http://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn

Already subbed. B) I love the ways different WM/DEs look, but for pure functionality, usability and ease of install, I just love Cinnamon.

Thinking of putting xubuntu 13.10 on my laptop as a dual boot. However, I've been hearing some things about Arch Linux and Linux Mint. Could I get a comparison between these different distros?

If I chose to dualboot Ubuntu with Windows 7, is there a performance drop from having both on one machine? I really like Ubuntu, but I am not completely sure that that I want to get rid of windows.

I don't see why there would be

Dual booting will not hurt your performance at all since only one of Windows/Linux will be loaded in your computer. Only if you're say using a VM to boot linux within windows or doing something similar might do that depending on your specs.

Fog, how familiar are you with working with terminal, linux in general, etc?

Arch Linux is one of THE most customizable linux distros out there. Which isn't a bad thing if you're very experienced, but if you're not... then you're screwed because after installing all you're going to get is a terminal, and you will have to install EVERYTHING with pacman. Also, updates can often occasionally completely fuck your installation.

For anyone that cares, here are the distros that I recommend if you're new to linux, aren't familiar with the terminal use, and just want something that works out of the box.
1) Linux Mint with Cinnamon or Mate (I recommend cinnamon for new people, if you are a gnome 2 junkie like me, mate)
2) XUbuntu (Sorry, I just can't stand Unity in Ubuntu)

If you have some experience, these can also work.
1) Fedora
2) Debian

Unless you're REALLY experienced, avoid these like hell unless you're serious about learning linux and how the thing actually works underneath.
1) Arch Linux
2) Gentoo
3) Slackware

Some of you might be wondering what Gnome, Unity, Cinnamon, Mate, KDE, XFCE, and other of these terms floating around are. To put it simply, they determine what your system will look like. (I am REALLY simplifying it here).

Unless your computer is a POWERHOUSE, I suggest that you avoid KDE.
If you want to squeeze all the performance, energy, etc you can, then I suggest going with XFCE or other not as intensive graphical environments. Otherwise, unless your computer is old, Cinnamon and the others should do the trick.

I suggest taking this quiz for anyone who's interested in getting into linux - it's a bit outdated but still will give you somewhat accurate distros that are good for your level.
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php

I've been dual booting Xubuntu 13.04 for a while, but recently fucked up my installation when upgrading to 13.10. So I was looking at potential other options to see if there was anything better than Xubuntu

you dont learn shit from gentoo, all you learn is waiting for everything to finish compiling

visual studio 2good

not interested until Valve releases some 'killer' app for linux that is conveniently missing a Windows binary

VMware Player + Windows 7 should suit all of my needs for a long time to come

http://u.kanobu.ru/ugc/081a3ae1-5fa1-43b8-b08a-3f8bdac3bd0e.jpg

In all seriousness, with Steam Machines on their way, you better believe Valve is doing everything they can to get some Linux love, and they know an exclusive here and there is going to very much sweeten the deal.

uptime
19:50:22 up 101 days, 21:18, 6 users, load average: 0.21, 0.26, 0.23

My desktop has been running only Linux as the primary OS since Valve announced Steam was being ported soon. So far I am very happy with the whole thing. I can't think of anything more stable than open source development, if something goes wrong I know that I will always be able to switch to whatever fork will emerge at the moment.

TF2 is very smooth on Linux and I have no complains whatsoever.

If I need to use any Windows programs like Photoshop, SolidWorks, etc.. I just launch a virtual machine and start the program. I can easily share files between the two OSes with a shared drive that was setup from my virtual machine configuration wizard. I use VirtualBox by the way. I even feel that running things in a virtual machine is better than running it as a primary environment since I can save the machine state and recover it. You can come back to a working environment where nothing has moved since your last work time. You can duplicated virtual machines and test things without any big consequences. Anyway, booting a virtual machine usually takes 10 seconds...

http://i.imgur.com/a0ApSfK.png

I'm on Debian or OSX 90% of the time. I boot to Windows whenever I want to play games, because games are more stable and performant on Windows across the board. This is because game devs do most of their testing/development on Windows. Meb is right -- Linux won't become a serious contender for games until people are forced to use it.

Aside from games. Linux is great if you already know how to use Linux. Most GUI applications on linux are pretty shit compared to their Windows counterparts. The command-line programs that you can use on linux, however, are insanely powerful. But it takes a few months to get really comfortable in the terminal.

I tried running linux on my desktop, but drivers for my video card are really terrible. When I got everything installed and running as well as I could, I was getting about half the framerate that I get in Windows. I'll definitely going to try again once I get a new video card, though. I'd love to use linux as my primary OS.

^ sounds to me like you have an AMD video card. Unfortunately, AMDs Linux driver support has been sub par for some time, however with the new 3.12 kernel that seems to be largely fixed....well, not fixed, but greatly improved.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_linux312_major&num=1

Go post that in r/unixporn for sweet sweet karma.

+1 for i3, I'm using it too.

Been using Linux for a pretty long time but made it my primary system since I got into the Steam for Linux closed beta. Can't wait until CS: GO comes out for Linux so I can totally delete Windows off my PC though.

I do. I have a 4670. Those benchmarks look interesting. I might have to try again when 3.12 hits the Arch repositories. Hopefully there's more support for AMD cards in the next couple months with the steam box coming.

Seriously. I'm not sure what the hold up is with CS:GO, you'd think it'd be one of the first titles out. Its honestly the only game I play on a semi-regular basis I miss, but I'm holding out because I know its coming.

Been using only linux for years now. Biggest way it hurts my tf2 is there's no overlay for mumble. That's it. Everything else runs fine.

Yeah, it should have come out a long time ago, Valve really made a mistake taking so long. Really lost or on a lot of money from Linux users.

EDIT: was looking at your screenshot, why don't you listen to Pandora through Banshee, iirc Banshee natively supports Pandora.

^ Because I was not aware that I could, I'll try that out now!

Edit: Looks like its not possible. Banshee has features for lastfm, but nothing for Pandora.

My bad, it must have been lastfm I'm thinking of, no Pandora here in the UK. :C

EDIT: you could have a look at Pithos. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1731105

Pithos seems to work great actually. Using it now. Have some errors when I apt-get update with its repos, though.

I get a frame of input lag on TF2 in windows no matter what I do, and the window manager drops every other frame that gets rendered for some reason (probably bad monitor sync), so I need 120fps to look like 60 and 240 to avoid most of the input lag. On linux, I have neither of those problems. Totally unrelated, I also don't have the problems with mingw's team being incompetent at creating a reasonable distribution mechanism (zipball pls) and people who port stuff from linux making it forward-incompatible unless you fix all the broken dependencies yourself.

Hmm, I'm not sure what the problem could be, should matter too much though.

So I was bored today and had a bunch of spare parts lying around so I build a PC (Pentium 4 yo). Couldn't find a spare HDD so I installed Arch+GRUB on a 16GB flash drive and I'm using that. #ghetto

Anyone else experiencing a looooot of video lag on tftv streams? When you click a stream on the side, and are brought to the tftv stream viewer, there is a lot of lag and makes the whole thing unwatchable. I need to click the stream window again and go to the actual twitch.tv page in order to watch without issue.

Everything's sound here mate