Please recommend a "Windows like" UNIX flavour

[The Natural Philosopher]

xfce for those wot likes it

[meow2222]

That's the dream version. In reality its too often: trawl thru the many listed apps to find that none does what you need or less often install something to find your install is then royally screwed. Or find that because you've had the distro less time than the average new computer is kept, some dipstick's wiped the entire repository. Thats why I dropped mint.

Not when the functionality you want isnt in the repository. This is the limiting factor with many distros.

Note to linux newbs: trying to run win apps under linux is something newbies do too often. Wherever possible use linux apps, it works much better. Use wine as a last option.

The other note for newbs is understand what mounting a drive means when you shift to linux. Despite these 2 differences with windows, overall its a vastly better experience. I wouldnt even consider going back to win.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not these days with Mint.

99% of the time what you want is in the distro and works.

It certainly doesn't screw up the installation. My main reason for going TO mint was that debian was years behind the latest apps and I ended up compiling latest and then latest libs and they DID screw up the install. Not with mint. Its near the leading edge.

[Windmill]

A Dremel maybe?

[Windmill]

The latest Ubuntu, and no doubt other distros, seems pretty good at recognising peripherals. Such as a DVB-T dongle and a soft modem which would have required a lot of DIY to get working when I used earlier versions.

But as others have pointed out, nowadays you can *try* most Linux systems without touching your existing system at all, by running (rather slowly) from a 'live' CD or DVD, which means that apart from maybe using any existing swap space, which doesn't usually hold files or anything permanent, on your hard disk, nothing is touched and you can reboot your old system after trying out the Linux one.

After booting from a CD or DVD, Ubuntu for one gives you the option to only try it rather than installing it; Debian does the same.

[Windmill]

Is it that bad? Who do you have for seconds? :-)

[Windmill]

Amen to that. I've never used Windows to any noticeable extent, but I've been around computers for longer than I care to admit, and I know how much of a hassle it is for most of us to switch to something new which can sometimes be utterly different. (For those few giants who say they can read a few hundred megabytes of documentation and immediately be completely up to speed on a new system, it may be easy - if they're telling the truth, which I suppose may be the case for individuals radically cleverer than mere mortals like myself).

So in short, follow the old adage: if it ain't broke don't fix it. But be prepared for the day when it *is* broke.

If somone throws out an old PC (I've rescued a couple from the kerb!) and it is more-or-less operational without much expenditure, try running Linux on it.

That way you don't even have to learn how to dual-boot.

And Linux is often quite fast on an old machine. Comparatively speaking.

[Windmill]

A virtualized XP can see an ext4 file system?

[djc]

Good, I moved to Xubuntu when Ubuntu started to get complicated and we-know-better-than-you about everything, I am begining to think that about Xubuntu now.

>

[Windmill]

I don't know if it is still available from O'Reilly, but 'Unix in a Nutshell' used to be a pretty good reference for Linux.

Forces you to think about the underlying basics, but isn't that how you learn?

Nothing about GUIs of course.

[Windmill]

Did you ask the Wine developers?

That's the "You don't own what you bought from us" business model. Maybe OK for giant corporations who can negotiate special terms, but I can't see it getting any long-term traction with private individuals.

[News]

In message , Tim Lamb writes

I'm with you, Tim. I am confident I can live without any of my apps, by finding replacements, except Turnpike, which is why I'm still running an XP machine. I know people have managed to run Turnpike on W7 machines by using a virtual thingy but that is too scary to contemplate.

Yes, I know I could ditch Turnpike, but, having used Agent and, more recently, Thunderbird, I just cannot imagine life without Turnpike.

[Mike Barnes]

As a long-term Turnpike user recently converted to Thunderbird, can I ask exactly what it is you couldn't imagine life without? I find that Thunderbird has some irritations that I can live with, and to make up for that, some much better features. The only thing I *really* miss about Turnpike is its 100% bombproof stability.

[Jethro_uk]

That was when I really saw how far Linux had come. My brother visited a few years ago, and happened to have his laptop which was running Ubuntu (with the really snazzy desktop extensions - Compiz). He downloaded an image, burned it to DVD, and booted my machine with it, which found the network card and connection and proceeded to give me access to the net. Without a single file being transferred.

I wonder how much of the collapse of PC sales is down to people being able to press old boxes into service by running a *nix flavour, rather than buying a new one ?

[Jethro_uk]

If you are a *little* nerdy or techy, then install "Webmin". It's a browser-based management tool. It'll let you set up file shares and manage your machine remotely.

[Adam Funk]

USB-controlled but mains-powered, of course.

[Gazz]

Well, there is the USB chainsaw:

[cl]

mutt for stability, it stays up as long as my xubuntu system, days, weeks, months even.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , News writes

Lots of advice on demon.ip.support.turnpike. You'll have to search back a bit.

may help.

One workaround is to revert to turnpike 5.02. There are some copies available.

[tony sayer]

Well if you can't then thats no use to man nor beast:(....