75 replies to this topic

[lazlo falconi]

You may be interested in osalt.com then.

[Donkeymog]

Had my first major driver issue in the three years I've been using Linux. Around my girlfriend's house trying to print off flight tickets with her printer and Linux can't find any suitable drivers. Check the manufacturers website; printers are only supported on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OSX. Not even windows XP. Crazy stuff.

[Vicious Parker]

Civ 5 coming out on Linux made me remember just how much I want PC game publishers to support the platform. I've decided to run Linux Mint as my primary OS, and only use windows 8 for games. We will see how it goes.

I was surprised that 54 titles in my steam library are Linux compatible.

[Donkeymog]

Yeah, between Steam & Wine there aren't many games left on Windows that I miss, especially with XCOM arriving soon. Skyrim sure would be nice though.

I'm surprised that you favour Mint over Ubuntu. I haven't used Mint in years though, what are it's advantages

[Vicious Parker]

I really, really dislike unity. Otherwise, I might go with Ubuntu.

The main advantage that I am aware of is that mint comes with all sorts of media codecs and the like already installed. I remember it being pretty easy in Ubuntu, but why not make it easier?

Though, other than that and some cosmetic differences, they're virtually the same.

[Donkeymog]

Yeah, I always thought they were the same. I tried using the Gnome interface with Ubuntu recently, but it has memory leak issues with my nVidia card that made it unusable after a few hours. I liked it, but I didn't really see any improvement on Unity as far as usability was concerned and I really missed Unity's global menus. Every seems to hate the global menu thingy, but it really makes everything feel much less cluttered and saves on vertical space.

[Vicious Parker]

I know you're a fan of borderless fullscreen. How does it fare in Ubuntu? Though I've only tried with XCOM, it's so far a no-go on mint... which is heart breaking. Also, apparently, I can't alt-tab from X-Com when I have the controller set as the input device. Not cool.

[Donkeymog]

I know you're a fan of borderless fullscreen. How does it fare in Ubuntu? Though I've only tried with XCOM, it's so far a no-go on mint... which is heart breaking. Also, apparently, I can't alt-tab from X-Com when I have the controller set as the input device. Not cool.

 

Rest assured in Linux there will be a way to fix that and I won't rest until I've discovered it and posted it here.

[Vicious Parker]

Decided to give Ubuntu a go, because Mint and I haven't been getting along lately. Though I still dislike some aspects of Unity (seriously, just let people move the launcher to the bottom. I promise it won't hurt), Unity and Ubuntu in general are mostly rock solid stable. I'm impressed.

 

However, I am suffering from the same problems I always suffer from when I try to make the move to Linux: it just isn't a better experience than Windows. Even windows 8 (which I am running dual booted with Ubuntu). Seriously...

 

If we're looking purely at a default installation, Windows 8 boots up faster, and runs more smoothly than Ubuntu. The default window manager actually offers more options for customization, though fewer for organization. Windows 8 has better multi monitor support. And ironically, both Ubuntu and Windows 8 feature controversial interfaces that are intended to be used on touch screen devices.

 

But I keep going back because there's that niggling ideological part of me that really wants to see a competitive version of Linux for the desktop, and especially for gaming. Ubuntu is probably the closest so far.

[Donkeymog]

Install Gnome or KDE. The joy of Linux is that you can set your interface up pretty much however you want it.

 

I personally really like unity though. The reason the top panel won't budge is because when you fullscreen stuff the window toolbar merges with the panel, which I find really useful and tidy. If you're not happy with the level of customization unity provides install the unity tweak tool (click on the link and it'll install after you've entered your password).

 

I'm surprised Windows 8 boots faster, but then again I haven't used it at all. There could be a couple of factors slowing down your boot. If you have elected to encrypt your home directory it can take longer to mount the drive, that's just a limitation of choosing to have an encrypted hard drive.  You can try installing preload, which optimizes boot time each time you start so that it gets faster over time. Install it in terminal using:

sudo apt-get install preload

If you're comparing default installations you should probably factor in that all of the default ubuntu applications are superior to that of Windows (VLC instead of Windows Media Player, Firefox instead of IE, gedit instead of notepad, etc.)

 

The real advantage is having the linux terminal though. I think it's understandable to dread having to enter black consoles to do stuff if you're from a Windows background, but on Linux the terminal is incredibly fun to use once you get the hang of it.

 

Persevere!

[Vicious Parker]

Install Gnome or KDE. The joy of Linux is that you can set your interface up pretty much however you want it.

