-friendly distribution, but never tried it.

Aw yeah.

I'm running Ubuntu at work and I loaded my kids' shared computer with it.
It works great. I also have a MacBook Pro for work and it is by far the most unstable POS that I own. I actually avoid using it.

Microsoft does one thing a hell of a lot better than both and that is Dev Tools. Otherwise, I don't miss Windows at all and would change everything over if I could run Tradestation on Linux (I know you can run a VM but it's not what I want to do).

Oh, and I worked at Microsoft for a long time.

BDawg wrote:Microsoft does one thing a hell of a lot better than both and that is Dev Tools.

Maybe you are writing for the wrong platform. Heck, I'm almost happy flipping switches. Seriously, for Linux I'm happy with vi or nano and gcc all from a shell. For micros, you're pretty much dependent on whatever the manufacturer provides, but Microchip MPLAB X is sweet. The C compilers have gotten pretty good these days.

Nah, I pretty much agree with you, though I'm a sucker for the Embarcadero stuff - Delphi!

Thanks guys. I just haven't had much time to play with it yet. Ubuntu probably isn't the right one but I had to start somewhere. Being 'the most popular' could swing it either way, good or bad, but it's still the reason I started with it first. In general, I'm not much of a fan of 'user-friendly' anything. It always is marketed as nice, but it seems to end up as swill for the masses of idiots out there. Look at Microsoft's decline over the past decade plus. Vista & Win8 are shining examples. I won't even get into how much the iPhone/Droid crap has pissed me off as a long time BlackBerry user. My plan used to be affordable.

Guy at work swears by Linux Mint at http://www.linuxmint.com/

I dropped Ubuntu because I can not stand Unity. I'm using Mint as my desktop now as well.