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So here's the deal, today the RAID 0 (Striping, in other words) array that I used as my system boot disk officially died after a short life of roughly four years. One of the disks is salvagable but I believe that all the data on it will be useless since my array is set up the way it is. As of right now I'm running Linux Ubuntu 7 from a CD so I can do all my internet stuff in the meantime before I decide what exactly to do with my situation.

But to be honest, I really like the Ubuntu GUI and I'm considering using this distribution of Linux as my OS instead of sticking with Windows. But I have some concerns and I thought maybe some of the more technical people here could help me out.

My biggest concern right now is support and compatibility. I use my computer mostly for typical web browsing and MS Office stuff for homework but I occasionally like to play games-- Warcraft III, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, Quake 3, etc. and I wonder if those games can run on Linux like they do on Windows. Also, I'm worried that by using Linux I'm limiting myself to what I can and can't do since most programs I see today are generally developed to be used on a Windows machine and therefore those systems are given the most support.

Next, is there an MS Office package that is compatible with Linux? I know there's MS Office stuff out there for Macs and I figured there would be some for Linux since they both run off of Unix, but I wasn't too sure. This is sort of a "Ask Google" question, but hey, I like to type a lot in my posts.

Lastly, is there any real advantage to using Linux over Windows? I enjoy the sort of minimalist feel that Linux has and the customization it offers, but if it doesn't function as smoothly as Windows then I feel like I'll be getting into more trouble than its worth. I also don't do too much developing at home, but I hear that Linux is much more conducive to development software than Windows, is this true?

Anyway, any advice or testimonials on Linux would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully I can make a decision on what to finally do with my poor machine.

Starcraft runs great in vanilla WINE (free). Quake 3 has a native linux port (free binaries, uses your CD for the game media, and your CD key, too). The UT series also have native ports. It has been announced that UT3 will have native Linux support.

Supposedly Counter-Strike can be made to work. I know I've had the old half-life engine running at one point.

Warcraft III I think requires Cedega. This is a commercial fork of WINE that includes support for some extra stuff, mostly the copy protection. Cedega isn't too expensive, and it runs a good number of Windows games.

Native ports often run faster than their Windows counterparts (or at least just about as well). WINE is usually ~10-25% slower than running natively on Windows. You do NOT want to try and use ATI graphics on Linux. Get an nVidia card if you don't have one and want real 3d accelleration for games.

MS Office (of course) does NOT run under Linux and probably never will. There is openoffice.org, which is roughly comparable though a bit less polished. There is also gnumeric if you want a slightly better spreadsheet than the one included with openoffice. There's also a commerical version of openoffice from Sun called Staroffice. Supposedly it does a slightly better job importing some MS Office files and inexplicably runs much faster.

The photoshop analog is the GIMP. It's got similar functionality in terms of non-print related targets (colorspace is limited to 24bit RGB), but the interface is completely different.

I have run Linux exclusively on my desktop for about 5 years now. I have almost no need for Windows in terms of day-to-day usage at this point. I run windows at work for a single program (everybody else runs Linux, except the sole Mac user), but in most cases would much rather be running Linux.

Probably the most noticible advantage over Windows is that it is free, and most of the software for it is also free (as in beer and speech). Most Linux systems come ready-to-go with a full line of development tools, including gcc (widely considered one of the best C/C++ compilers out there) and tons of documentation. If it isn't pre-installed, it's generally easier to install. Linux also uses library versioning, so you don't run into "DLL hell" as easily. Libraries and appliactions are also packaged, meaning you have one central place to install/remove things, including any shared libraries.

If you want to make it look pretty, install Beryl (pretty stable) or Compiz Fusion (which is currently unstable). Thing Aero from Vista, but with even more eye candy and without breaking hardware acceleration of directdraw (well, in Linux this would have to be OpenGL) apps.

The only downside is lack of a large COMMERCIAL software library. Free replacements are often available, but they're not usually exactly the same in terms of functionality or interface. For day-to-day web surfing, email, etc., most people could be given a Linux machine and, other than some minor interface differences, would never notice. You have the two key apps: Firefox and Thunderbird. You won't have IE, but I personally consider that a plus, not a minus.

Thank you for the input Brandon!

I guess this brings a few more things into question. Can OpenOffice at the very least read and create MS Office format files? If not I suppose I can do my homework on the university computers, but it would be much more convenient to have the opportunity to do it at home. I'm worried that I'll write my homework in a format my professor can't open and therefore I'll get screwed.

I do have an ATi card (Radeon x800), is that going to cause a lot of problems? I'm going to have to upgrade eventually sometime down the road, but until then will I experience issues with my First-Person Shooters?

