[Coco] OT: Upgrade to Windows 10? -- Upgrade to Linux?

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 22 November 2015 10:09:20 Francis Swygert wrote:

> Gene, at this time I am trying to learn more about Linux so that i can
> use it seriously. I feel as though I am at the level where I can power
> up, login, browse Internet, and shutdown, but I want to go much
> farther. I think it is important to know Linux, and to know it well.
> But this is a Windows world. Many use Windows, for better or worse,
> for the simple fact that this is where the money is. I am trying to
> change that by looking for employment and projects that are more Linux
> centric, but once someone has been in a specific field for most of
> their career, it is hard to convince anyone that they can do anything
> other than that. If you can perform all your activities off the
> Windows grid then fantastic! 

The last windows I had was XP, came on an HP laptop I bought for use on 
the road. 100Gb drive, I immediately shrunk the windows partition to 
20Gb and installed the french version that has changed hands and names 
several time in the last 15 years.  I found out that keeping the XP 
around didn't mean diddly because the XP drivers for the radio in it 
were also worthless. So next install, fedora IIRC, wiped out the windows 
partition.  Several other versions have been installed over the last 13 
years, currently running lubuntu 14.04 LTS.

You see, I was already spoiled by first os9, then os9 L2, and since we 
were using amiga's for graphics at the tv station, I built an A2k, full 
blown with a 68040 card and 64 megs of simm dram.  When the boot HD died 
and I found that none of my carefully made backups actually contained 
the operating system itself due to the backup silently skipping any open 
files at the time it ran and I wasn't about to try and re-compose all 
that from my ancient wet ram.

So at that point, I built my first linux box and installed red hat 5.0 on 
it in late 1997.  Quite a few boxes later, the rest is all linux 
history.  And yes, even my cnc machinery is running linux, 3 of them, 
that elderly lappy, and this one, a quad core AMD phenom with 8Gb of 
dram, is now getting long in the tooth since I built this one in 2007.  
But its still fast enough for me, and barring a house fire or such, I 
doubt if I'll build another before I fall over. 

Too many other things on my "bucket" list. ;-)

> Unfortunately, this is not the case for 
> many of us. The biggest problem I have with Linux is that I can't find
> a way to determine which of the many (many) distros there are out
> there is best suited for my needs.

What, where are your main interests?

> *********************************************************
> Regards, Salvador
> ================================================================
> Actually, you probably CAN perform 85-90% of what you do in Windows
> with Linux. The most USER friendly, ready to run Linux seems to be
> Mint. It's also one of the most popular. If you go to DistroWatch it's
> the first on their list of top 10 distros. There is a good description
> of it there. ZDNet has it as number one also:The most popular Linux
> is... | ZDNet
>
> |   |
> |   |  |   |   |   |   |   |
> | The most popular Linux is... | ZDNetNo it's not Fedora, openSUSE, or
> | even Ubuntu. It's Linux Mint. |
> |
> | View on www.zdnet.com | Preview by Yahoo |
> |
> |   |
>
> I'm running Mint on one machine, though I haven't been using it much
> lately -- my wife's laptop is Win 10 and I find myself using it mostly
> since we have been together almost two years now. Mostly from
> convenience, not choice. She's not real tech savvy, and uses Windows
> at work, so I'm stuck there, but don't mind. I found no issues going
> between Mint and Windows, I switch between them all the time now. I
> did purchase codeWeavers "Crossover" product. It runs many Windows
> applications under Linux. It's a commercial version of WINE. The main
> advantage is that Crossover makes installing Windows apps much easier,
> and managing them. It's not necessary -- WINE is free and works the
> same, but I like the Crossover interface and user interactivity. I'm
> not a programmer and don't care if I never use the Linux terminal or
> command line (I have had to to make some minor tweaks, but do so
> following published instructions, not on my own!). Sounds like you
> want to learn Linux from the command line, which is fine -- I'd say
> required for a programmer/developer. I would think it would be nice to
> have an easy to use stable system that just works to learn from
> though, and Mint is that. Install then hit the terminal and learn from
> the command line as you would OS-9 on a CoCo3. Frank Swygert
>  Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
>  803-604-6548


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>