Which distribution for a newbie?

Capt'n Midnight

bw wrote: »

I have Ubuntu on the netbook, haven't upgraded that since 10.04.

Don't upgrade.

Unity is just head wrecking. It's a touchscreen user interface. On a desktop you spend ages scrolling.

oscarBravo

I really can't stand unity, but I'm surprisingly fond of Gnome Shell 3. I can't quite figure out why since they're so similar in many ways, but I just instantly "get" GS3 whereas I find myself swearing constantly when I'm forced to use Unity.

Jagera

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Don't upgrade.

Unity is just head wrecking. It's a touchscreen user interface. On a desktop you spend ages scrolling.

I actually did upgrade back when 10.10 came out. Within about an hour, I had decided to go back to 10.04 and the reason was 100% due to Unity. I'm happy with 10.04 on the netbook, it's a nice little interface.

D'Agger

Hey lads,

Have a spare PC at home and I'm going to set it up as a study PC for reading files, doing a small bit of browsing etc., however, the main things I want to try with it are messing around with Unix/Linux and trying out different software programs

I've tried out ubuntu using wubi on win7 on my laptop and liked it but would you recommend an earlier version to cut my teeth?

My plan is to go up through a few different versions, get a general feel for them, try out a few things and move up.

What would you recommend? Thanks in advance btw

Johnboy1951

PaulieC wrote: »

Hey lads,

Have a spare PC at home and I'm going to set it up as a study PC for reading files, doing a small bit of browsing etc., however, the main things I want to try with it are messing around with Unix/Linux and trying out different software programs

I've tried out ubuntu using wubi on win7 on my laptop and liked it but would you recommend an earlier version to cut my teeth?

My plan is to go up through a few different versions, get a general feel for them, try out a few things and move up.

What would you recommend? Thanks in advance btw

It would be like starting off with Win 3 then putting Win 95 & Win 98 & Win2k & Vista and Win 7 on in sequence (yeah I know I skipped WinME )

I don't understand why you would want to do that.

I would recommend you download a few ISOs from different distros, burn them and use them live to get a feel of which you prefer, then install that.

All Linux distros are essentially the same underneath .... they take slightly different approaches to some things, and some include things that others don't - by default. Those things not on the CD by default can usually be installed after installation of the OS.

D'Agger

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

It would be like starting off with Win 3 then putting Win 95 & Win 98 & Win2k & Vista and Win 7 on in sequence (yeah I know I skipped WinME )

I don't understand why you would want to do that.

I would recommend you download a few ISOs from different distros, burn them and use them live to get a feel of which you prefer, then install that.

All Linux distros are essentially the same underneath .... they take slightly different approaches to some things, and some include things that others don't - by default. Those things not on the CD by default can usually be installed after installation of the OS.

Well not quite that far back now tbf

I just want to get a feel for Linux - If somebody asked me where to start with Windows I'd say XP, then 7, reason being, sometimes when people look at 7 they realize how to fix an issue by going on something they may have picked up with xp - at least I have in my experience.

I've never really had any exposure to Linux so was looking to be offered a few suggestions as to which would be good versions to learn on so as to build up my experience.

Thanks for the reply btw

Johnboy1951

PaulieC wrote: »

Well not quite that far back now tbf

I just want to get a feel for Linux - If somebody asked me where to start with Windows I'd say XP, then 7, reason being, sometimes when people look at 7 they realize how to fix an issue by going on something they may have picked up with xp - at least I have in my experience.

I've never really had any exposure to Linux so was looking to be offered a few suggestions as to which would be good versions to learn on so as to build up my experience.

Thanks for the reply btw

I would think that a new user of Win would be better off going straight in to Win 7 and start learning from there.
IMO, the same applies to Linux.
I see no point in learning how things worked before they were changed ...... the things that are the same or similar can be learned on the newer OS too.

Some distros have several Desktop Environments which all behave somewhat differently from the user perspective.
At the same time, the underlying Linux OS is the same for each.

So, from a user point of view maybe it is the desktop Environments that you need to check out first.
For instance I use PCLinuxOS which makes available the distro with the following user interfaces .....

KDE4
Gnome
Xfce
LXDE
Openbox
and a couple of other minor window managers.

They can be had from here
http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/pclinuxos/live-cd/

and the support forum is here
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php

PCLinuxOS is different to most distros, in that it is continually updated ..... OS and apps ...... so if you installed in 2010, keep updated, then you would now be running the very latest. They release 'snapshot' ISOs so that new installs do not have huge updates ... maybe every three months or so.