What distribution of Linux do you use Brandon? My roommate uses Slackware but he gave me a boot disc of Ubuntu since it's the most user friendly in his opinion.

Merk wrote:I guess this brings a few more things into question. Can OpenOffice at the very least read and create MS Office format files?

In most cases, yes. Macro heavy files and Word documents with really strange formatting, especially table related, sometimes don't import right. Exported stuff usually opens fine in Office. PDF export is also included out of the box.

I do have an ATi card (Radeon x800), is that going to cause a lot of problems? I'm going to have to upgrade eventually sometime down the road, but until then will I experience issues with my First-Person Shooters?

There is driver included with X.org that provides full 2D acceleration. This won't get you ANY 3D. ATI provides some semblance of a 3D driver, but it's even worse than the Windows driver, if you can believe that, and not very easy to install, either. The use of nVidia hardware for gaming is highly recommended. nVidia provides a driver that, while a giant binary blob, actually works pretty well. If you just want the fancy desktop effects, the "Intel Extreme" stuff actually works remarkably well and is fully supported, but don't expect good gaming performance.

No matter what, make sure you find instructions tailored for your distribution for installing any 3rd party (not packaged by your distribution) graphics drivers. Google is your friend, here.

Oh, one more thing: if you're on a laptop or using wifi for any reason, watch out for unsupported devices. Wifi chipset makers are noutorious for not giving out specs to 3rd party developers, so Linux drivers can't get written. Atheros and Ralink chipsets are well supported, but it's tough to know what chipset your devices uses (since Atheros and Ralink just sell the raw chips to others who market full boards) until you plug it in. People have compiled lists of stuff known to work.

What distribution of Linux do you use Brandon? My roommate uses Slackware but he gave me a boot disc of Ubuntu since it's the most user friendly in his opinion.

I run Debian. Ubuntu is derived from Debian, though the relationship is somewhat distant at this point. Debian is a bit more suited to my usage style: heavy on desktop minimalism with lots of up-to-date (in unstable) developer tools. Ubuntu is a little more casual user oriented. It has better hotplugging features (better than Windows, if you ask me), and is MUCH more desktop oriented, though Debian's default desktop isn't bad at all, either.

I used to run Slackware, but I found it becomes somewhat unmaintainable the instant a new version is released, and full upgrades are difficult. I finally re-installed Debian a few months ago after using the same base install, upgraded repeatedly, for 5 or 6 years (from before Windows got blown away). It still ran fine, but was getting a bit wonky from some of the leftover stuff.

Most of the guys at work are Fedora users. I'm personally not at all a fan, but it's what became of Redhat. Suse is the distro Novell maintains, and it focuses heavily on desktop usability, but I still think Ubuntu does better.

Your choice of distro doesn't have a whole lot of bearing on software availability, since most of the common projects are packaged in all major distros. It mostly has to do with how you administrate the system (such as the tool for installing/removing packages and configuring things) as well as how the default desktop environment behaves.

If you install with /home on a separate partition, you can actually pretty well migrate between distributions while keeping all your user-specific data untouched. It's certainly an option if you'd like to try out several distros. Also, use LiveCDs to take testdrives, when available.

Merk wrote: RAID 0

RAID 5 go!

Merk wrote:
My biggest concern right now is support and compatibility. I use my computer mostly for typical web browsing and MS Office stuff for homework but I occasionally like to play games-- Warcraft III, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, Quake 3, etc. and I wonder if those games can run on Linux like they do on Windows.

I haven't really tried linux yet but quite possibly will in the near future. However, from what I've heard.. you can play windows games on linux but generally it's a pain to get it set up right and there may be bugs. I think starcraft had some odd font issue last time I checked. So what I intend to do is get a bootloader.. I'm not sure what the best one is and would love to find a free one that works for xp/ubuntu. Then I can play games on windows and do other stuff on linux.

OH yeah.. and the MS Office thing.. like Brandon said, openoffice is good and usually works fine for opening word formatted docs.. I'd also recommend trying out google docs (docs.google.com)

You can upload and edit from your browser and then save back to your desktop in like a bajillion formats.. or just leave it on google and grab it on any other computer (I think your limit is 5MB per word doc though)

Merk wrote:I also don't do too much developing at home, but I hear that Linux is much more conducive to development software than Windows, is this true?

No. Unless you're writing cross-platform code . Otherwise, if you develop in linux, your intended users will be linux users, which is a MUCH smaller market

And I'd like to see something on linux that can match VS2005.. which is free from iuware!

I will admit that Visual Studio is a good IDE. Eclipse, however, is also very good. Personally, I just use vim/nedit and make. CVS or SVN for version control. I'm a minimalist, though.

