(no subject)

[bubosquared]

I'm halfway planning to refomat my HD and install Linux/Unix/whatever, basically, an open source OS. Could anyone please tell me if this is a good idea for me? Ta.

Comments

[evilbliss.livejournal.com]

Ummmm. I have Unix. I can tell you that it's pretty useless unless you plan on sharing large amounts of data on a network or sharing programs on a network.

[sonatine.livejournal.com]

First off, if you're going to do this, I am going to tell you right now: BACK EVERYTHING THE FUCK UP. Sorry for the caps, but I only partially did, and the Windows partition on the hard drive I shared the Linux partition with crashed. Bye bye data.

Secondly, you might want to check the compatibility of your sound and graphics cards and modem with Linux. Some don't.

Thirdly, some flavors of Linux are going to be harder to install than others. Mandrake is more user-friendly than say, Slackware. And if shit goes wrong, you have to be prepared to do stuff at the command prompt rather than the happy little Windows-like graphic interface. But otherwise, I'd say go for it. Or back up Windows and see how they coexist.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

or, y'know, don't use linux. Almost everyone I know prefers FreeBSD, having used both of them. (I leave the geeking over these things to my SO, because he enjoys it so much, so I've never used linux, just FreeBSD.)

I should point out that I'm biased here, because I know half of the FreeBSD core team, a fair number of the active committers, and my SO is the guy who makes sound work. So. :)

and there is a rat about to leap onto the keyboard, so I'm going to go before he does.

-Kris
(bill! No! Leave my keyboard alone!)