I've been strugling to get Linux installed correctly for the last several days and it has been very frustrating at times. Finally all my hardware is workning. But I'm still struggling to get the apps installed to make everything work how I want it.

Deficiencies I have found with Linux:
1. No top-notch newsreader (NNTP) application. I'm using Xnews in Windows and nothing in Linux is close.

2. Internet streaming video is difficult to solve. Realplayer works OK but not as good as in Windows. And some sites I just can't get video at all. Even in Windows, some sites say I need to view with MS Internet Explorer or upgrade my Netscape (I'm actually using Firefox).

3. The directory structure is confusing. I'm still learning the best place to put things: applications, downloads, images, music, etc.

4. Fedora Core 4 takes an eternity to boot (well several minutes anyway).

I'm really beginning to understand the concept of portability with Linux. You can install it on just about any machine. The applications are available as source code so you can configure it to any particular environment. That really is a great concept - to have free, open source. And now that I have figured how to configure, compile and install the source I am really beginning to like my Fedora setup. My goal is to get Linux running and performing all tasks justt as well as my other system (Windows XP).

My question to this forum is: Anyone out there think they can do everything on their Linux machine as well or better than can be done in Windows?

Other than gaming, yes. My Linux installations performed all needed tasks so well, I ditched Windows all together almost a year ago.

But everyone has different needs. Take for instance flash. I run an Athlon64, which means no Macromedia flash for this guy. That is not unless I want to set up a 32-bit chroot to run substandard (on my architecture) applications. Personally, no flash was a gift to me, I really hate what 99% of flash is used for on the web (advertising), so that is not a need I have. Like I said, different strokes for different folks. Use what works best for you. It bugs me when I hear people dog on dual-booters, because if they didn't need both OS's on their machine, they wouldn't likely have both OS's on their machine..

1) Tried Pan?
2) Vendor problem - most streaming video is done in WMV9 or WMV10, which the mplayer developers are trying to reverse-engineer. Try contacting the webmaster and requesting they offer their video content in an open format.
3) And C:\ is not confusing? It took you while to get used to DOS/Windows directory structure too -- you'll get used to it.
4) Try removing startup services you do not need. Otherwise, prepare to recompile the kernel. Remember, Linux is a UNIX-like OS, and is thus engineered more toward stability (meaning no reboots)...

As for the question: I do not have Windows on my home computer. I use it fine. My 2 computer-illiterate roommates use it fine... I don't see a problem...

I don't game and I've been Windows free for over 2 years now.. well except at work where I use more open source applications than I do that is provided to me since I have to have one XP machine cause the whole company is on Exchange..

trickykid, speaking of gaming.

It's amazing how you get out of the gaming habit when you use Linux regularly. You tend to do much more productive work with Linux because of so many interesting things to do like programming and scripting and so much more.

Yes. I've not played a game for a long time now and I'm amazed at that because at one time I used to be an avid gamer. Though I still want to play games, I find that my taste for playing games has come down considerably.

I must say I agree with you. I got my computer so I could play games in my room. However, I rarely play games (and that's not normal for a fifteen year old ) Yes, Linux increases productivity, I spend a lot of time on the net, sometimes helping people. The community is pretty neat.

I haven't used windows in at least 2 years. I don't miss it at all. I know I can do more on my linux pc then most can do in windows. you can trim down the boot time (my machine boots into a fully loaded gui in 1min 25sec. and shuts down in 46sec.) and maybe it's because my gaming intrests tend to be a bit more retro (emulators & Doom mostly) but I think there are plenty of great games for linux. besides what beats a perfect dark deathmatch in a window with playstation controllers?

I have a Gentoo Linux setup and I do most of my stuff in that rather than Windows. I don't play many games, mostly just World of Warcraft via Cedega. I actually prefer to play that in Linux due to the enormously faster load times. I have a pretty beefy system (P4 3.33 and a GeForce 6800GT) and graphical performance is near identical to Windows.

For the newsreader definately check out Pan. Still not quite as good as XNews, but damn close and has some features which are nicer.

I never liked Fedora Core. It feels big, bloated and slow. Once you've gotten some experience under your belt try Gentoo. Very streamlined and fast.

