Re: Why are you on a *nix desktop?

Wow, I have to disagree with the application and driver support.

Linux Fedora has been my primary desktop for the last 4 years. I am currently on Fedora 11. For that matter, I have 9 machines here and Cisco networking gear. NONE of them use Windows as the host OS. (Oh, yes, pure geek, I even have a rack for my servers, switches and routers in the basement.)

I have a Samsung 22" monitor and have full resolution (last 2 years) using ATI Radeon and nVidea Geforce cards. They are supported, no extra driver software even for the ATI card.

Everything I plug in, USB, iSCSI, CF, SD... they all just show up.

Applications... OpenOffice has come a long way. I use it exclusively. I have even imported all my 123 spreadsheets. It handles MS Office documents and Excel spreadsheets with no major issues.

Mind you, when I have to use RDi or WDSC, or even Client Access, it's back to Windows, but in VirtualBox and W2K at that. (Stop laughing, it still works, and it works well. I haven't sent Bill Gates any money for the last 7 years.)

My Dell Mini 10 v runs Ubuntu. And there again, no issues at all. Even exported my Desktop's VM for W2K and RDi/Client Access and imported it to VirtualBox on Ubuntu and it just runs perfectly.

My experience with Linux has not been without those application and driver issues, but that was 5 years ago when I couldn't get Fedora to run on my Thinkpad.



On 11/04/2009 02:44 PM, David Gibbs wrote:

Aaron Bartell wrote:

I thought I would start a thread that would allow us to get to know each
other and why we ended up here.

I'm not ... really. Although I think it's a great goal.

As most of you know, the midrange.com lists run on linux ... but for the moment, Linux doesn't have enough application& driver support to be viable on the workstation.

I do have Ubuntu 9.10 installed on my laptop, and I play around with it from time to time.

david

p.s. I *REALLY* don't want this list to turn into a debate about if linux is viable on the desktop or not.