Completely screwed over- Now merits and demerits of various OSs

[cleverlymadeup]

How? Look at the advances in hardware. When your hardware is too powerful for the old os, ya need a new os that can use it.

ummm no you don't, the fact is the newer hardware works just great with linux always has, it just speeds it up. no need to get a new os just cause i got newer hardware. it should just run faster

btw look at kde if you want to see a "new" desktop, 8 years ago they have all the "new" things that osx brought in and that vista just brought in and it ran well on old hardware

Linux is great for some things, but as a gaming platform? Not really.

actually that's wrong, it's just there's no games for it, doom 3 and ut 2k3, 2k4 actually perform better under linux

 

[Jaythulhu]

How, pray tell, am I wrong in that? Linux, with its various flavours, different kernel configurations and such make it a platform that is not worthwhile for gaming. It's far too long and arduous a task to program a game to run in linux, especially without the directx api as a native inclusion. Whilst there are exceptions to every rule, this doesn't invalidate any of my argument.

I also dispute your assertion that new hardware doesn't require a new operating system. Every few years, hardware reaches a point where the old just can't keep up and attempting to patch the old os to keep up makes less sense than creating a new one. By your rationale, we'd still be using dos text edit to modify our autoexec.bat and config.sys to try and eke out a few more kb of memory so we can get crysis running.

 

[Easykill]

Thanks a lot guys, I'll start by locating a Vista (Ubuntu was an experiment, I don't fully know how to use it yet) disc and go from there. If you guys wish to continue, this thread is now about the merits and demerits of Linux and other OSs.

 

[bluerahjah]

http://www.xkcd.com/178/

Ahem...

Apologies abound.

Haha, I was wondering where that pokemon quote came from. Literally though, I would definitely say it's the Vista side of things, and just stay as far away from it as possible.

 

[clarinetJWD]

Bolded the problems you have. When I say "Apple" I really mean iTunes. iTunes is a load of crap, and as such I use alternatives for my iPod. I use Winamp.

Oh and get an External HDD. Putting your OS on a seperate physical HDD is the best way to protect your important files.

Funny, I've used both of those programs, and came away with a similar impression...one was a great music organization tool and player, the other was a load of crap...but strangely, it was the other way around. (And I truly dislike most Apple software)

Anyways...on topic! Before trying anything major, go into BIOS and make sure the hard drive is appearing at all. Then, get a live boot disk for linux like Knoppix or SuSE's live DVD, boot into that, and back up your files!

The Vista update may have tried to overwrite the Linux bootloader, but not quite done it right, so you can use Super Grub to restore the linux bootloader, which may get it to work.

Honestly, though, my policy is this: If something major goes wrong, there's probably more problems than you can see on the surface. If I start getting bluescreens or boot problems, I just automatically back up and reformat. (I use Norton Ghost to clone a clean install of the OS, and clone it back) (There's also, shit what's the name, ah, GParted, another Linux distro, that can easily save a compressed image of your clean hard drive and write it back, and that one's free, but I like that the Norton backup is bootable.)

 

[cleverlymadeup]

How, pray tell, am I wrong in that? Linux, with its various flavours, different kernel configurations and such make it a platform that is not worthwhile for gaming. It's far too long and arduous a task to program a game to run in linux, especially without the directx api as a native inclusion. Whilst there are exceptions to every rule, this doesn't invalidate any of my argument.

ok that's wrong, how about the 173284901237498012470912 flavours of windows vista and it's various configurations?

linux is VERY easy to program for, the ONLY difference for each distro is what packages there are and possibly the package manger they use. other than that you code for one distro you code for them all

oh and as for an api to code games in, opengl for the win, it's also cross platform, including windows, mac and all *nix flavours

I also dispute your assertion that new hardware doesn't require a new operating system. Every few years, hardware reaches a point where the old just can't keep up and attempting to patch the old os to keep up makes less sense than creating a new one. By your rationale, we'd still be using dos text edit to modify our autoexec.bat and config.sys to try and eke out a few more kb of memory so we can get crysis running.

go learn about *nix and then come back and talk to me, you have obliviously been duped by the wankers at m$ and their idea of how to code bad os's

oh and as for autoexec.bat and config.sys, they are still there and still used by the os today

 

[Jaythulhu]

Already been thru my *nix is the best phase during high school back in the early 90s. So you use it and think it's best. Good for you, have a potato chip. I got over *nix in the mid-90s, and I'll stick with vista thanks.

Go learn about "informed decision" and then come back and try to slag me off about my choice of os.

Now then, I'm more interested in hearing from Easykill to see if his puter is up and running again.

 

[Alex_P]

How, pray tell, am I wrong in that? Linux, with its various flavours, different kernel configurations and such make it a platform that is not worthwhile for gaming. It's far too long and arduous a task to program a game to run in linux, especially without the directx api as a native inclusion. Whilst there are exceptions to every rule, this doesn't invalidate any of my argument.

Different kernel configurations aren't that bad, really. And package management software already handles dependencies quite well. It's really only the lack of DirectX that constitutes a serious technical obstacle. Even then, that obstacle is far from insurmountable -- it's just that there's no market, either, so the motivation really isn't there.

-- Alex