What platforms do you own?

[paul_nicholls]

I forgot to mention that I also have a Nintendo Wii too LOL

[Ñuño Martínez]

May be you can add GameCube and Wii. I know the FPC support isn't official, but it supports PowerPC and there are information in the wiki.

I own Windows, Linux (most used), GameBoy Advance, GameCube and Wii.

[vgo]

Windows XP and 7, I have a Linux box too but it's only for IRC and other TTY stuff and the only game on it is Nethack.

[code_glitch]

I have:
Android (phone v.soon, next week hopefully) and AndroidX86 for my tablet PC
Linux (1 outstanding Ubuntu 10.10 x64 box to be converted, 3 Linux Mint 11 x64 boxes)
Gameboy, DS, Wii
PSP with cfw
Windows BUT it has been 9 months since I booted that thing and don't see it happening any time soon, so I didn't vote for it.

[LP]

It is interesting to see that at least half of contestants own a Linux-based system. May I ask what were your reasons for moving from Windows to Linux OS? What edition do you use? How is the stability and driver support?

By the way, seems I'm one of the few who own a Blackberry.

[Andru]

May I ask what were your reasons for moving from Windows to Linux OS?

Because it fully customizable and with much better font rendering. Many other aspects just a details, which always bring people to holy wars

What edition do you use?

ArchLinux with GNOME 3 in fall-back mode(classic mode in other words).

How is the stability and driver support?

Everything just works for me(except ATI drivers, which are crappy as in Windows, but fortunately in Linux I have open source realization), in many cases without a need to search drivers over all internet, as it was today at work for my LG Optimus One(Windows 7 wasn't able to connect it for developing).

[code_glitch]

@Andru:

which always bring people to holy wars

Wise words, I'm afraid I may just start one, I don't mean to so I'll try and keep the specifics out of it...

@Lifepower:
I use x64 linux mint 11 (katya as its called), themed like a mac although you could do anything you wanted. I still sport GNOME 2 for my desktop as many people do. If its your first linux install I would recommend mint - no console faff. Just boot, hook up to the net (optional) click next a few times, tell it where to place the install on the HDD, answer 3 questions about username and password, click your country and wait 15 minutes. Done, all in a nice GUI (keeping in livecd tradition)

Why: Development is crazy, you get mono and wine - so a lot of windows stuff works, performance is inconceivable when coming from windows in many cases. Just try getting it to exceed 1.6GiB of RAM through normal usae with an XP VM, a LOT of firefox tabs, banshee, skype, compiz, LibreOffice writer, Geany and thunderbird Plus no antiviurs as Linux has no viruses targeting it

Stability: I have crashed windows a total of around 16 times over time, windows 7 thrice in 8 months... Linux crashes: 2 - due to absolute idiocy on my behalf - if you have a few braincells this never happens. Like mucking with the file system on a root level (DUH). Linux IS the most stable platform (same as mac - common ancestry through BSD)

Drivers: I am cursed by an ATI card that royally muck up windows (hybrid GPU ). I use the fglrx drivers, crappy but I've only had 1 issue with docky, so I set up a keyboard shortcut to restart it once a week And yes, I call it unstable as a linux user - it messes up once a week. For the record I reboot once a fortnight.

Nicenesses: lets say I want to install some programs that are quite common, like freepascal compiler, geany IDE and chromium (google chrome for linux) I just need to type in:

sudo apt-get install fpc geany chromium-browser

Or on arch I believe it'd be something like

sudo pacman -S fpc geany chromium-browser

No downloading stupid exes from random places.... Nice.

And wait a minute or two for the packages to be downloaded and installed - no intervention unless you are installing some proprietary 3rd party stuff that needs you to hit space to say you accept a license once in a blue moon

Hope you get to take a distro for a spin sometime...

[LP]

Andru and code_glitch, thanks for your answers!

Many other aspects just a details, which always bring people to holy wars

This was not my intention. I know that some of these discussions can get heated up. I've asked this because lately on Eee PC forums there is an increased number of users installing Linux replacing existing Windows 7 Starter installations. It starts to look like a trend.

In my own case I've haven't used Linux for many years (I think since 2003). Even though Windows Vista and 7 never crashed on me, I'd still like to try some edition of Linux, just haven't decided yet which one to choose.

[Cybermonkey]

It is interesting to see that at least half of contestants own a Linux-based system. May I ask what were your reasons for moving from Windows to Linux OS? What edition do you use? How is the stability and driver support?

I use both Kubuntu 11.10 and Mageia 1. I started to switching to Linux long ago. My first Red Hat based distribution was shipped on 3,5" floppy disks ... but was a pain to install. KDE 1 wasn't that nice either.
Since Windows 95 I was looking for an alternative for WinDos. I had a look at OS/2 but it obviously failed to gain a market share. Linux has now the best "support" of alternative systems. But a long time I used the BeOS Personal Edition so I always have a close look at the Haiku-OS. (Which should be added to the list because FPC runs on it ...)

[Ñuño Martínez]

It is interesting to see that at least half of contestants own a Linux-based system. May I ask what were your reasons for moving from Windows to Linux OS?

Actually because I can't use OS/2.

I used OS/2 3 Warp in the '90s and I think it is the most stable, user friendly PC operating system ever, even nowadays. Unfortunately it's almost dead (IBM tried to open-sourced it several times but Microsoft vetoed it always). Currently there are "eCom Station" but it isn't the same and cannot compete with Windows in the most modern computers.

When I changed my home computer and I realized that I cannot use OS/2, I moved to Linux (Redhat IIRC). I was using it occasionally and I found it recovers from my programming errors better than Windows.

What edition do you use?

Xubuntu in both computers (an old IBM desktop and a new DeLL laptop), but I'm tempted by Mint.

The IBM has an OEM WindowsXP too. I use it only to play and to test the Windows version of Allegro.pas.

How is the stability and driver support?

Not sure why but I never have it tuned perfectly, may be because Xfce has fewer support than famous KDE and Gnome, but my home computer isn't powerful enough to support anything "bigger" than that (good old Pentium IV 1.8 Ghz). By the way, the latest Xubuntu (11.10) seems to be much more stable, less buggy and more ease to configure than previous releases, but it's slightly slower.

Unfortunately, Intel graphics support is broken. I've read that they know why it doesn't work (the driver doesn't reserve the graphics RAM correctly as it's shared with conventional RAM so system and graphics becomes mixed after some time...) but I don't understand why they decided to drop off the OpenGL support instead of fix it (Windows XP has full OpenGL support and it's fast and safe. Actually old Kubuntu 8/9 had full OpenGL support and was fast and stable!). AFAIK this problem isn't fixed in any Linux.

The DeLL laptop has an nVidia that works, but I've found that it isn't able to render some effects. Not sure if it's problem of the graphics card itself or because I didn't configured it correctly or because I'm using the open-sourced driver.