[pecenipicek]

Try Linux mint, spin up a VM and try it, you have nothing to lose but several days of your time.

fixed that for you. i cant count the times things which would have been simple tasks on windows have taken me days to get working on linux systems. linux users are all masochists (sometimes you get a wizzard, but i hate to think of what they had to do to get to that point).

Good luck, have fun!

Spoiler:

thats how i started learning linux stuff

The stage3 install? Try the stage2 or stage1 ones.

As an old Gentoo user, I can't think of a more terrifying command than:

emerge -e system

i've been through two "emerge -e world" so far... usually i do it when a new major gcc version hits and recompile the whole thing overnight... ( i'm on funtoo btw )

rereading the bit about emerge -e system thing... stage3 has been a thing for how long now? 5-6 years if memory serves? when i first touched gentoo, it was already supposedly unsupported way of installing gentoo...

i think you may be exaggerating about the fun. every linux experience ive had has been horrible, and ive even had a few classes on linux. ive had the desire nay even the need to use linux, but ive never enjoyed one second of it.

weird, that's how I feel about windows.

Quoted for the bloody truth...

[Fury]

Try Linux mint, spin up a VM and try it, you have nothing to lose but some of your time.

OpenSUSE is another distro worth considering.

Someone mentioned Linux is for masochists and then someone else came in to drum Gentoo. Point proven.

But really, even if one distro doesn't seem to work for you, chances are some other will. Just try them out, nothing to lose except time.

[Ghostavo]

Try Linux mint, spin up a VM and try it, you have nothing to lose but several days of your time.

fixed that for you. i cant count the times things which would have been simple tasks on windows have taken me days to get working on linux systems. linux users are all masochists (sometimes you get a wizzard, but i hate to think of what they had to do to get to that point).

Good luck, have fun!

Spoiler:

thats how i started learning linux stuff

The stage3 install? Try the stage2 or stage1 ones.

As an old Gentoo user, I can't think of a more terrifying command than:

emerge -e system

i've been through two "emerge -e world" so far... usually i do it when a new major gcc version hits and recompile the whole thing overnight... ( i'm on funtoo btw )

rereading the bit about emerge -e system thing... stage3 has been a thing for how long now? 5-6 years if memory serves? when i first touched gentoo, it was already supposedly unsupported way of installing gentoo...

From since I can remember, about 8 years ago, the using stage3 was the only supported method and the tutorial hasn't changed much since then.

But when I see something like one of those commands I cringe at the possibility of it breaking your system. Which has happened more times than wish I remembered.

[Klaustrophobia]

XP (and 2000) are deemed safe enough to be plugged into components serving nuclear reactors.  good enough for me.

[The E]

XP (and 2000) are deemed safe enough to be plugged into components serving nuclear reactors.  good enough for me.

That's.....not a particularly useful bit of information, as the requirements for those are only tangentially related to the requirements of a device connected to the internet.

[Nuke]

industrial rigs dont count. they are usually built with everything need and sit idle most of the time (the things they do dont really tax the system). so there is no point in upgrading them. especially if they are off the internet.

[Dragon]

Yeah. You could use DOS for all we care, as long as it's not physically connected to the web and you don't use USB sticks with it. In fact, it was still in use in at least one place a few years ago (I know, because my father, being old enough to be proficient with DOS, was called in to fix something on it. ) and probably still is. As long as the only way for a system to communicate with outside world is the keyboard and a display, the only security it needs is a good system password and a few screws (or a locker) to secure the case from being stolen.

[Nuke]

im rather proficient in dos myself. i had that down when i was 9 and spent the summer with my grandparents. gramps was an electronics technician, fixed tvs and then moved over to computers in the 80s. while i was there i read the ibm dos manual, got my elite rating, also learned about porn from the 386 era.

