i'm thinking about switching to Xandro's Desktop Biz. Edition 3.0 or Xandro's Desktop Home 3.0 Premium... anybody ever use Linux before? cause Microsoft has been screwing me over and i need something more reliable...without going Mac (due to price).

 

I'd talk to hokiefan104...he's the resident linux guy I do believe. I know there's a few others, but I believe he uses it primarily....

As for switching to Linux over Windows......dont think that just because your having problems with Windows that you wont have the same problems with Linux. Linux suffers from lack of driver and user support depending on the software and application your using it for. Linux is as good or better then Windows in several regards, but also suffers some problems that Windows doesnt.

My suggestion is before you switch, try to find out why your having the issues/problems your having...and make sure that switching will/can fix the problems. I'd hate to see you make the change and find out nothings fixed.

 

yea i knew there were driver problems and such but i've also heard that Linux is a little more reliable so that would be why...and what i would do is that i have an empty paritition and i would just install it onto that partition and check it and such and if it still has the problems or i dont like it then i would just uninstall it... and for the past 6 hours i've been trying to do scans and such but all of them have come up with nothing... disk defrag. came back as it needing it badly which was a shocker...so i ran it...but it only cleared it up like 20% and the other 55% is still really defragmented but it just couldn't defrag them for some odd reason so yea lol

 

I use Suse 9.2 Pro (retail) and 10.0 (free). Ubuntu, Suse, Knoppix and Mandriva (all can be downloaded for free. Ubuntu actually will send you the OS on disks for free) are good distros for new users. If you are gonna use linux on a wireless PC, make sure the card (pcmia, pci, etc..) is compatible with linux (look for Atheros chipset cards. They usually are 99% compatible). Other ones can work, but theres tricks to get them to think they are working in a windows computer.

As for linux being more reliable, I cant say it is. To me its about the same. But then again I rarely have problems with windows. Most windows computers I have to fix for people are user related (not saying you are stupid or anything, just my experience fixing peoples pc's). Whats your computer doing?

 

i did a Microsoft update and after that my windows media player practially stopped working it would crash like crazy...and then Explorer would stop responding and all that crap... so i ran a virus scan...came up with 1 virus... and it cleaned it up but didn't help at all... and before Media player began to mess up...somehow a whole 40 gig partition of data got lost...was able to recover that and then everything started to happen... and today it has come to the point where on start-up it takes about 15 min. to load the windows files and then when it does load it doesn't reconize ANYTHING so i'm gonna install linux (actually am while i type) on a partition and then re-install Windows on the other and see which one lasts longer...and if i run into driver problems with the Linux (like to an extint) then i will just un-install it and just be on Windows...unless Windows does its crap again...man i just want a mac mini lol

EDIT:

ok its installed...and wow is it different... i think i need to read the manual tomorrow lol... and then read how to connect to the internet...

 

to be honest i know very little about linux. i installed it on an old Dell Laptop to be a learning experience but so far i havent had much time to learn how to use it. the only thing i use it for is progtamming in C++ and ADA using vi. the only other time i use it is for general web use when i go home for tech football games, this saves me the trouble of lugging my desktop back and forth from school.

as for disribution i use Fedora Core 3 (which is out of date, i think they are up to Fedora Core 5 or 6 ). so far i have had very few problems with drivers. of course the only things i have plugged into it are my mouse(logitech), jump drive(off brand) , and my digital camera(nikon) and the plug and play drivers worked fine. the only thing that has had problems is the DVD/CD-RW combo drive, it wont play DVDs and i can only get it to burn at 2x.

i would be more motivated to learn and primarily use linux but i play way too many computer games few of which will run on linux.

wish i could be more help
you can try going here if you need help

 

Dual boot windows and linux. Thats what I have on my other desktop. I had some version of Redhat installed on it, couldn't tell you which version because its been awhile since I used it. And if you get bored with it you can just run windows, no problems. My biggest problem with it was I couldn't do as much with it as I could windows. Also some of my hardware devices were not recognized by linux as well, or I couldn't get them to install properly. It was pretty rock solid though. But for the time being I have given up on linux. No reason to run it really at this point.

 

I haven't installed Linux again (i went to do a system restore cause i was going to go back to the OS that my computer came with and it over-writ the Linux *cries*... but this time i have gotton smart... i have 4 partitions on my main drive... 10 gig for Windows, 60 gigs for documents, 37 gigs for extra stuff and 6 gigs for the Linux... i'm just going to use the Linux as like a backup if and when my Windows crashes again...atleast i would be able to boot up my computer...