The following message is brought to you by Ubuntu, one of the most user friendly Linux Distros. I can do a lot of basic stuff, and all for free and Legit... I just can't fully convert yet as much as I would love too. Yes there are answers for pretty much anything if it isn't working right away on linux, weather its drivers or software, the "it can't be done" phrase is almost eliminated in linux, however if its not meant to be, its either a pain in the ass to get it to work, or it just doesn't work right, but it does work! I really wish one day that browsers will be almost like virtual machines and be completely platform independent, but we are not there yet. Shockwave and Silverlight for instance, just don't run on linux, not without moonlight(a meh linux port of silverlight) or running Shockwave in Wine&windows version of firefox. For reference I am using a Dell Inspiron E1705 Laptop that has a core duo intel intergrated graphics HDA... 1gb of ram (ddr2 553 or 667). Not bad considering I got it for 60 bucks, it was kinda beat up, so bought a new screen for $90, hard drive for $50, and ac charger for ~$10. I would love to run this laptop soley on Ubuntu, but I have to have some sort of flavor of windows on here, I chose XP(I also might do Hackintosh in the future which took almost an entire day to do the Quad boot I have on my Desktop [Vista,XP,Leopard,Ubuntu).
So XP runs Quake Live around 80-90 fps on I believe High settings, Ubuntu has a Weird Sound glitch with ALSA UnderBuffer or something to that effect that produces a crackling effect, which also drops my frames to about the teens to 30 fps, no matter what my video settings are. There is a forum post about this in the Quake Live forums and I have tried every command on all 15 pages (as of today) Posted in that thread.. nothing worked. I have always been under the impression games written for both Linux and Windows, that the Linux version will run better. World of Goo, that runs fantastic, they even sell a Debian version of the game which is no different than running a windows install its awesome. I will probably try some other games on this Laptop, yes its a Laptop its not for gaming, but I am a gamer and it doesn't hurt to have it with you to kill time, I also plan on checking out how emulators run on Linux vs Windows.
All this for the most part is not Linux's fault, its developers, corporations, and truthfully inertia. Yes I through in Physics. Windows works, its worked for a long time, corporate America uses it. Mac worked in the beginning and it stopped for a little bit, and Windows worked better, and Apple has never recovered fully, OS X worked and was Macs comeback, but still nothing to the windows market.
So whats the real point of this post? nothing just like most of these blog posts they are just an opinion/review... this blog is maybe read by 3 people, and the random Googler. I love the idea of openness and I have tried to get into linux in the past and never really could and after SUSE took nearly a weekend to install and still wasn't done I said Fuck it. Now since Ubuntu has gotten so easy to use, and you only need terminal commands to troubleshoot some stuff and take care of a few things its great, but it has also acted as a gateway. I am now going down the rabbit hole and going to check out all the flavors of Linux I can, probably starting with what Lifehacker has their top 5.
I could write about this all day, and I really need to have a conversation with someone who knows what they are doing, but most likely that won't be until Quakecon when I see my "extreme geeky friends".