Other distros take a different approach (most of them I think), in that they release a new ISO every six months or so, which are designed to be reinstalled to bring everything up to date.

The main difference for the user is the environment ..... once you get under that there is little difference between the distros.

Most of all ...... have fun! ..... regardless which distro and what DE you choose ...... and don't be afraid to try several to find your own preference

D'Agger

Cheers man

My view on xp still stand though you won't change me!! :pac:

Johnboy1951

PaulieC wrote: »

Cheers man

My view on xp still stand though you won't change me!! :pac:

human 19

PaulieC wrote: »

Well not quite that far back now tbf

I just want to get a feel for Linux - If somebody asked me where to start with Windows I'd say XP, then 7, reason being, sometimes when people look at 7 they realize how to fix an issue by going on something they may have picked up with xp - at least I have in my experience.

I've never really had any exposure to Linux so was looking to be offered a few suggestions as to which would be good versions to learn on so as to build up my experience.

Thanks for the reply btw

If you look in a good magazine store for Linux Format magazine, the normally have a cd with a coouple of "live" operating systems (or "distros" as they call them). You can then run them by booting from the CD drive witout having to install them on to the computer. A great way of testing various ones out. Keep in mind that no installed software, updates etc is saved. To save your workings you could install to an 8GB usb stick.assuming your PC can boot from a USB stick. 8GB is perfectly adequate for a distro.

I found before that after installing some of the non-standard (Mint, Ubuntu,Fedora etc.) I could not get into the Graphical User Interface after trying to boot into it. That included PClinux unfortunately. So now I tend to stick to the mainstream ones.

I dont know why some distros have this problem and not others.

For a lot of info and reviews on different distros..check out www.distrowatch.com

D'Agger

For me I like the change in GUI - I've installed Fedora and while it isn't as stylish as Win 7 I still think it looks very sharp

I'd be looking into getting used to the GUI and troubleshooting admin style issues others would have with it so might look into a few Linux admin guides for Fedora etc.

I work in IT so I'd like to be able to put down on my CV that I'm comfortable with Linux and administrative setups etc. - if that makes sense

human 19

When I said I could not get into the GUI I meant literally!
X doesnt work and I end up with black screen.
Personally I prefer KDE but also use Gnome as cant get 3D accelleration to work in KDE so use gnome for some games (ATI Radeon 4350).

Problem with gnome is that the mobile broadband connection keeps dropping every 20 mins or so which doesnt happen with KDE

joezie

I would definitely recommend Ubuntu!

have been using it for about 8 years now, and it's awesome.

Yes, the new user interface is different and takes some getting used to, but it's actually loads of fun.

and... it's SO stable!

it's just silly to use windows or even a mac, and pay a fortune for (quite similar) stuff you can get for free.

h57xiucj2z946q

http://biebian.sourceforge.net/

D'Agger

Camilla Mealy Signal wrote: »

http://biebian.sourceforge.net/

That's surely another sign of the apocalypse

jozi

Wondering if you guys can point me towards a distro for me.

I decided a few weeks ago after the parents complaining about their pc being slow I'd install a distro on it, after some searching for parent friendly distro's I ended up with Mint 13 (Kubuntu looks good for myself as well). Finally got round to installing it today and it seems like my parents might manage fine with it.

This got me thinking a bit more about running a distro on my own desktop but I have a few questions related to hardware and other things.

In the past I've tried to run a distro or two and found I had trouble because I had a ati gfx card. I'm using quite and old card at the moment (ati x800xl) which I probably won't replace till next year. Has linux support for ati gotten better, am I likely going to run into problems?

I've got a creative sound blaster xfi elite pro with the break out box, I'd love to have this running properly as I have the pc wired into my receiver for surround sound. I'm going to go with the assumption that it will work and is fully supported? I found creative drivers for linux but no idea how good they are. I've also just found out about Ubuntu Studio, would this be ideal to run with the xfi card?

To complicate it more I use a few adobe programs, photoshop, indesign, but mostly lightroom. While I don't think these are available for linux, I did find someone running a virtual os (windows 7) so he can run his adobe programs. How hard is this to setup and get running, is there a big impact to system performance running a virtual box?

Finally I want something that looks pretty and flashy but not tacky Better than windows, something like this or this

Any recommendation?

