Picking out the LinuxOS that is right for me

I

ir0n_ma1den

Weaksauce
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Oct 30, 2007
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Recently, I deleted a partition on my computer in order to resolve this problem unaware that it contains the install files for WinXP... oops...

Because of my hard drive problems (see above URL) I think I need to reformat my HDD and I would like to be free from WinOS. I've tried Ubuntu before on a ~6yr old system, but gave up because it wouldn't configure my wireless card. If I format my hard drive, I think I would like to give Linux another shot.

My question is, what is the best/most user friendly distro? Also one that is pleasing to the eye.

Here is what I do with my computer:
Internet
Gaming ( Battlefield 2, Armed Assault)
Photoshop
Fruity Loops 8 (a music production program)
listening to music
A/V splitting and merging
watching movies
Office work
IRC

thanks
 
Ubuntu is still one of the friendlier distributions around for users, as it tries to do many things for you to make your experience less painful. OpenSuSE is not bad for usability, I guess. PCLinuxOS is supposed to be pretty friendly too.

If your wireless card wasn't supported previously, it might be supported now out of the box, but without knowing what it is, can't really say.

Since most of your apps are not native to Linux environments, you'll have to use WINE to run most of them (or try to).

Internet - this works
Battlefield 2 - works through WINE
Armed Assault - does not work according to WINE database
Photoshop - CS2 works via WINE, and probably some older versions
Fruity Loops 8 - This apparently does not work according to WINE
Listening to music - whatever software you want
A/V splitting/merging - Depends on what you use now and if you can either use that in Linux, or find an alternative
Watching movies - whatever
Office work - whatever
IRC - whatever
 
My advice would just be to get a new wireless card, one that works with Linux. They're incredibly cheap now. I have a Ralink RT61 reference card, and it works great with Ubuntu, and is only like $20 shipped from newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833315041

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833158017R
(exact same card as above, but cheaper and the wire for the antenna is a bit shorter)

I have both of these cards, one in my main rig, and one in my HTPC and they are awesome.
 
a repack of Ubuntu is Linux Mint, it has improved wifi support and a few other tweaks that make a world of difference.
 
I honestly don't think Ubuntu is very pleasing to the eye. It's default Gnome theme is rather ugly, and Gnome itself is designed to be simple and easy to use, rather than pretty. If you go with KDE instead, you get pretty much the stock KDE theme, which has its own problems. OpenSuse is supposed to look a little bit better "out of the box". The good news is that you can tweak either desktop environment to make it look just the way you want it to. Take a look at the "Post a screenshot of your linux!" thread - people have set up their Linux desktops to look like Vista, OSX or completely unlike either OS.

You'll be able to use Linux for almost all things you listed above. The two problem areas are:

Games: Some OpenGL games are ported to Linux, but not nearly enough. I don't know if it's possible to run Windows games through virtualization at all. Even if it works, performance would probably suffer.

Music production: There's nothing like FL Studio, Reason or other easy to use DAW's for Linux. There's Ardour, but it's not as easy to use. I've read that it's even possible to run some Windows-only VST plugins under Linux via Wine, but performance and stability would suffer. You can check out http://ubuntustudio.org/, don't know if it's any good.

I've found hardware support of Ubuntu 8.04 to be excellent. It detected all the hardware in my laptop, inlcuding the Atheros wireless networking. I've also tried booting from the LiveCD on my desktop rig, and it detected everything. It's using a Realtek RTL8187-based USB wireless adapter. I had some problems controlling the volume and outputs of my Delta1010LT audio card, but I'm sure it's possible to solve. The card has eight separate analog outputs plus digital out, so it's a bit more tricky to configure than most other soundcards, even under Windows.

It's probably easiest if you dual-boot. Use Windows for gaming and music production, and use Linux for everything else. If you think dual-booting is a hassle, your best bet is sadly to stick with Windows until Linux has caught up in those two areas.
 
Because of my HDD problem I only have 18GB of free space. Is it possible to dual boot w/ this much space??

also, do you think that a linuxOS will detect all of my 300Gigs or does it have that problem that windows has were it only detects 128Gigs??

Could I use KDE w/ Ubuntu?

thanks
 
You can install Ubuntu and download the Kubuntu Desktop package, or you can install Kubuntu and later download the Ubuntu Desktop package if you want it. You can even use both desktop environments with the same installation - just choose which one to use when you log in. Most Linux users probably have at least KDE and Gnome installed, and quite a few also have additional "lightweight" environments installed.

Provided you have a backup of the entire drive: Install Ubuntu and in the wizzard, choose to have it use the entire harddrive. This should get rid of your old messed up NTFS partitions and hopefully give you back all harddrive space. The tricky part would be to install Windows *after* you have installed Linux. The easy way is to install Windows first and then Linux.

If you have a proper XP installation CD (not just an OEM recovery CD), the XP setup program also comes with a partition manager where you can erase all old partitions and create new ones. It's one of the steps when you select to install Windows XP clean. It doesn't allow you to resize partitions, though. If you delete your old partitions and then create a new one (don't worry about selecting a size, the Ubuntu setup program can resize the partition for you later), and do a "long" format, you should be able to reinstall XP and get back your harddrive space. Make sure you have an XP SP1 or SP2 CD, not an RTM one - RTM has problems with large harddrives.
 
Thanks for the advice JiimmiG, I think I want to do a proper XP installation and then setup a Ubunutu partition.

No, since I erased the XP partition on my HDD I don't think I would have a copy of XP.

But I remember seeing a free copy of XP w/o all the bloatware. I just can't find the link...
 
zaxour said:
My advice would just be to get a new wireless card, one that works with Linux. They're incredibly cheap now. I have a Ralink RT61 reference card, and it works great with Ubuntu, and is only like $20 shipped from newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833315041

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833158017R
(exact same card as above, but cheaper and the wire for the antenna is a bit shorter)

I have both of these cards, one in my main rig, and one in my HTPC and they are awesome.
Click to expand...

After reformatting my HDD I got real fed up with my WG111 POS so I did what you said and bouth the Edimax card, the one with the longer antenna. Hopefully this works...
 
wireless - you can run ndiswrapper which should allow your wireless car to run

I'd use kde, and I'd go openSuse or PCLinuxOS, skip the *buntu's if you're gonna go kde because it's the 2nd class citizen of the family.

I wouldn't drop the XP partition, it's always good to have just in case but I would shrink it and I would look into wmplayer or virtualbox at somepoint in the future for any critical XP apps.

instead of FL you could look at http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

Finally - pick a distro or 2 and then dl the livecd's and run them from the cdrom to see what they're like - your only problem will be no net with your wireless card
 
as a normal user, all you will basically see is either gnome or kde or xfce. or others too I guess.

So it comes down to which of those you prefer. In terms of what distro, I'd say it usually ends up being what people learned first. Since I first learned debian and its apt system, those are the type of distros I use and recommend. :)
 
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