I am starting to learn linux on my own. I was wondering if someone could tell be the "goodies of it." What I have learn so far is that it is a open source code with you can modified and changed, correct?

There are so many "goodies" about linux. The networking for Linux is awesome, the stablity, the server capablities and so on. You can use Linux for lots of things, look at dream works, they use Linux to make animation. Those are just a feew things, there are more once you start to learn it more.

Linux is a damn good operating system, and the "goodies" get better and more plentiful every day. In my humble opinion the GNU GPL license http://www.gnu.org/ is one of the greatest goodies.

Do you guys use Linux more than windows, or is it 50/50 thing?

Soon I'll have a party: 2 years Linux-only

hiya.
I'll tell you the truth. I became first familiar with Linux back in 1995. And that was just a couple of years after Linus came with the wonderful idea of Linux. Now, because Linux is sort of new, all of us have stumbled at many hardware not supported by linux drivers. Specially all that software aimed to be ran under Microsoft Windows. For this, many programs had to program drivers for the hardware that they had in their computers and perhaps do faivors to some friends and program some drivers for some other hardware. But, this was no miniscule compared to the huge amount of hardware out there, that most of the hardware, unless pretty old, would not be compatible with linux unless you were a wizard programer that could make these drivers, like I am not. So, since '95 I had been on and off in Linux because well, most of the software as well that I needed in school was simply not supported by linux. So I just would use windows or macintosh. Slowly, however, we have seen that now we are at quite a different stage in the flexibility of linux and the quick updates that we get of new drivers for new hardware coming. More companies are adding Linux compatibility to their products and this is very good.
Seeing that you have just entered the world of Linux, you never became familiar on how you a couple of years ago had to create a boot disk using rawrite in dos and selecting the correct image to load all your drivers. Which now RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, can all do by simply booting your computer, inserting the cd and wala!
And so you see, now we have nice graphics programs, we have all we need for school, Staroffice, we've got statistical analisys sotfware, digital camera, USB support, plug and play, etc. Things that just 3 or 4 years ago, we would've just dreamed of,
It's all cool though, specially here in Linuxquestions.org, anyone that can, I hope, will help you including myself in any problems or questions you may have.
have a good one,

zLinuxz

By the way Mara!, I love pierrogi!!!! stuffed with meat,
And also my all time favorite is...shishkava, I think it not spelled the right way. And I was in Warsaw last summer with my ex...she is polish.

zLinuxz

I agree. After my first Linux install (long time ago...) I didn't have cdrom, nic and sound working. 3 weeks ago I was reinstalling with ReiserFS (which is great!) and everything was detected and configured properly...
The only one piece of equipment I have still problem is this old cdrom. I wrote to the producer for specification to write the driver myself, no response. But it's changing. Not long ago, when I was writing to someone with winmodem/winprinter the answer was: it won't run. Now it's usually : get drivers from xxx.xxx.
To zLinux:
Have you tried different kinds of pierogis? With strawberries, for example? And I have no idea what can 'shishkava' be...

Well i use linux for enjoyment, and windows to get real work done... i have to make websites and the software in linux isn't that good in that catagory.

re the title of this thread, i thought you guys were going to talk about lunix!
as in:
http://www.lunix.com/

I gave away ALL my Windows software. I had about 100 CDROMs with games and apps (installed Linux for the first time in Mar/2k. Removed Windows in Jun/2k. Even my mom and sis use my Linuxbox at home...)

My consumist dream now is Heroes III for Linux. What do you think?

I do all my REAL (and boring) work in Linux, I play with it, program for it... So is Linux good enough? Well, it's very subjective. For me, it's wonderful. But you may hate it...

hmmm.. wouldn't so much call it 50/50 with me. I use linux for everything besides graphics. I tried to just go fully with the Gimp but can't do it, I love photoshop too much, and I hate emulators... plus my scanner still isn't supported so I have my windows box for scanning and photoshop.
but most of my time is in linux.. basically for everything else i do, web, web design... everything else you can use a computer for.

and Calum.. i edited the thread title so it won't confuse anyone.

Which linux software do you prefer more:

RedHat

or

Mandrake

mandrake is very newbie friendly, redhat is almost along the same lines as configuration, ease of use. but the software for each one is almost the same, whatever you can use on mandrake can be used on redhat, as well as any other distro.. so i presume you meant distro and not software..

might want to search the distro section as this question is asked all the time.

Which package should I get from the distro. Mandrake?