I deleted my windows about a couple weeks ago. And besides some games which I recently felt the urge to play, I havent had any problems. I have cxoffice so I have IE, for sites that need it. And I also installed windows media player using cxoffice. For word processing I'm using openoffice. And just found an older copy of dreamwever so I can use it with cxoffice.

So I'm extremely happy with linux. The best thing is going to the login screen, and then having enlightenment load immediatly after login (like 5 seconds). While in windows login took about 5 minutes literally (not joking.. and I did ms-config to change the startup progs.. still was slow)

I'm also amazed by the free, open source software. In windows I had to try to find demos for everything. Here I just find a program and im able to download it with no problem. I don't need to pay, though I can donate, but that's my choice. It's amazing when you really think about it, not having to spend any money on software, updates, anti-virus subscriptions, etc..

For me linux is a dream come true. Now, I have no crashes with it, no errors, no slowness, and everything works better, faster, and is less expensive than windows . I just wish I had grown up with someone who showed me linux first (but I guess then I wouldn't appreciate it and open source as much).

Whew that was a looong reply, guess I got carried away with me linking linux so much

1. knode

KNode cannot handle UUEncoding spanning multiple messages, whereas Pan can...
This made the decision for me...

knode handles everything I do. Pan is another good choice. The point was that there are good linux newsreaders.

Do you realize how long 1:25 actually is? That is a LONG time for a system to boot up. My Windows XP system gets to the login screen in 30 seconds flat. (About 19 seconds of that is BIOS stuff -- the Nvidia video card BIOS, then the motherboard BIOS, then the RAID BIOS -- and about 11 seconds from when Windows starts booting to login screen.) From login screen to desktop with all of my programs loaded and my CPU idle is about 23 seconds. In Linux, some of the smaller distros get down below 30 seconds for a full boot up... with some of the light weight window managers, people are getting to a desktop in not much more than that. I doubt that a boot into a KDE desktop with all the bells and whistles is going to beat Windows XP without some SERIOUS tweaking, but I don't think as many people go to Linux for boot up speed as for stability. Now shutdown is different, I shut down fairly quickly in Linux... I'd say it probably beats Windows. Still, Linux = stability... err... at least the OS itself. Now applications and even X are a different story.

I'd agree that the basic file structure is about on the same level as far as confusion. If you think about it, it's fairly logical to separate the storage by their physical partitions... \Windows and \Program Files certainly aren't bad... now \Documents and Settings... wtf?

The main problem with the Linux file system is the redundancy. Now, most of your program executables are in /usr/bin, but... they might also be in /sbin, or perhaps just /bin, heck, they might be in /home/username/bin... or they could be wherever the installer was darn well pleased to put it. And how many /lib folders are there? Like 3000? Try to look at the kernel source and find the one Makefile that does what you're looking for when you've never seen a source folder before... oh yeah... /src has quite a few duplicates I must say. And then having a program install itself to like 6 completely different folders all over your computer... and trying to track down the one place where you have to change some config file... yippy. And the fact that those places might be different depending on which distro you have.

I think you'll eventually get used to it. I'm halfway there myself. It makes sense in a way that only a program that has been worked on by hundreds of thousands of people over the course of some nearly 30 years or so can. It's a *nix.

Between RDP (remote desktop) and WINE (which even lets me run IE 6 on X) I find I can do everything I need to do under Linux, even at work. My biggest prob is still hardware support. Though the hardware manufacturers themselves are largely to blame for the deficiency.

1:25 is from pushing the power button to a fully loaded gui with all the programs that load at gui startup loaded. this includes bios, a mem check on a gig of ram, checking both cdroms for boot media, a 5 second grub delay so I can pass the kernel some boot arguments if need be and starting X on 3 graphics cards. Its not a fair comparison because XP doesn't do a file system check, it pauses at the log in screen giving it some more free time to do things and it loads the gui but it's not what I'd call fully booted because then it has to load other things and usualy I have to wait to get started even though it looks booted. when my desktop comes up thats it the computer is done with everything and I can do whatever I want right away. 1:25 doesn't seem that long to me besides I only boot up like twice a week.

btw I just checked if I time like you I get 32 sec from when it starts to load linux till it starts X (most of this being for a full filesystem check that windows just doesn't do) and another 20 to start X and load my desktop