I was really a bit worried, not having the second windows xp partition for games, bit torrent etc. You know, this has been the best 2 weeks of my life. I really let go of alot of my favorite activities, as up to this past sat, I couldnt even get my ati drivers installed. But something happened, it all just worked. And I asked only 1 question about my driver here, fixed it myself and never got a reply. Google and the search here answered everything.

And you know something else? Not one program has asked me to purchase to continue using. No hasseling me about a pro gold or platinum upgrade to a damn software dvd player, for only $50 more dollars. No activation to keep using my os was neccesary, no personal info, or privacy invading questionaires. Ohh, and shadows bit torrent client, only my 2nd fav thing to do on the web, is available written in python. Beautiful silver gray interface, exactly as my fav bt proggy in windows.

3d games? Yeahh a bit lacking, but the loki titles rock and lets not forget doom 3, unreal 2004, and Im sure others being ported at the same time. No spyware, and it works. And it works longer than 10 hours without rebooting. Hell Ive had it up as long as 4 days downloading 2.0 and 2.5 gig torrents, at the same time. Windows choked on the memory issues it had with bt, and began to lag very bad around 1gig, horribly at or above 2 gigs. Linux, didnt sweat a thing, I had two open, no memory clogs. I have my amsn messenger, working on xmame, and I have my 3d fps, and a rpg as well. More games are on the way. Winxp was about a reboot every 10 hours with my use, linux has the stamina of a horse.

No worm or virii crisis every other week, in fact, no spyware Im aware of. So to put it best, being windows free has been an experience Ill never forget. There is so much out there, so much more than MS.

ive been using linux for about a year full time (3 years getting here) and there is just no way back to windows

a friend got a new system with xp home (never used xp before)
what a nightmare 6 hours (using dialup) to get installed and updated

linux install 45 mins max the rest is just a learning curve

happy linuxing (windows free in 2003)

excellent. welcome aboard

Excellent review xo, and congratulations!

As for myself I've only been an avid user of this operating system for a few months and even in that short amount of time I realize there's no going back to Window$. I've settled on Redhat 8 as the ultimate overall experience for me personally, however the essential framework itself I believe is just inherently superior to anything Microsoft has to offer.

Another thing, if MS thinks it has something over Linux based on hardware compatibility with XP alone they better watch out! I was running an older Gigabyte board with an Athlon XP 1800 for a while and when I first installed my Redhat system, and I couldn't believe how easy it was to make the swap over to the ASUSA7N. No tedious configuration, no painful repair process like with XP where you just know something is fundamentally flawed thereafter somehow, just a quick "yes, please make everything in my system work perfectly with all this new hardware the first time I boot it" option and it was done.

Not to mention of course the nForce drivers that allow Linux to take full advantage of that 400mhz memory bus the new board has, as well as all the other chipset features like tailored drivers for gig and standard lan, audio, etc. The performance difference after the nForce install alone was incredible, and with the NDVDIA driver for geforce as well the system actually rocks all over what Windows gave me performance-wise for what I do.

Processing space imagery for example, using ISIS from USGS used to take hours to go through a single hires MOC in full resolution, now it takes minutes! That of course on top of being able to run photoshop, XMMS streaming digitally imported, streamrip emulated through xover office caching and titling tracks, every kind of media player I could ever want (mplayer basically), the superior open office suite, limewire, evolution, all my webdev and ftp stuff, clones for anything else I used to or could ever possibly conceive of wanting to use, and all the other simply cool extras like kstars...

Just becoming involved with this system has been an adventure for me, and an extremely rewarding one at that, being that it all works so remarkably well!

Come on one of you gurus, admit it. You're all really from Mars, aren't you?

linux is on MARS at this very moment in the 2 rovers

a world of open source is a world without windows or gates

also linux was used in the Lord of the rings for the building of Gollum" Linux iss thes Precious" lol how corny did that sound

i'll assume you ended up finding azureus for bittorrent, right? works like a charm for me all the time. i hadnt heard the rovers were using linux, where did you see that?

It'd make sense that they ran the rovers on Linux since they have SSH and can essentially control EVERYTHING from ANYWHERE that has an antenna. They'd be using GoToMyPC if they were using Windows. :P

Also known as, "Cough up $50"

let's not forget the magic that is google!

Congrats xodustrance