Needing a computer. Help?

[Straf]

I use vanilla Ubuntu. I've done some of the tweaking and that in Redhat and Debian but I have become lazier since I've gotten older. I just like things out of the box.

The reason I use Ubuntu is because I am too stingy or skint to pay for Windows. I used to have a hooky copy of W7 but I loaned it to someone I am no longer in contact with and I can't find a backup version. Those bogus Micriesoft tech support guys in India can't help me either, although I now know how to swear in Hindi.

Anyway Rongar that is a great spec machine you have there. Did you go with the A10? Can I ask you how much it all cost?

[Rongar]

1) Those bogus Micriesoft tech support guys in India can't help me either, although I now know how to swear in Hindi.

2) Anyway Rongar that is a great spec machine you have there. Did you go with the A10? Can I ask you how much it all cost?

1) LOL.

2) All in all I spent 300 Euros.

A10-7850k APU - 103€
16GB RAM - 119€
Asus A68HM-Plus mainboard - 57€
Arctic Alpine 64PLUS cooler to replace the usually crappy boxed cooler - 12€
and a mouse pad, lol - 7€

If one were to build a full desktop PC from scratch, he or she would also have to include

a power supply unit ~ 40€
a case ~ 40€
a monitor ~130€
mouse+keyboard ~ 25€
and probably Windows OS - no idea how much that costs, 30?
[Edit] Forgot the hdd/ssd ~ 50€
[Edit2] And a CD/DVD/Bluray drive ~ 50€ (?)

Anyway, somewhere north of 500, maybe 600€. Just to give an idea about how much moolah one would have to put down on the table for a decent non-gaming PC.

[Rongar]

Have you considered Mint+Cinnamon? I quite like the interface and it's familiar to the Gnome 2.4 crowd with the Gnome 3.x features minus the radical paradigm shift. Granted, I have not upgraded in 3 years or so and have not kept up with the details, but the last I saw, the Gnome team was backing off some of their more controversial changes.

Oh sorry, didn't see your reply.

I haven't but the way you describe it sounds right up my alley. I'll have to look into that, thanks!

[Redrobes]

My main PC is Mint + Cinnamon. Its fine. Theres obviously a couple of minor issues i could mention but nothing that really gets in the way. I prefer Mint over Ubuntu only because of the systemd issue and also I lost faith in Ubuntu with their rather bizarre desktop targetted for mobile devices (oh yes you guys have reminded me of the name: Unity !) which didn't work for me at all on a desktop. Under the hood its all much the same tho. Try and get on to a long term release branch unless you like to surf at the latest wavefront. I rather liked Windows XP. Win 7 was tolerable and then I just listen to all the moaning about Win10. Never been back there to know how bad its gotten. Windows seemed to be steering a course in the opposing direction to where I wanted to be so I abandoned ship. But from an ease of use perspective, although there are some hooky historical command line voodoo to contend with on linux, on the whole I think linux is less fuss than Windows. Its just some of the Apps that let the side down. Those are improving quite a lot as time goes on. I do wish in general that they would make much more of a priority on fixing bugs and stability over new features. Its little things that bug me. All the important stuff on linux is very very stable and much easier to handle than Windows. Also, a lower spec PC running linux will stil be pretty nifty where a low spec PC with latest windows will just cry and throw tantrums. I had a fairly low tolerance level for that.

Edit: For Chick: I think the reason why many of us are on linux is that were content creators as opposed to content consumers. We have to get stuff done and cant spend half of our time feeding lollipops to windows to stop it throwing its toys out of the pram. I aint got time for that. Microsoft deliberately make life hard for you and hide away things you need to know to get on with the job. After a while, even on windows you end up installing a load of linux tools. The other day we were talking about the APNG format for animated GIFs. No dice on Edge, no problem on Firefox. Mark above in this thread talking about 32bit apps. Linux has been 64 bit for YEARS. Its not a thing that you even need to consider on linux. It just does your head in come the end.