[Dragon]

Leisure Suit Larry? I love old DOS games, but can't stand working with a command-line interface, whether it's in Linux or in DOS. It wasn't a bad system, a bit primitive, but works well enough, especially if you get a GUI for it (read: an early Windows version, from the times they weren't a complete OS. ), or don't have to manually interact with it at all (as is the case with most specialized equipment that runs it).

[Nuke]

dos may be a command line interface, but its a command line interface that makes sense. commands are mostly named after what they do. linux has some weird commands. though compairing dos to linux is like comparing a donkey to a 747.

[Polpolion]

Speaking of shells I find it hilarious that Microsoft has made an advanced, modern CLI like PowerShell but they still can't figure out how to dynamically change shell's width with the window's width.

[Fury]

PowerShell is essentially my job these days and far bigger issue than shell width is that Microsoft doesn't seem to know how to make newer versions of PowerShell backwards compatible with their existing products. I've been stuck with version 2.0 because it's simply not possible to use 3.0 or 4.0 without running into problems. It's sad really.

[FlamingCobra]

Debian Live distro, man.

[S-99]

I think my main problem with Ubuntu was that my box has a Radeon HD4670, which because AMD is dicks is already on the "legacy driver" path.  I had a hell of a time getting the official AMD-provided Linux driver to work right, and for whatever reason I had absolutely no luck with the open-source version.  In the end I'm not even sure if I ever managed to get it acknowledged correctly, because just the basic Unity desktop was running ridiculously slowly when compared to a normal Windows install.  I was just trying it out in an attempt to get a Linux promo item in Team Fortress 2, so after I got the game to load and grabbed the item, I gave up and uninstalled.

Amd hasn't had the greatest linux drivers for a while. Nvidia driver support in linux is better. But, i no longer have nvidia hardware and am stuck with radeon onboard graphics. So far all is good. I hope **** doesn't turn up eventually

Someone mentioned Linux is for masochists and then someone else came in to drum Gentoo. Point proven.

In reality, i believe it more safe to say that the point was proven that just gentoo is for masochists.

Back to reactos.

Reactos would be cool if a beta would finally come out for once. Perhaps reactos is too ambitious? It's basically an all in one version of windows (compatibility from xp on up), but opensource. One thing that probably did slow them down was the internal code audit they had a while ago. The repercussions of simply hearing about the audit weren't positive in the opensource community. Results of the audit were never released as it was all internal (the results i'd like to know for the hell of it). Reactos has strict policies for clean room reverse engineering. Of course they do, they don't want microsoft breathing down their shoulders.

[Nuke]

alphas are available but they are hardly stable enough for day to day use. last time i used it (i wasnt to say back with version 0.3.12), the system was functional but there were all kinds of interface glitches. but it was clear that they were serious about making an operating system, and have periodically released several versions since ive heard about what they were doing.

the audit had to happen because microsoft wanted assurances that windows wasnt being decompiled and repackaged as open source. i dont see the audit as something that needs to be reviewed by everyone, its probibly just a bunch of hashes and diffs against various versions of windows to prove that the code is original. it was obviously good enough to keep ms from shutting them down (if anything would have been found amiss, ms could have butchered them).

right now they are running a crowd funding campaign:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/reactos-community-edition

seems they are trading assurances that applications and drivers that backers use will work with the 0.4.0 version of the operating system, in exchange for donations.

[Mr. Vega]

Dunno if it becomes more essential for an XP user, but NoScript is your friend.

[jr2]

Yeah. You could use DOS for all we care, as long as it's not physically connected to the web and you don't use USB sticks with it. In fact, it was still in use in at least one place a few years ago (I know, because my father, being old enough to be proficient with DOS, was called in to fix something on it. ) and probably still is. As long as the only way for a system to communicate with outside world is the keyboard and a display, the only security it needs is a good system password and a few screws (or a locker) to secure the case from being stolen.

*smacks you with a fish*

That's only if the system is dumb enough to use autorun...  Like Windows USED to before it was patched.