As far as dev target, it is quite possible to create applications targeting multiple OSes. WxWidgets is proof to this. GTK and Qt also exist for Windows, but WxWidgets will provide the most "native" feel. Command line apps also tend to be very portable. Also, if you're willing to accept some of the nastiness of the .NET API (C# is decent, but the API is horrid), mono will let you develop .NET stuff and run it on Linux. Just about System.Windows and you're good. I would argue that the free dev tools on Linux outdo the free dev tools on Windows any day, and are competive with the highly expensive stuff Microsoft offers.

Linux also tends to have very scriptable actions. The shell alone is capable of things that would require lots of effort using a GUI or cmd.exe. While not directly related to development, this tends to interest developers more than casual users, who tend to stick to the GUI.

gcc is WAAAY better than Microsoft's C compiler. About the only thing that beats gcc in speed of output is icc (Intel's compiler), and I don't think anything supports more language features. Microsoft's C++ compiler STILL doesn't fully support STL, from what I'm told, and it certainly doesn't have even halfway decent support for C99 (which I use all the time). gcc also targets more than just x86, so you can "just type make" and build your code for other archs (ppc, arm, avr32, mips, sparc, etc.). As long as you don't assume architecture specific things, the code will build just fine, since it's the same compiler. No need to worry about weird feature subsets.

As far as games, I've not had any problems with Starcraft. Starcraft was made to work almost 6 or 7 years ago. I remember the announcement well; it was quite a feat at the time. If you want a slightly less difficult to use solution, you can buy Cedega. They provide some support and they also make all the copy protection work, which is normally all that's keeping games from working with mainline WINE these days. Games which have native ports, like Quake 3 and the Unreal Tournaments, will of course run just fine. Many people actually report that they run slightly faster, though there may be some fanboyism there. It may also be that nVidia hardware has traditionally been slightly faster using OpenGL, and there's certainly no DirectX on Linux (at least not without WINE, which just translates things into OpenGL).

Still, if your primary system use is gaming, you're pretty much stuck with Windows at this point. Publishers simply aren't building most games for anything else. There's a limit to what can be done by emulating APIs that are largely undocumented, inconsistent, and buggy to begin with.

MonMotha wrote: There's a limit to what can be done by emulating APIs that are largely undocumented, inconsistent, and buggy to begin with.

I thought Wine was not an emulator!!! lol =]

W.I.N.E lolz

It actually isn't an emulator in the traditional sense of the word in that it does not emulate another CPU architecture. It does however have to emulate the Win32 API in a POSIX environment by translating calls and, where necessary, breaking things down into different primitives. In this sense, it is something of an API emulator, though the WINE people tend to simply call it an "implementation" of Win32 on UNIX.

Posted before.
Gonna post again.
http://nata2.info/d/flash/f/switchlinux3.swf
Classic.

Yea, take it from me when I say that until the rumored ATI Linux driver rewrite happens give up on anything 3d intensive. I'm having to plunk down $400 on a replacement GPU for my laptop cause of how terrible the Mobility Radeon X1400 is.

MonMotha, I can confirm that Warcraft 3, and Counterstrike both work on Wine. (http://appdb.winehq.org/ has a full list of applications, how well they work in Wine, and instructions for getting them to work.)

Ubuntu is a good Linux distro for non-advanced users. Personally I suggest kubuntu in particular as I've seen that KDE is not as painful to use.

Ahem, i agree. Linux has grown a shitload since i herd about it 5 years ago. and its getting to the point where it may be able to overtake windows, im still dual booted. Like i play WoW and Guildwars and such and im really to lazy to fuss with Linux to get em runnin. So i play games on windows and everything else on linux.


I say keep er dual boted just incase.

wat tool to recommend for dual boot k plz thx?????

Both major bootloaders for Linux (LILO and GRUB) are readily capable of booting several different operating systems. Install windows first - it will blow away your Linux bootloader without asking. When you subsequently install Linux, most distributions will helpfully add Windows to the menu for you.

Just make sure you leave some unpartitioned space for Linux when you install Windows.

Ok, as it was mentioned that ATI's drivers were rubbish for Linux I figure I should put up this update as I am in legitimate shock over this.

In the next few days version 8.41 of the ATI Linux drivers will be released which features a new codebase and a massive performance increase. Version 8.42 will also feature AIGLX support finally!

The biggest shock though, GPU specs are going to be made readily available without a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

I never though this would ever happen.

Yes. This has been a very major development for the Linux/OSS guys. If it actually pans out, it'll take a few months to get everything worked out, but expect fully functional and rather good drivers integrated within the X.org tree. This means no futzing with third party packages and downloaders, no third party binary blobs, etc. Things should "just work" out of the box, with full 3d acceleration. That's something that's difficult to achieve even with Windows.

Suffice to say, if this comes to be, my next video card will be an ATi.