Vista? Options

[Maccabee]

What do you think of it?

vs xp who wins?

Im not worried about speed so I like vista. WHich I never thought Id say.
As my new vista computer gets old and slow I might put xp on it to speed it up.

Thoughts?

What are you running?

Vista? Xp? OS X?

Thoughts?

[heyo-captain-jac...]

Linux is better.

But out of Windows, I'd say Vista.

[Maccabee]

Linux is better.

But out of Windows, I'd say Vista.

What is Linux! I constantly hear about it but dont know what it is!
I know its an operating system but i have never seen or used it! And i dont know what is different about it? and how to get it!

[heyo-captain-jac...]

What is Linux! I constantly hear about it but dont know what it is!
I know its an operating system but i have never seen or used it! And i dont know what is different about it? and how to get it!

http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=434787

http://www.linux.com/

http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=626185

There's other distributions, my favorites are Mandriva, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu.

Also, wall of text:

CODE

Linux Pros:

* You can leave you're computer on for like a year and it'll still be just as responsive as when you first booted it.
* Looks prettier than vista whilst using massively less resources to provide the same kind of effects.
* Pretty much all software for linux is free.
* Linux itself is free.
* When I installed linux on my laptop I didn't need to locate a single driver for any piece of hardware everything was configured for me automatically.
* Linux is a piece of piss to get all your drivers and software updated. It's literally just a one click process to update all your software and drivers to the latest versions.
* Background processes don't rape your resources at all. I get much better battery life on Linux, as 99% of the time the CPU is at 0%
* I downloaded a 1Kb bash script which auto-locks the desktop if my mobile phone moves more than 10 feet from the PC, and unlocks it again automatically when I return, which I think is awesome for some reason.
* No viruses.
* Super secure and unf*ckupable once configured. I installed Ubuntu on my grans computer after she managed to get over two dozen viruses/spyware apps installed on the machine under XP.


Linux Cons:

* Filesystem will be pretty alien to people used to MS-DOS/NT based filesystems.
* Games don't run quite as well under Wine as they do under windows.
* Some commands require the user to muck about with command lines/console, which may seem intimidating to novice users.


These are pretty specific to Ubuntu/Kubuntu, as that's the distribution I currently have installed.





Windows Pros:

* Windows media center. I absolutely love this feature of vista and it's probably the only reason why I haven't upgraded my gaming PC back to XP. If linux's MediaPortal ever gets as good as Media Center I'll die a happy man.
* DirectX. Microsoft have admittedly done an excellent job of persuading developers to use their game development platform. This means that windows has a MASSIVE catalog of games developed for it. If OpenGL ever catches back up with DX in terms of features & ease of use for developers we'll hopefully see much more cross-platform gaming. Until then, windows is really the only choice when it comes to an OS for a gaming rig.


Windows Cons:

* Have to re-format every few months, as after a while windows slows to a crawl and takes an age to respond to anything you tell it to do.
* Vista's fancy effects require some pretty meaty specs to be run correctly.
* You Have to pay for windows.
* Every piece of software updates differently, if you wanted to update every bit of software on your machine to the latest versions it's take ages.
* Background processes rape your resources constantly. Want to install a new printer? sure, but lets install fifteen background processes while we're at it. Want to install a PDF viewer? sure, but lets force you to install a background process and yet another system tray icon as well.
* Viruses are pretty much exclusively developed for windows, so obviously windows has a greater virus/spyware risk.


These pretty much apply equally to all windows versions (with the exception of 2000, which I reckon was the most stable, secure Windows version of recent years.)

Codebox'd because it's probably tl;dr for most people.