I’ve noticed a few linux-related threads last couple of days. There must be more of us here than I thought. Just because I’m curious.
If you feel like stating or advocating a particular window manager / desktop environment, just post a reply. Me, I’m a big fan of ION, though I’m testing xmonad right now and it works very well.
“You’re”?! Oh dammit.
I use Ubuntu, insofar as one can say I actually use that box for much of anything. It’s my backup server.
Ubuntu for me. 9.10.
I have to wonder, what does desktop or windows have to do with anything? (X and motif are still the harshest words I know)
The desktop environment/window manager (there is plenty of overlap) provides the main way to interact with GUI applications under X. I was just curious to see if people had some “non-standard” (not Gnome or KDE, basically) preferences for that.
Motif is a gui toolkit. You may or may not have preferences for toolkits, but for most applications, you get no choice in the matter.
I dabbled in Linux a little about five years ago and it wasn’t for me. Now, I don’t intend on putting Vista back on my laptop. My laptop hard drive crashed a month ago and I couldn’t find my Vista disks, so I put on Ubuntu 9.10. It does what I need from my laptop: browse the internet, run Open Office. I’d like to get MS Office working under Wine, but my first attempt didn’t take and I haven’t put the time into figuring out why.
When I order my next desktop, I’ll probably put Windows 7 on it because I want an elite gaming machine. Wine is good enough for some games, but I’m not going to monkey around trying to get the latest and greatest to work.
I was being somewhat sarcastic, and managed to miss implying that guis are wastefull, silly apps, that have no place in a discussion about linux distros. :smack:
I’m going to blame irritation about having to work past 8pm tonight on my inablity to mock guis properly.
I look forward to your thread blasting GUIs 
Anyway, since my work involves building web applications, I really can’t do without them. Aside from browsing, the main thing I really need GUIs for is watching movies - got no TV.
But point me to a multi-monitor version of GNU screen and I might consider your POV. Otherwise, where am I going to put all the terminal sessions? 
Multi-monitor? I’ve got more boxes than I do heads, and all my monitors are on my windows boxes. The linux machines all boot to 3, anyway. (sadly I’m going to have to learn the interface to be able to explain it to my nephew since we gave him an old laptop with ubuntu on it)
I’m a curmudgen though. I was still making new admins learn ed :eek: years after there were better editors available in single user.
“Curmudgen” isn’t quite the word I’d use, you cruel, evil man. 
Ergh. ed. I used to be able to use it, in 1993 when it should rightly be already completely obsolete.
But about the multi-head; I do run more machines than heads, but for my development work I run a desktop with 2 heads because when you’re running systems with over 3 running components, having direct view of all the logs, plus an editor and the output/browser/whatever is very useful.
I might switch back to 1 monitor when 32" monitors become more affordable.
I’ve used puppy linux to boot and recover data from more than one broken Windows box, and just introduced another Windows user to it. And I play in Ubuntu on a VM on my Mac.
Where are all the Mint users? When people ask what to use, it seems like there’s always a couple people recommending Mint. I just downloaded Mint 8 to try out based on those recommendations, and now here it sits with zero votes.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a few months, but that’s the only one I’ve tried, so I haven’t voted myself.
First off, this is a pretty fresh poll. There may be mint users out there.
Second, it really depends on what you want to do. Ubuntu is (AFAIK) quite good at providing otherwise tricky drivers for things like WIFI and 3D/Video cards. Mint may or may not be good at that, but Ubuntu’s Debian base assures a damn good platform for actual working programs. As I stated in some other thread, I’m just happy that the new linux kernels provide pretty good video drivers.
But I don’t care about games at all, and good 3D is only marginaly interesting to me. What I do care about is having 2 or more monitors and GFX cards that will react fast in 2D and video streaming.
Mint is actually just a fork of Ubuntu that’s supposed to be even more user friendly. It’s got the same Debian base, and actually includes the proprietary drivers that Ubuntu makes you download after installation.
BTW, I’m not voting, since I haven’t tried anything but DSL and Ubuntu. But I will say I liked DSL better. It actually gave me the mistaken impression that all Linux distros were superfast.