Still though, it's easy to install some distro on a cd and just run it off of that and give it a go. Just do it anyways cause it's easy and I'd like to hear your opinion on whatever distro. inferyes seems to hold Fedora 15 on gods pedestal.
This. Since there are LiveCDs for every distribution out there, trying it out is easy - just download the image and either burn to a CD or, if you are modern and don't want to use CDs, write the image on a USB drive. LiveCDs are run directly off the CD and allow you to use the OS as if it was installed on the physical disk, with the exception that anything you do will not be saved (hence it's a great way to experiment). If you use LiveUSBs, then settings can in fact be saved, which makes it essentially a Linux in your pocket, even if struggling with disk space.
Oh yea, and there are basically no viruses for Linux. Sure, there were some developed, but kernel patches and the fact that you need the root password for serious changes keeps all of that in line. In Windows, I have to use a firewall and an anti-virus, while here I don't need to use anything at all, the integrated firewall (and the router) takes care of everything.
You never have to apt-get anything. There is this fancy tool (that has always existed, by the way) called Software Center (or something similar) that lets you download packages by searching a name. And, surprise surprise! it also determines dependencies for you so you aren't downloading stupid libraries. Has it been 10 years since you even tried using Linux or something?
What are you talking about? I have less driver issues in Linux than I do in Windows. And 99% of the drivers install with the initial install and I never have to go hunt them down.
Indeed. The package managers are called a variety of names - Synaptic, YaST, Smart etc., but they all do the same thing - solve dependencies. You install a program, it will automatically pull in all its requirements.
With the drivers, it's two-fold. For one, Linux has a history of having drivers preinstalled, so the OS just works. I remember how I had to battle Windows for the installation of network card drivers, and failed in the end anyway (since you can't do much there without internet to begin with), while after booting to Linux, internet just worked, instantly. Same thing with many other pieces of hardware - sound card, wifi card, printer etc. They just work on Linux. However, some of the hardware can be limited, for example, my sound card has hardware support for EAX presets, but the lack of drivers on Creative part makes that feature unusable here. Still, those are just additional features, the core functionality is there.
Also, no, Radeon HD 5xxx support is there and is stable, at least with the binary blob. The open-source stack is not as well-developed, but that's to be expected.
And about the performance - the benchmarks are conducted with fresh installations of both OSs. In that case yes, their performance is similar. But in practise, long periods of usage will make Windows sluggish, while Linux is relatively immune to that. Plus, like I said, you need a whole lot of other programs to make Windows usable, while all those tools are already integrated into Linux.
About the command line, it's actually very, very useful. I often times find myself preferring it to GUIs. That's because certain tasks, like deleting files or searching through text files, is a whole lot faster in the command line. When I get back to Windows, I often find myself limited by the Windows Command prompt (can you imagine that, it has no
grep or
less!
)
