Does Linux Still Suck....for Games?
<div class="IPBDescription">Or software?</div> I was thinking about possibly trying out linux, I have a 8GB HD that I use for my virtual memory, but since the VM limit in XP is 4GB its only half taken. Four gigs should be enough space for Linux right? The only problem is, there isn't any way in hell I can go without a few programs, such as:
-GTA: Vice City
-Half-Life
-Baldurs Gate 2
-Macromedia Dreamweaver (website development studio)
-Adobe Photoshop (take a wild guess...)
-Kazaa (I mostly use Bittorrent, but still need Kazaa for quick downloads)
The only problem is, I know Linux can run some Windows apps, but I can't ever find a list of what it can run. And many times I hear there are occassional problems running Windows programs under Linux. From what I have read, only a few games work under Linux, and I havent found anything about Dreamweaver or Photoshop working (Use GIMP? Yuck).
So any Linux folks able to run any of those programs? And what do you need to go through to get them to run? <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
-GTA: Vice City
-Half-Life
-Baldurs Gate 2
-Macromedia Dreamweaver (website development studio)
-Adobe Photoshop (take a wild guess...)
-Kazaa (I mostly use Bittorrent, but still need Kazaa for quick downloads)
The only problem is, I know Linux can run some Windows apps, but I can't ever find a list of what it can run. And many times I hear there are occassional problems running Windows programs under Linux. From what I have read, only a few games work under Linux, and I havent found anything about Dreamweaver or Photoshop working (Use GIMP? Yuck).
So any Linux folks able to run any of those programs? And what do you need to go through to get them to run? <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
Comments
As for Photoshop yeah, Gimp is not a good substitute, but hey its free. Although you might be able to use WINE to get it running...
There are probably dozens of linux Kazaa and other P2P clients out there.
Linux isn't ready to be a mainstream desktop OS yet. /me ducks the avoid thrown objects from zealots
Ok let me rephrase, what GOOD games run on Linux? <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
/runs
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To a lot of the NightWatch staff GIMP is better than Photoshop.....
And it would feel very odd saying I use a GIMP image editor <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
"Linux is a crap-*** hobby OS."
Linux is most definately not a desktop OS, so don't even bother. I tried installing Mandrake once. It's the reason my second hard drive broke, and it screwed up Windows to the point where I had to format. Avoid Linux like a plague.
And GIMP is quite a bit more powerful than Photoshop, albeit not quite as user-friendly... if you're a power-user, you should take the time to learn GIMP. Free, fast, and it does a heckuva lot more than Adobe.
I'd personally recommend giving Linux 6-8GB to start, just so you can install the full package set, depending upon the version you use... never know when you might need one of the bits that's tucked away in some package or other, and don't want to bother with downloading the package or installing it manually from the distro CD. Though that includes the ~100MB /boot partition (so the boot partition won't cross the 1024 boundary, just to be sure.. prevents the system from being unable to boot properly), and a good chunk for the swap partition if you have a decent amount of memory. All you really need for the actual filesystem is about 6-7GB.
If you're just getting going with Linux, I have to recommend RedHat. Mandrake may be a *bit* more user-friendly, but the kernel patches they incorporate leave a semi-unstable system until you compile a custom kernel from the clean source.. a daunting task for the Linux-newbie, at least until you've done it a few times. If you're a more accomplished user, you probably know which distro you prefer, though I recommend Slackware, Debian or Sorcerer for the real power-user who knows what's what. (steep learning curves... RH is much lower until you understand the filesystem structure and basic administration commands).
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To a lot of the NightWatch staff GIMP is better than Photoshop.....<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hell yes.
<img src='http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~afoster/manhole-in-gimp.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image'>
Drag the corners of the mesh to where they're wanted, click a button, and hey presto, the perspective's gone. Quick touch-up, and instant texture.
I <i>assume</i>this is possible in Photoshop, what with it being slightly more expensive and all that, but people keep being surprised by this feature in the Gimp. If it can be done, can someone tell me? I want to write a texturing tutorial, but don't want to make it Gimp-specific. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
Linux is put to much better use in servers and some networking hardware, Linux routers are so much more powerfull that your average router.
Haven't had to restart computer in 3 months.
GG Linux <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
Here's a newsflash: There can be more than one good OS at a time.
Amen. 20 minutes of fooling in both gave me better junk in Photoshop <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
Macs are good for creatives.
Windows are good for everything else.
This is all based on personal experience o
The thing with Linux is that it is a 'boys club' of OS users. They say they want to make it big, and knock down the monopoly, and yet they do nothing to standardise program interfaces or usability past what is given with the distro you run, and you almost need to be able to write your own programs to be able to run the existing ones. "Yes, it sounds very useful, but how do I use it?". This applies to everything open source, there are no groups working on standards that are user-interface based and enforceable. It gives the coder more options as to how they set their program out, but coders in general are notoriously bad at understanding the basic user.