I've been playing with both lately. Gnome feels outdated, but I do love the level of customizability. KDE feels incrediby bloated and slow, though I know I could probably do some tweaking to prevent that. I have grown comfortable with most of Unity. It's just the panel that I want to move. Not the top panel, the launcher. I know it's a bit OS 10-like, but having the launcer on the bottom would make me happier. The window buttons on the left, and not being able to grab the title bar to drag a window are taking a bit of getting used to, but I probably won't miss them.

 

I have been using Unity Tweak Tool, and Compiz Config, and they are handy.

 

On a side note, Start 8 is a great program for not only making Windows 8 feeling more familiar, but more useful. There's a lot you can do with that little app.

 

I do agree the the default applications in Ubuntu are better than those of windows, but it's pretty easy to find free, sometimes open source, software for windows that will handle just about anything you might need to do. In fact, I use a lot of the same things.. Firefox, Filezilla, Libre Office, calibre, and of course Steam, are all part of both installations. (Though my goal is to eventually reduce Windows down to games only).

[lazlo falconi]

The main problem with linux is that a lot of the "creation" programs available for it feel half-finished, or otherwise just "not-quite-there-yet". GIMP is great, but it feels like an ugly, half-hearted Photoshop that doesn't even have the good graces to default to Photoshop's keyboard controls. Blender is great but compared to any other 3D animation program, it's a pain in the ass to use (Although they are making great strides to fix this lately). There are no animation suites, and LMMS... Does it even work yet?

 

Even for a desktop user, Firefox, Chromium and Opera don't seem quite as snappy and responsive as they are in Windows, all the offices suites available require Java, and you all know how that is, and even simple paint programs seem to never stack up against MS Paint. Plus video games, man. video games.

 

I love Linux, and I don't mean to criticize, I'm just kind of lamenting the sad state of affairs for one of the greatest operating systems around.

 

(Now, if we're talking about a good cli setup, yeah, Windows has nothing on irssi, cmus, links and vim)

[Donkeymog]

I've been playing with both lately. Gnome feels outdated, but I do love the level of customizability. KDE feels incrediby bloated and slow, though I know I could probably do some tweaking to prevent that. I have grown comfortable with most of Unity. It's just the panel that I want to move. Not the top panel, the launcher. I know it's a bit OS 10-like, but having the launcer on the bottom would make me happier. The window buttons on the left, and not being able to grab the title bar to drag a window are taking a bit of getting used to, but I probably won't miss them.

 

This may be the guide you're looking for.

 

I used to love the cairo dock before I used ubuntu. I used it on everything. The problem is that having the launcher at the bottom consumes vertical space, and I find that vertical space is more precious than horizontal space on widescreen monitors. It doesn't matter too much either way if you have the launcher auto-hide.

Here's some screenshots of my current setup:

 

 Screenshot from 2014-08-06 17:48:40.png   382.56K   0 downloads   Screenshot from 2014-08-06 17:48:48.png   233.18K   0 downloads

 

It's fairly basic unity set up, just with the numix icons.

 

I also suggest you check out variety, which is a neat program that enables you have to automatically changing desktop wallpapers.

[Monkeydog]

In response to Lazlo's remark on the Office suites. Have you used Libreoffice? It requires Java but is pretty good at not feeling bogged down by it. I think you can get it to run without Java too, it just requires it for some things.

[lazlo falconi]

Actually I was talking specifically about Libre Office.

[Monkeydog]

I've never had problems with it. OpenOffice and other things though I absolutely hate using.

[Vicious Parker]

I agree. I rarely have issues with Libre office, on windows or elsewhere. Though I also rarely use anything other than a word processor (In which case, downloading just Abiword seems to be the best choice).

[Donkeymog]

Yeah, I've been using libreoffice a while now and I haven't had any problems with it. Both Writer and Calc both do what they need to pretty well.

[lazlo falconi]

I don't have problems with them, except with how slow they are. Libre Office is actually exactly the same product as Open Office but with a few (Well, now many) updates between them, but it's the same core and I think anyone who says they had problems with OO but not LO is just making stuff up to join the Internet Hate Bandwagon™. 

[matrim]

Ubuntu works amazingly simple, it lacks some of the stability of other dists but it's still damn good, I preffered it before they changed to Unity or Gnome 3 since both feel alot like they are designed for handhelds.

 

I've used Chakra quite alot as well, it uses a similar package manager system as Ubuntu/Debian

 

 

And for creative software, well you can sue Wine and Winetools and you can run more or less any windows application in linux.

 

Anything from Notepad to Photoshop or even Games like Battlefield or back in the older days World of Warcraft

 

 

the newer versions of wine are quite autominus.

Simply running an installer exe file will launch it in Wine and install it in the Wine folderstructure, and the shortcuts will automatically be linked to run with Wine.

 

I did this with Spotify just the other week, since spotify linux version is somewhat ustable in it's current develoment state