LiamOSullivan

I can only really give any input on bits of that, but here goes.

jozi wrote: »

In the past I've tried to run a distro or two and found I had trouble because I had a ati gfx card. I'm using quite and old card at the moment (ati x800xl) which I probably won't replace till next year. Has linux support for ati gotten better, am I likely going to run into problems?

As far as support goes, Ubuntu is one of the better distros. My recommendation would be to boot a live CD of Ubuntu and see if it gets detected. I think the correct command to check out that sort of stuff is
# lspci
so you could run that in the live Ubuntu and see if it picks up your card.

There are other distros out there with more up-to-date kernels, but those are much more complicated if you're only starting up.

jozi wrote: »

To complicate it more I use a few adobe programs, photoshop, indesign, but mostly lightroom. While I don't think these are available for linux, I did find someone running a virtual os (windows 7) so he can run his adobe programs. How hard is this to setup and get running, is there a big impact to system performance running a virtual box?

Setting up a windows virtualbox is very easy(The hardest part is getting a legal copy:rolleyes:). I set up a Windows XP one the other day, and while I didn't time it, it took me only one cup of tea to install it; I don't imagine W7 being much worse.
As far as performance goes, you can usually choose the resources you'll allocate to it, so you can give it quite a bit of your system resources. It's not as quick as booting the OS itself, but for most tasks it's fine. I've never actually used any of those adobe programs, but they'd have to be very heavy to not work nicely in a virtual machine.

jozi wrote: »

Finally I want something that looks pretty and flashy but not tacky Better than windows, something like this or this

If I'm not mistaken, both of those were Gnome2, but fairly heavily customised, which is a shame. Gnome2 development has ceased if I remember correctly, which is annoying, because Gnome2 was nice.
There are still ways to use Gnome2, but I'd advise against it unless you're reasonably confident of what you're doing.

Bodhi Linux is, in my experience, the distro to go for if you want a reasonable amount of simplicity and awesome looks. (They even have a Desktop of the Week page). It's a massive mindfeck for the first few hours using it because it behaves fairly weird, but once you figure out where the settings for everything are it gets fairly nifty. The only worry I'd have recommending it is that it's based off a fairly old Ubuntu release, and their new release is only in the alpha stage.

Other than that, have a look at normal Ubuntu, normal Ubuntu with the Gnome Shell(Looks something like this out of the box) and Linux Mint(Never used it, but keep hearing good things).

Mr. CooL ICE

Noob here. Only used two builds a few years ago; Fedora on college computer (i.e. no admin access) and a little Ubuntu on a friends computer. Found both fine to use.

I have two desktops; My main PC which is mainly for general usage, games and a little development (and has a legal Windows copy), and my media PC/server which has +2TB worth of media files and is hooked up to my TV (not legal Windows copy).

After reading through this thread, Mint seems to be the easiest out of the box to set up compared to Ubuntu in the 2009ish posts. Has this changed? I looked up Ubuntu 12 and it looks pretty damn user friendly now. It has what looks like an android-type app marketplace which sounds like any codecs Mint had that Ubuntu didn't would be easily retrievable. Is this correct?

On my main PC, I would like to dual-boot and install a distribution that would run Eclipse for Android development. Does anyone have experience with Android dev on Ubuntu or other linux distributions? Would there be any problem getting Eclipse to detect my test phone (Galaxy s1)? Would it need drivers?

On my media PC/server I have 2GB which is sluggish with Win7 and am too poor to get more RAM, so I would install Ubuntu as a main OS. This PC has an obscure small profile MSI graphics card, but I only intend the PC to be used to play media files. Would installing Ubuntu be suitable to be a media server for other PCs (Windows) in the house? Would the obscure graphics card have trouble being detected by Ubuntu? Would 2GB RAM have any effect on the speed of Ubuntu 12?

Sorry for longwinded post

BopNiblets

LordChessington wrote: »

After reading through this thread, Mint seems to be the easiest out of the box to set up compared to Ubuntu in the 2009ish posts. Has this changed? I looked up Ubuntu 12 and it looks pretty damn user friendly now. It has what looks like an android-type app marketplace which sounds like any codecs Mint had that Ubuntu didn't would be easily retrievable. Is this correct?

Yep, I think it's "restricted extras", but it's been a few versions since I've used Ubuntu.

