I just thought I'd weigh in (as a dedicated Linux user) on the discussion.
My goal is not to heat up a debate, but to shed some additional light.
Ubuntu is a pretty danged cool distribution. I've played with it some, but
haven't implemented it on any of our machines (we have 6 at home). The
biggest thing that slows it down is that it was designed to boot from a CD
on any machine without needing to be installed on that machine. That piles
a ton of overhead processing that systems that need to be installed don't
have to deal with.
The difference in the memory requirements that David Councill noted is a
result of the flexibility that most Linux distributions provide. From a
single set of CDs you can install anything from a single-purpose machine
built around a 300 mhz Celeron to a huge server providing a backend to 1000
thin clients, or anything in between. Generally, if you want a really
pretty graphical interface with ALL the bells and whistles (video-editing
anyone?), you're looking at 500 meg of ram.
Just about all Linux distributions have made huge advances in the past few
years, particularly with the advent of the 2.6 version kernel. If you had a
bad experince a few years ago, it might be worth another look.
Allen's wondering why so much is written about using the command line
editor. It's a function of a couple factors: First, most of the folks
writing the instructions are very familiar with the command line. Second,
it's an easier way to write instructions. (Though it looks like gibberish,
telling someone to "Type 'sudo yum install --fix-missing mythtv <return>'"
is a lot easier than walking them through the graphical tools to do the same
thing.)
That brings up another point, for most distributions the need to compile a
program after downloading it is pretty limited unless you are doing
something unusual, or bleeding-edge. The command I used in my example above
will install (on many distributions) a suite of about a dozen applications
that together make up a complete Digital Video Recorder and home
entertainment system. You still CAN download the source code for all the
pieces and compile them (if you want to edit the code to make it do
something else), but you really don't need to.
In case anyone's asking, what do I use? Windows 2000 at work, because
that's what we're requied to use. We have a couple of Win98 machines at
home to run an obscure Windows-only application and kids educational games.
Everything else at home is Fedora Core (lots of features for daily general
use), or some flavor of Debian (snappy performance on small, old, machines).
Feel free to ask me Linux questions off-list.
Chris K.
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