[jfrazierjr]

My main PC is Mint + Cinnamon. Its fine. Theres obviously a couple of minor issues i could mention but nothing that really gets in the way. I prefer Mint over Ubuntu only because of the systemd issue and also I lost faith in Ubuntu with their rather bizarre desktop targetted for mobile devices (oh yes you guys have reminded me of the name: Unity !) which didn't work for me at all on a desktop. Under the hood its all much the same tho. Try and get on to a long term release branch unless you like to surf at the latest wavefront. I rather liked Windows XP. Win 7 was tolerable and then I just listen to all the moaning about Win10. Never been back there to know how bad its gotten. Windows seemed to be steering a course in the opposing direction to where I wanted to be so I abandoned ship. But from an ease of use perspective, although there are some hooky historical command line voodoo to contend with on linux, on the whole I think linux is less fuss than Windows. Its just some of the Apps that let the side down. Those are improving quite a lot as time goes on. I do wish in general that they would make much more of a priority on fixing bugs and stability over new features. Its little things that bug me. All the important stuff on linux is very very stable and much easier to handle than Windows. Also, a lower spec PC running linux will stil be pretty nifty where a low spec PC with latest windows will just cry and throw tantrums. I had a fairly low tolerance level for that.

Edit: For Chick: I think the reason why many of us are on linux is that were content creators as opposed to content consumers. We have to get stuff done and cant spend half of our time feeding lollipops to windows to stop it throwing its toys out of the pram. I aint got time for that. Microsoft deliberately make life hard for you and hide away things you need to know to get on with the job. After a while, even on windows you end up installing a load of linux tools. The other day we were talking about the APNG format for animated GIFs. No dice on Edge, no problem on Firefox. Mark above in this thread talking about 32bit apps. Linux has been 64 bit for YEARS. Its not a thing that you even need to consider on linux. It just does your head in come the end.

Pretty much this. I was on Ubuntu until the Unity switch. I stuck with it for 1 full release cycle, but I just could not deal with their version of "start bar" pinned to the side(IIRC, it was not movable until 1-2 releases later), and the Mac style menu system(ie, one bar instead of one at the top of each application). Their whole "simple menu finding paradigm was extremely nice sounding, but by that time I had skipped ship to Mint and did not look back. Mint had stuck with gnome 2.8, then the next release they did gnome 3(which was full of it's own bugs and/or complete shifts in UI behavior), and finally they settled on Cinnamon which is the best of gnome 2.x and gnome 3.x stuff without most of the "crap" of either. TBF, I have not upgraded in 2-3 years, so the gnome 3.x line may have fixed many of its earlier stupid decisions, as I seem to think they had backed off of their most extreme changes or at least offered more customization options.)

[Straf]

I installed Classic Menu Indicator which gives me a shortcut to just about everything I need.

I haven't tried to run Skyrim or Fallout 3under Wine yet.

[Jaxilon]

Interesting info here from some of you guys.

As a software developer who works in a windows environment, currently Win10 which has some things I like, especially over Win8 (which I didn't like much), I have to say that the popups and ninja updates have been causing me to just lose my potatoes!

It feels like often when I sit down to get some work done I'm foiled by having to update some garbage that has nothing to do with me. I can't say how many times things have started going wonky and then after an hour of frustration giving up and rebooting as a last resort only THEN to find windows has an update so "Please wait...." <cue elevator music>. Oh sure, supposedly you can solve this by getting the "Server versions" but talk about creating a market for yourself?! It might not be so maddening if they at least informed you that an update was in the wings instead of slapping your environment while you are in there. I suppose I may have notifications turned off but if you don't you get those annoying popups along the side that distract you from whatever concentration you are in the middle of. Rebooting could become my first response to a possible bug except that when you have 4,5 or more applications rolling at once it's just a pain to have to shut it all down, reboot and get back to the point where you can do some work. Holy cow, I'm full rant now so I'm going to just stop...GRRRR!

I have only barely played around with Linux but I'm starting to strongly desire another foray into it. My patience with what they have done with windows is practically spent and I worry for my sanity. When you sit down to create something the last thing you need are tools that put hurdles in front of your flow and that's what it feels like. I want to be a creator more than a consumer so maybe it's time I should dive full in to the Linux world.

[ChickPea]

I use Windows 10 at work and I'm not a fan. I spent ages tweaking settings and turning off all the various snooping options only to discover that, after a big update, they'd all been turned back on again. I was raging! Things like this make me want to put my fist through the monitor. (My poor boss. I think he wants to put his fingers in his ears sometimes!)