On my main PC, I would like to dual-boot and install a distribution that would run Eclipse for Android development. Does anyone have experience with Android dev on Ubuntu or other linux distributions? Would there be any problem getting Eclipse to detect my test phone (Galaxy s1)? Would it need drivers?

Not sure about this but my GS1 worked in USB Storage mode on Linux a few years ago, so Eclipse (or the android SDK) should detect it.

On my media PC/server I have 2GB which is sluggish with Win7 and am too poor to get more RAM, so I would install Ubuntu as a main OS. This PC has an obscure small profile MSI graphics card, but I only intend the PC to be used to play media files. Would installing Ubuntu be suitable to be a media server for other PCs (Windows) in the house? Would the obscure graphics card have trouble being detected by Ubuntu? Would 2GB RAM have any effect on the speed of Ubuntu 12?

Sorry for longwinded post

2GB should be fine for Ubuntu media server.
If you're streaming over the network the graphics card won't matter as it will be the GPU on whatever device you're streaming to handling the video, you could even run it headless in command line mode for extra performance?

_Godot_

Complete noobie, this is probably asked before, but between Fedora and Mint, which would be the best for a beginner? They both look good.

Mathiasb

_Godot_ wrote: »

Complete noobie, this is probably asked before, but between Fedora and Mint, which would be the best for a beginner? They both look good.

Mint, Fedora is kind of bleeding edge.

LiamOSullivan

Bleeding edge? Ehh, not so much.
I'd agree that mint is probably the better choice for a noob though, unless they have aspirations of setting up servers, in which case getting the hang of YUM would be good.

Mathiasb

LiamOSullivan wrote: »

Bleeding edge? Ehh, not so much.
I'd agree that mint is probably the better choice for a noob though, unless they have aspirations of setting up servers, in which case getting the hang of YUM would be good.

I knew I'd get this reply. Fedora is known for trying out new stuff as soon as it's out, for good and bad.

LiamOSullivan

Mathiasb wrote: »

I knew I'd get this reply. Fedora is known for trying out new stuff as soon as it's out, for good and bad.

If you ask a debian user, they'd say the same of mint. :P

Fedora does use new bits and pieces, but the software it uses is generally 'stable' with grub being one exception. Ubuntu is actually quite similar, I think, with the exceptions of the LTS releases. Unity would be a very good example of that.

Tom Dunne

LiamOSullivan wrote: »

Fedora does use new bits and pieces, but the software it uses is generally 'stable' with grub being one exception. Ubuntu is actually quite similar, I think, with the exceptions of the LTS releases. Unity would be a very good example of that.

Hmmmm, I'd tend to agree that Fedora is bleeding edge. I've experienced a significant number of freezes on my laptop since I installed it a few months back. No amount of clt-alt-backspace would let me back in - just a good old fashioned power off.

Mathiasb

Tom Dunne wrote: »

Hmmmm, I'd tend to agree that Fedora is bleeding edge. I've experienced a significant number of freezes on my laptop since I installed it a few months back. No amount of clt-alt-backspace would let me back in - just a good old fashioned power off.

Ctrl-alt-backspace has been disabled by default for quite some time now. You could've tried Ctrl-alt-F1 or so, to switch to a terminal. YMMV

Tom Dunne

Mathiasb wrote: »

Ctrl-alt-backspace has been disabled by default for quite some time now. You could've tried Ctrl-alt-F1 or so, to switch to a terminal. YMMV

Clt-alt-backspace has worked on a number of occasions for me with Fedora 17. I have gone to the terminal on occasion to kill a few rogue processes, so it looks to me that both are in fact enabled.

Lovely Bloke

Just installed Mint 14 on an old laptop, it looks great!

I had some x264 videos downloaded, and Windows XP had them rendered like cartoons or something, handled them really badly, even in vlc player.

In Mint they looked brilliant, scaled up to 42 inches - quality HD goodness.

*****************************

I have Mint 13 on a different laptop, dual booting with Win7 - how hard/easy is it to go to Mint 14?

BopNiblets

TheNinthGate wrote: »

I have Mint 13 on a different laptop, dual booting with Win7 - how hard/easy is it to go to Mint 14?

They recommend a fresh install (just backup your home directory and Package Manager selections through the backup tool) but there are a few ways:
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

Skrynesaver

Which distribution, well it depends on lots of things, so this guy put together a set of questions that will point you to the best option for you, your intended usage, your skillset and your hardware