Nicely said, guy ! Thanks a lot ! Since many years I think exactly that, and I didn't know how to express it. Next time I will have to use simple words for explainint the difference between Crosoft and Unix I will say : "cheap coffe vs real coffee"!

heres my linux story.

i am quite a young person [17] but have been around computers for quite some time. as my parents ran a business they had to have accounting PCs and i always used to play on them. mostly just simple games and the like. we also got the internet early on but that was back when the net was a bit rubbish for media etc so we didnt use it much. so i was always using computers.

then i found a very simple book on html in my school libary. as i had notepad at home i started making websites. so from html i knew a bit about coding. time passed and i got my own computer and other things happened. then one of my family friends introduced me to the other side of computing. he was doing proper programming and learning how to make simple games in visual basic. [thats proper coding to me!] he also showed me qbasic on an old win 3.1 computer we had lying about. i played with that and even made a few text based games.but i soon got bored and went outside and played in the woods or something.

the next time he came down he brought a cd with certain goodies on it. number one was firefox. number two was a crack of flash 5 but that is fairly unrelated. firefox was open source and i liked more and more about it as i found out. i had heard of linux but knew very little. i started to find out about it. then a friend in my maths group started really installing linux. he had decided on gentoo! i liked the idea of fast and cared little about easy [how hard could it be!]. so i installed that on an old 98 pc we had lying about. but it was networkless.

recently i felt i really needed linux for security and ease of working with ftp and web hosting. so i installed a kubuntu system on another old pc. that was incredibally easy [especially after learning through gentoo!] recently i am reinstalling windows so i took the oppitunity to safely partition and i am now working in kubuntu as a dual boot on my main pc. and with that decent spec it flies.

future things are going to be possibly a gentoo install on this good pc, and definatly a linux fileserver from random old parts. however i am afraid i may leave all that behind as i intend to get a mac next upgrade so i will have all the advantages of unix on a flash, supported and expensive machine.

p.s. thanks for all the advice so far i have recieved about linux from these forums.

p.p.s xboxrulz - i bumped into a post by you on another linux forum somewhere today when i needed help. and it was the only reply to the topic that made sence, thanks for that.

Well, a few years ago I never even knew what "Linux" was, let alone how powerful it is. It all started on a forum (well, a PHP-Nuke site I found) and this one user was helping me with something. He sent me the file as a .tar.gz file and I was like, wtf is that??!?! how do I open it?!? and then he repiled with "oops... I forgot that everyone doesn't use linux". After that, I googled Linux (this was also back when I was new to computers and was learning their full power... at this time I couldn't tell a graphics card from a NIC) and found out that it was a free and open source operating system. If my computer wasn't junk at the time and if I would have had broadband, I would have downloaded and installed it. It wasn't until I got signed up for a Novell/IBM Linux conference. That's when I got my first distro, SuSE Standard/Enterprise Server 8. When I installed it, I was impressed! Of course, the install didn't even last a week. But then later on (like a few years) I got broadband and my computer knowledge has GREATLY improved. I like SuSE but for some reason it won't install properly on the machine I have. But Fedora Core 5 works wonderfully! Last summer I was working with Fedora Core 4 for a "intranet" project for my school... you know, getting the whole server working and such. But I've tried everything from Fedora Core to Red Hat 9... But I'm stuck with Fedora Core 5. Now, if my laptop would install Linux, I'd have it on there too, but it doesn't so it runs MS Windoze...

But ever since I moved to Linux, I've found the environment to be very adapting... if there is software you need, just open a terminal > yum install SOFTWARE-NAME > Enter > Downloads & Installs! No need to scavenge the web, download, run the installer, then have it ready for use... Plus, the way Microsoft has been getting lately, it's another reason to slap them in the face and move to Linux. There are no "upgrade fees" to upgrade your OS, there are no viruses, spyware or adware... It's a great world.

[N]F

np, and good to hear that my answers were useful, o and which forums is that (I'm in so many forums, I lose track on who I respond to:P)

xboxrulz

I haven't completely switched to linux, because of my favorite games and my limited RAM. But I am planning to upgrade my RAM soon and install cedega on my linux. Then I may totally switch to linux. By the way I am using ubuntu this OS is simply cool.

its was the forums for knoppix i believe. it was just a question about root passwords and using super user. i didnt understand that the password needed to be set, etc.

The short answer: Windows annoyed me.

I was fine with Windows 98 and 2k Pro.

Then we got XP. It just annoys me.
I swear that half the things on Windows XP are there just to annoy you! I really hate the message that comes up when you're in the middle of a really good game of Civ 4 saying that your "Virtual Memory is low and windows is increasing it's free space" I really hate that. Then you have to wait 5 minutes for the game to start working again because it takes ages to bring it up again and ages after that for the virtual memory to have some free space.
At the moment the paging file is at 2 GB just so I don't get that annoying message!

Right now I am on a laptop that dual boots Ubuntu linux and Windows ME, which is much much better than XP but not as good as 2k.

Soon I will get rid of Windows and just run Linux when I get the modem working, and then when we get broadband I will download some other Linuxes instead of ordering Ubuntu, even though it is free.

The start menu in XP also annoy me. I want Computer, Documents and eveything else on the desktop, NOT IN THE START MENU! It is also slow.

sonoftheclayr, remember, most of your games won't work on Linux unless you get Cedega from Transgaming which is $30 per month for 3 months.

(yes, I know it's subscription based, but it runs some of your games; sometimes even better than on Windows .)


xboxrulz

I'm thinking about using linux for a server computer because i know it is so much more stable than windows and almost all servers run on linux. Does anyone know what distro of linux would be good for a few game servers, web and irc servers? Currently i'm looking at fedora which was the old red hat distro.

-hellfire

I started learning linux because it was different and sooner or later I'd need to learn it for my career field. I started with redhat 7.2. I dont use it as my primary OS, though at some point I might move completely over and run windows in vmware. For the most part, I think windows still has a better IDE than linux.

I don't like how some distros have agendas, like ubuntu.