What's your favourite Linux distro?

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About $100-300 you could spend on other things shoud you have to wipe your drive and reinstall your operating system. --I'm assuming that the computer that you have did not come with OS Media, as is common these days.

And Linux is far more secure. Hacking Windows is easy, that's why it has so many viruses - every single virus you get means your computer's been hacked.

Linux allows you to do cool things that Windows can't, its not locked down like Windows and if there is something you are not happy with you are then free to change it.

I'm just curious about Linux, I'm not bashing it at all.
I'm thinking about installing it on my current computer after I get a new one.
The new box will be a win7 box though. btw, I assemble my own computers.

To me it really seems like 6 of one a half dozen of another, sure, I could save a little money by not buying the OS, but that's about the only advantage I see. Security isn't a big issue for me, I haven't been hacked, I'm the only one who gets physically near my computer. and I RARELY get viruses. A major part of virus protection is smart surfing. I don't screw with things off the internet that could be potential threats. It's hard to explain, but I have a sense for if I am treading into risky territory.

So, this "WINE" you guys speak of, is there any kind of a performance hit? How compatible is it, will I be able to play most windows games with it?

I really just use windows out of habit, it's a familiar environment.

It depends on what you're doing, I guess. I've never seen any use for Windows as anything other than a game platform, and keeping a partition of it on my hard drive as a toy was just too much hassle. Linux is a lot more capable (and easier to use) for scientific purposes. Programming is easier to set up, things like Octave, all the GNU utilities like ssh, vim, bash, etc are more readily available. Linux generally tends to be more stable. There's the ease of use factor (and I will never back down from this: Linux is hands-down easier to set up and use than Windows) and, for me at least, the familiarity.


It varies from program to program. WINE gets tested a bit more rigorously on games, so a lot of the high-profile games (WoW, Starcraft, etc) allegedly run well with it. I haven't used it much; having never really been a Windows user I never got dependent on particular Windows programs.

I've noticed that Wine tends to load programs a bit slower than Windows, and there is a slight perfomance hit with some stuff. The only program that I've found to be almost completely unusable is a Multitrack recording program called SAWStudio, which is much differant from many other Audio production programs in the fact that it is coded entirely in Assembler, and relies mostly on it's own internal API's. What renders the program unusable is the GUI of the program has refresh rate issues that render the program unusable, even though it is perfectly able to track and process Audio Data.

Other than that, Steinberg Wavelab works fine with it, as does Office 2k3, and Photoshop. VST plugins that need the MS C++ runtime environment as well as MS .Net work fine once these are downloaded and installed. You should have no problem installing DirectX 9.xx as well, and playing games that rely on it, though newer games that rely on DirectX 10 and greater will most likely be problematic.

The 1.3.xx series of WINE is a stable Beta with some added functionality over the 1.2.xx release.

WINE works very poorly with iTunes I have found. There are alternatives on Linux for managing your music and even syncing with most mp3 players. Unfortunately, only iTunes can seem to sync properly with an iPhone or iPod Touch. So I still keep a Windows partition for the rare occasions when I need to sync my iPhone. And some other small things to. And as a backup in case I do something to completely destroy my Linux environment. Personally I'd recomend keeping a Windows partition--I've never found it much of a hassle and it provides a backup platform.

Yeah I was never able to get iTunes to run properly under Linux when I've used it in the past. Never tried any of the alternatives with my iPhone though.

The gap has closed a fair bit though. Win7 is a lot more secure than previous versions. When you consider that relatively insecure XP still has over 30% of the market, no wonder Windows is target so much compared to Linux, OSX.

I remember an interview with Charlie Miller where IIRC he said that finding exploits in Linux is no harder and could even be easier than OSX. The main reason being many vulnerabilities are in the browsers, flash etc which most are used on all major OS's these days.

Windows 7 is still suspectable to viruses, and is therefore easily hackable.

Charlie Miller is right, of course - browser exploits, Flash exploits, and so on can effect any OS. But that's not enough to install a virus. Most of those exploits are like gateways into a system. After that, you need additional exploits, usually at least one privilege escalation exploit, to actually do anything to a system.

On Windows, however, you usually don't, because of the system's design. And as long as you keep everything up to date, your UNIX system will be very secure as a result. Also, if you use NoScript, and only allow sites you trust to run scripts or Flash elements, you're also very safe from anything browser-based.

In fact, there was once a Facebook worm which used Java to install a virus on computers. At least, it did on Windows. On OS X and Linux systems, it couldn't do anything without authorisation even if the Java exploit existed on the target system.

The real security threats are phishing schemes and browser exploits that grab your financial/credit card information. Susceptibility to those is a function of user stupidity more than anything else.

Back to the topic/poll, I did install a Linux Mandrake once (french company distro).
Because of the lack of support for drivers (that was back in 2000 I guess), I didn't go far.
Then in 2004 I met a sysadmin IRL who praised Debian so well that I had a go at Woody.
Now I would like to go all over and set-up a proper PC with rooting, firewall, apache and samba services, and all the likes.
Debian looks really "sturdy" and stable, that's what I'm looking for in my case (altough heard of FreeBSD... another story)

There is one very major virus associated with Linux.

It infects the users themselves.

It is called...


... wait for it...



... Linux!



(Once it has wormed its way into your brain, you cannot return to a sub-standard operating system - ever. There is no cure.)

Very relevant to the thread I think

You should give the link, so you can see the hover text... http://xkcd.com/272/

Oh of course, the mouseover text is as good as the comic. Apologies.