Windows solves a lot of this with a simple, almost over-easy interface. People may call it dumbed down, but it certainly does the job whether you have never used a computer before, or whether youve been bit-twiddling since the ENIAC. Good help and support (without the need to scour newsgroups and recode your OS every time there is a problem), standardised keys and program components are the way to go.
And now for the cheap jibe:
Linux is the pastime of sadists. They don't dislike Bill Gates for his money, they hate him so they can hurt themselves more. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
Macs are good for creatives.
Windows are good for everything else. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hit the nail on the head.
If you need Linux, you'll know it. A lot of what I do with it is either impossible or horribly expensive, or would involve jumping through so many hoops that the Linux route becomes far simpler. Just running it to be 'cool' is silly. All the hip kids are running MacOS X these days.
Of course, I still have a dual-boot machine - while it's <i>possible</i> to run some games in Linux, native ports can be a pain to get running while emulating Windows is invariably buggy and riddled with problems. So, if I want to play a game, I reboot into Windows. Far simpler.
Linux <i>is</i> improving as a desktop OS, and a recent KDE is a more than adequate replacement for the Windows desktop. Of course, more esoteric KDE applications are often a bit lacking - KOffice is 'nice try, should be good in a year or so', it's only Konqueror (web browser and file manager) and KMail (email) that have really had a chance to be polished so far. You can run something like the pretty good OpenOffice instead, but then you get the problem of huge wodges of the user interface working in dramatically different ways. Ack.
The Gimp? Different again. It's quirky, odd-looking and is lacking a couple of high-end features that make its use problematic in print work, but I love it to bits. It's why I originally installed Linux back in 1997. Yes, Photoshop is a brilliant program, but it's also a bit more expensive. How many people here with Photoshop have a <i>legal</i> copy? <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
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But to be brief, here's what happened and why it shouldn't happen again. There's some kind of horrible bug with either our filesystem (ReiserFS) or our operating system (Linux 4.5.19 and/or 4.5.20) or some combonation of the two. The plain truth, as I've learned it over the years, is that Linux just sucks. Now don't get me wrong, it doesn't suck anywhere near as much as anything written by Microsoft, but the developers have rushed its advancement too quickly, likely as a result of their competition with Windows (That's right, I blame Windows for Linux's faults). As far as I've seen, there is simply no stable version of Linux. Every version of Linux in existance has bugs. They don't bother to find and fix all the bugs before introducing new one. So each new version introduces as many new bugs as it claims to fix from previous versions.
So what's the solution? FreeBSD! A systadmin friend of mine suggested this long ago, but it's hard to simply abandon a whole operating system and the learning curve that comes with it. But we've been doing it recently and I truely believe that BSD is God's operating system. Why is it so good? Because they don't release a version as "stable" until the development version is two years old. There's no rush to introduce new features and there are none of these horrible disasterous bugs that destroy every file being written to during an unplanned power cycle. As I read on a website somewhere: "BSD is for people who like Unix. Linux is for people who hate Windows."
Case in point: Since we started migrating new servers to FreeBSD many months ago, the new BSD servers have not crashed once due to software (we had one major problem with the Keenspace server, but that was due to a failing hard drive).
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So what's the solution? FreeBSD!
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FreeBSD?
It's okay, but the package management's terrible, the help-you-get-started configuration is worse than useless (contrast this with SuSE's YaST, which is plain godly), hardware support is lacking, and disk throughput is pretty terrible for IO-intensive stuff.
It's <i>definitely</i> the foundations of a good OS (it's also seen as MacOS X and now important chunks of Windows), but in its more usual form it's too much like Linux was several years ago.
And 'Linux 4.5.19 and/or 4.5.20'? What the hell kind of version numbers are those? They aren't kernel versions, they aren't ReiserFS versions - what are they?
2) They are not monthly dues, they are to support the continued development and pay the licensing fees for the improved ISW support.
3) He probably meant 2.5.29 and 2.5.30. Which were notoriously unstable, and why I stick with the 2.4.x kernel branch for now.
Additionally.. I used to be an op in #linuxhelp on DALNet. We had a guy come in for help with his system. Over the course of an hour (mostly due to him evading questions) we find out that he is not the one who set up the machine. The guy who set up the machine had been fired four years ago, after a constant uptime of two years without intervention.
The reason the system finally went down? The mail spool finally barfed after over SIX YEARS uptime, with no updates or user intervention. The system? Debian (Buzz).
GG Windows. GG BSD.