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Lycoris?

Anyone used this before? I'm really interested in it, but I have NEVER used Linux or any other *nix OS before in my life.

Advice and opinions welcome!
 
I have no personal experience with Lycoris; but it looks like one of the Windows like Distros intended to be newbie friendly. I'd be a touch leery of it, myself, as it looks(from some of the corporate puff-pieces on its website) to be treading the path of trading away openness for a flashy experience. There are some as likes that sort of thing; but I'm not too impressed.

I'd recommend the following: If you fancy a go at Linux, and I earnestly urge you to go for it, it is really a wonderful system when you get into it, it doesn't really do to muck around with the Distributions that try too hard to be Windows-like. To be perfectly honest, Linux isn't Windows, and isn't likely to become so any time soon. This is a good thing; but it makes for some adjustment. My personal favourite recommendation for someone in your position would be Ubuntu or Kubuntu. Both of these offer the frankly superior Debian package system, but make it really easy to get a modern desktop running sane defaults up and going; before you have to start playing with the fun stuff. You really shouldn't hide from the command line, and text config files forever; but it's rather nice to have your graphics card and network up and running beforehand.

I have less experience with Fedora Core 4; but it is also quite popular, and I'm sure you'll hear from its adherents shortly.

 
Originally posted by: phisrow
I have no personal experience with Lycoris; but it looks like one of the Windows like Distros intended to be newbie friendly. I'd be a touch leery of it, myself, as it looks(from some of the corporate puff-pieces on its website) to be treading the path of trading away openness for a flashy experience. There are some as likes that sort of thing; but I'm not too impressed.

I'd recommend the following: If you fancy a go at Linux, and I earnestly urge you to go for it, it is really a wonderful system when you get into it, it doesn't really do to muck around with the Distributions that try too hard to be Windows-like. To be perfectly honest, Linux isn't Windows, and isn't likely to become so any time soon. This is a good thing; but it makes for some adjustment. My personal favourite recommendation for someone in your position would be Ubuntu or Kubuntu. Both of these offer the frankly superior Debian package system, but make it really easy to get a modern desktop running sane defaults up and going; before you have to start playing with the fun stuff. You really shouldn't hide from the command line, and text config files forever; but it's rather nice to have your graphics card and network up and running beforehand.

I have less experience with Fedora Core 4; but it is also quite popular, and I'm sure you'll hear from its adherents shortly.


hey thanks!
 
Originally posted by: phisrow
No problem, do keep us posted.

well, i ended up trying Ubuntu. i really like it. i popped in the live CD and played around with it. now my only final question is does it play games? like can i install steam on Ubuntu? or doom 3? i really only play HL2/CS: Source... and I watch DVDs sometimes.
 
DVDs are quite easy to set up for. You need libdvdcss2(this isn't in the official package set, for legal reasons); but you can get a working Debian package of it at http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/deb/ and install the package seperately.

As for games: you more or less must use closed source video drivers to get playable speeds, first of all. As you appear to have an NVIDIA card, this won't be too bad(and Ubuntu has a package that handles that, check the guide, forums, and/or documentation if you need more help. Or ask back here). That done, some games have native binaries, others don't. Id is really quite commendable for their Linux support(and all around play nice attitude with OSS e.g. the Quake 3 engine. Quite good for a game company). Doom3 has a native binary. I've never dealt with it myself; but it should Just Work reasonably well.

Steam and its collection of games, the major ones at any rate, are not native Linux binaries, and there exist no Linux versions. A good number of people have had luck with WINE and/or Cedega http://www.winehq.com/
http://www.transgaming.com/

The former is Free software, the latter is commercial(with occasionally strained links to the WINE project). These setups both impliment the win32 API on top of Linux. A fair amount of software is supported; but it is an ongoing matter. I'm not a gamer myself, so I've little experience with closed source 3D drivers, or getting games to work; but I know that a fair few people manage it. Other people on this board, on the Ubuntu boards, and elsewhere can probably give you more specific advice.
 
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