I imagine software developers will find much to like about Linux, though missing a certain piece of software is usually the stumbling block to switching. I often wonder how many artists would make the jump if Adobe's products were available for Linux. Don't see that happening any time soon, though. It's kinda funny. I would probably pay the tenner a month for Photoshop if it were available on Linux, but I'm not paying it if I have to use Windows. It's not worth it to me.

[jfrazierjr]

Interesting info here from some of you guys.

As a software developer who works in a windows environment, currently Win10 which has some things I like, especially over Win8 (which I didn't like much), I have to say that the popups and ninja updates have been causing me to just lose my potatoes!

It feels like often when I sit down to get some work done I'm foiled by having to update some garbage that has nothing to do with me. I can't say how many times things have started going wonky and then after an hour of frustration giving up and rebooting as a last resort only THEN to find windows has an update so "Please wait...." <cue elevator music>. Oh sure, supposedly you can solve this by getting the "Server versions" but talk about creating a market for yourself?! It might not be so maddening if they at least informed you that an update was in the wings instead of slapping your environment while you are in there. I suppose I may have notifications turned off but if you don't you get those annoying popups along the side that distract you from whatever concentration you are in the middle of. Rebooting could become my first response to a possible bug except that when you have 4,5 or more applications rolling at once it's just a pain to have to shut it all down, reboot and get back to the point where you can do some work. Holy cow, I'm full rant now so I'm going to just stop...GRRRR!

I have only barely played around with Linux but I'm starting to strongly desire another foray into it. My patience with what they have done with windows is practically spent and I worry for my sanity. When you sit down to create something the last thing you need are tools that put hurdles in front of your flow and that's what it feels like. I want to be a creator more than a consumer so maybe it's time I should dive full in to the Linux world.

Assuming you don't have a locked down boot process, I would suggest doing a split partition with Windows and Linux Mint, assuming you have plenty of hard drive space available. If you want use specific commercial software products(and especially games, but also things such as Turbo tax or Word,etc), you have to keep windows in some form. If however your entire computing world revolves around internet, email, and in our case GIMP, then Linux is perfectly fine. I also use Virtualbox(FREE!) for those really rare instances where I need windows in an emulated environment(such as Turbotax for example).

One big issue with Linux is the dizzying array of software choices and it's rather hard to find objective resources to provide information about whats best for a particular need you might have. This may not be an issue for the most basic of users, but might cause issues if you want to say for example stream to twitch, do some video editing, etc.

One thing to note, I have not kept up with Linux distributions and their differences in around 4-5 years, so a lot may have changed. At the time, Ubuntu and then Mint(for the record, Mint is a rebuild of the official Ubuntu release and follows along about 1-2 months after the previous Ubuntu release date) were hands down the easiest to install, configure and set up. There were a few other distributions who at that time were showing some signs of consumer easy to install processes and I am sure some of them have gotten very good at making the process super easy.

I have been using mostly Linux of the past 7 years or so at home because my new windows 7 machine thought it would be perfectly funny to replace my vendor provided network card driver(Windows update) with a generic driver WHICH DID NOT WORK! After three months of undoing that after each automated updated, I started using Linux full time. Granted, I am a technical person, but I found Ubuntu at the time fairly easy to understand in most cases, but did have several learning curves to handle. I ended up switching to Mint because of the Ubuntu Unity desktop replacement and could not handle Unity's workflow style change.

I really prefer Mint because it finds that common ground between "nerdy" and "consumer". I am a programmer by trade and have loads of experience with computers(built perhaps 20+ computers from parts in the past 25 years), but i don't want to have to micro manage EVERYTHING and Mint seems to sit right in the middle... it's easy enough most consumers and flexible enough for most nerds.

[johnvanvliet]

dual booting is great to start
just DISABLE win 10's " fast boot" !!!!

it IS NOT a fast boot but just sending the machine into hibernation
-- it DOSE NOT turn off the machine

in the office environment RHEL and SUSE are common

opensuse is free
suse 12 like RHEL 7 requires a support contract to get updates and install software