When I have work to do, I use Windows. When I want to monkey around or work through a problem, I boot into Linux.
Edit: just booted into Linux and it promptly informed me that my older 82gb SATA drive has lost of bad sectors and could be failing. Just when I want to completely bag on Ubuntu, it surprises me.
Linux still has a time and place. And as you saw there still has good hardware detection as well. The recent ubuntu releases also include the latest releases of GParted which is used often here rather then shelling out for retail partitioning program.
While booted live in a distro you can perform tasks there as well as if you had a separate GParted cd onhand. That's a second advantage of seeing ubuntu installed on a flash drive's second partition leaving the first Fat or NTFS for Windows and made bootable besides simply having a bootable data recovery stick onhand. Partitioning for broken optical drives in laptops and netbooks sees a purpose there as well.
I guess Linux with a gui appearance changes still has a place for 3rd party application while still based on the old(and now ancient) UNIX platform. For being a main OS someone summed it up earlier best seeing server application for that reason as well.
At this point I ended up blocking my ears or pressing the mute button a the remote when hearing the 7 ads with that in it being repeated over and over and over in different breaks when watching more then one hour on the same channel... blah blah blah ... while lately the new ads seen no longer hear that in them.
As far as ubuntu at this point I wouldn't even be touching the beta builds but simply download and install the final on a flash drive to see how it looks. I still have the 5.10 on cd somewhere aournd here since every time I turn around there's a new one to download.
Sorry! The new build will be free of a lot of clutter since one release(9.10) will still do everything required of it while booted live. With the 64bit 7 on I hardly ever even boot into anything else!
I really enjoy using Ubuntu, but driver and flash support just aren't what they're supposed to be yet.
It's fun playing around with it and trying to get some games running on it.
W7 is awesome and will be my primary OS for now.
I'm still wondering till now, what is so great about Ubuntu anyway... Yes it's one of the "easy" Linux distro (well, not really...), yes it brought up the "Linux for people" topic, but I use Linux since early Red Hat Linux, I don't see the "Linux for people" ease of use... it's just Linux, and it's not that hard, really... Though, for those who uses Ubuntu, this is a good time to taste what's in store for the next major release. I my self is an OpenSuSE person - I prefer YaST for my system administration needs, I can't really depend on GNOME's panel for administration when in CLI mode...
zzz2496
Ubuntu 10.04 Release Candidate will be released tomorrow for anyone interested. The final product should and likely will be delivered on the 29th, if not then it would be the 30th.
Highly inaccurate...
That is true for Desktop market, but computers aren't used only for Desktops, there are servers, lots of servers... In server world, Linux is simply trashing Windows server. According to IDC (too bad the link went dead, fortunately Wikipedia had the numbers written down), for Desktop usage Windows has 92.00% market share, as for Linux - it only commands 1.02%. This is per January 2010.
As in server world, Linux is commanding 33.8% versus 7.3% Windows server. This is January 2009 Data. In HPC world, the gap is even WIDER, Linux commanding 88.6% (with 14 of the fastest super computers are running Linux) versus 1.0% for Windows Server HPC edition... Maybe it's very small in Desktop market, as Windows server is even smaller in HPC market. Linux is just starting to make inroads for Desktop, the revolution is just beginning... :)
Linux nor MacOS isn't anywhere near "dead", MacOS's kernel have a legacy being stable, scalable, secure, highly efficient network stack, and many others. Apple is still developing new technologies around Mach kernel, like Grand Central Dispatch, Clang and LLVM for compilers, OpenCL on top the GCD - meaning Apps that uses GCD will have GPU at it's disposal (super cool feature), and many more. One aspect that I like from MacOS is the implementation of Spotlight (the search engine in MacOS). Spotlight database is VERY RESPONSIVE, it can handles lots and lots of data (a lot more than Windows 7's search indexer). In MacOS, every file, every folder is indexed by default, and whenever you search for something - you type one character, the search engine will start searching and while searching it spits out what it found along the way, in real time... In contrast to Windows 7's sluggish search performance... Plus a glaring warning about not to index too many folders, because it can cause slowdowns in search... "WHAT???? Are you freaking serious???" is what I screamed when I read that glaring info text...
Linux on the other hand - are very scalable, very secure, very open, very customizable, very adaptive, ultra flexible, and is growing rapidly... Runs on everything, from Phones, PCs, Routers, Firewalls, IDS/IPS appliances, DPS appliances, Servers, Super computer clusters, Mainframes, Robots (Roomba?), Cars (DARPA Challanges), Network Interface Cards (KillerNIC), System Managements (various IBM management infrastructure for it's Server products), TVs (My Panasonic TV uses Linux as it's "OS"), NAS boxes, SAN appliances, Refrigerators (Samsung/LG's highend fridge...), it ran as system rescue live cd/dvd/usb thumb drive... It ran almost anything. It's the utility knife in the computer world...
Linux maybe a poor man's OS in Desktop, but it's a the prime choice in super computer cluster environment. To me, Microsoft is just starting, the money is there at the "HPC"/"Super computer cloud" level, Desktop are just "snacks" compared to HPC, yet the LION share in that market are Linux and proprietary UNIX (AIX, UX, SOLARIS, etc). Microsoft is just starting the battle... You can't even begin to comprehend the situation with your tiny and narrow view of computing world...
zzz2496
Linux os still UNIX no matter how you look at it! Knoppix was initially the favored distro here over others like ubuntu. It is a bit larger not quite as large as Fedora however but requires a dvd not cd unless unplacked on a flash drive made bootable.
Small distros like Puppy and ubuntu have been popular due to size mainly since you simply burn an iso onto a cd-r and boot live. With a server type like Fedora you install from several cd-rs burned with the set of iso images that make up the total installation files.
Mandriva(formerly Mandrake) is another one that is popular but not a Debian release like ubuntu, Puppy, Knoppix whcih can read MS volumes, copy and delete files even as well as make excellent live recovery tools since you boot live mostly unless planning a dual or multiboot.
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