That Crazy FOSS Thread

My most powerful machine right now is a laptop... It has a i7-4500u as a cpu (only dual core), only 4 gigs of ram (though I think I'll be putting more, it tends to use swap whenever I have way too many tabs opened in browsers) and a 500 gig SSD (which I put in there). It could connect to wifi without having to get proprietary drivers or firmwares (take that, windows), works fine with open source graphics (intel and ati) on debian jessie. Using gnome 3 on this is actually enjoyable.

ren wrote: My most powerful machine right now is a laptop... It has a i7-4500u as a cpu (only dual core), only 4 gigs of ram (though I think I'll be putting more, it tends to use swap whenever I have way too many tabs opened in browsers) and a 500 gig SSD (which I put in there). It could connect to wifi without having to get proprietary drivers or firmwares (take that, windows), works fine with open source graphics (intel and ati) on debian jessie. Using gnome 3 on this is actually enjoyable.

Nice! I hear running Debian is a bit more of a challenge than something like Ubuntu, requires more technical expertise, is this a correct assessment? Also they're known for being very methodical about making sure things are as secure as possible before committing to upgrades? (or perhaps I'm thinking of Slackware?) Either way, probably a spin for someone with a bit of experience under their belt I'm sure.

I find that debian always works the way it's meant to, and other ditros do not... making debian a lot easier to manage.

CryojenX wrote:

LTK wrote: I would like to be on an open source OS at home, but I've never really tried to do it. Never had powerful enough hardware (I felt like) to do the dual-boot route.

Dual booting doesn't really require anything special in the hardware department, rather the main hiccup can be whether or not the distro you're looking at works out of the box (so to speak) with your already established hardware - often times some distros have difficulties with Nvidia graphics cards (though there are solutions) and KDE in particular has issues with a lot of sound hardware, but it's really more a KDE specific issue. Linux Mint is particularly popular and fairly easy to use, and since it's based on both Ubuntu and GNOME underpinning, has much better compatibility with these kinds of hardware, but also has a a choice of desktop environments that are very Windows-like in their appearance and functionality.

To piggyback on that, there are also plenty of other desktop environments you can install which are very minimalistic and practical.

To name a few:

- Xfce (Which Ubuntu has a flavor for, called Xubuntu)
- Blackbox
- Fluxbox
- LXDE
- IceWM
- Enlightenment
- And more

Those are just the ones I've tried and used. Can't say that I liked them all, but there's one out there for everyone. And, if you don't particularly like something about your favorite DE, change it -- it's open source.

Also, if you're looking for more options than just Ubuntu (which is Debian-based), you can take a gander at Distrowatch.org. Tons of distros to look over and gather information about.

Luthien wrote: Those are just the ones I've tried and used. Can't say that I liked them all, but there's one out there for everyone. And, if you don't particularly like something about your favorite DE, change it -- it's open source.

That is - of course - provided one has time and natural affinity to learn the skills for programming, mind you.

True. I won't argue that point. But, the potential is out there, should you be willing to learn. (I think that applies to a lot of things, but I digress)

Ubuntu = Debian + Apps. One of the cool things about Ubuntu is the enormous support forums, howtos, video walkthroughs, etc. I like that they have gone beyond the desktop and I can use it for my servers, raspberry pis(raspbian actually), notebook, and hopefully soon my old smartphone. It's like the one OS to rule them all

After shopping around for some alternatives because of GNOME's system resource requirements (I like a lean machine), I finally settled on Xubuntu; that is an Ubuntu distro bundled with the XFCE desktop environment. It's pretty much everything I need (though I did end up adding Cairo-Dock).