Tips on moving to Linux?

[persia]

Pinquyos http://pinguyos.com/

Definitely the best place to start for a beginner.

[persia]

VMs are so nice why bother with a non-virtual machine?  Most computers have terrabytes of hd and underutilised cores.  Linux is more than happy for most purposes with a gig or two of RAM. and you can pass things between OSs if they are both running.

[persia]

SteamOS  http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download

[persia]

I'm thinking building a SteamOS box for one of my TVs.  It has fairly minimal needs.  

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2095494/how-to-build-your-own-steam-machine-today-for-560.html

[persia]

Canonical is working on a touch friendly Ubuntu.

[persia]

Because Linux is pretty light on resources you should be able to run it happily in a VM on a low end core i3 or perhaps even lower end.

[persia]

Oh god, the liquid cooled G5 Mac Pros.  Why didn't someone at Apple think "hmm liquid and electronics, what could possibly go wrong with that?"  

I use several versions:

Arch Linux on a laptop
FreeBSD for desktop and servers
IRIX on SGI Octane
And I have a PowerMac G5 I need to rebuild the watercooler in, going to be used for something, yet to decide since it doesn't run at the moment.

[persia]

A few years ago we had four liquid cooled G5s fail.  The liquid got on the motherboard and nothing worked after that.  We ended up having to replace them all.  If it works it's brilliant but they also fail spectacularly...

[persia]

Haven't tried this..

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easily-enable-silverlight-watch-netflix-linux/

[persia]

Did you try the Google Cast (not Chromecast) extension in Chrome?

[persia]

I didn't notice you were in Oz.  You are going to have to hide your ip with a proxy to get Netflix (UK or US) or iPlayer to work.  Basically Netflix US needs to believe you are in the US to wok, similarly Netflix UK or iPlayer need to know you are in the UK...

There are lots and lots of proxy servers out there, just google it.

[persia]

Windows users don't even know there's a command prompt in Windows.  And heaven forbid one of these new Windows Server 2012 Administrators ever has to fix a config file.  Face it, Windows is for people who don't ever want to see a command line.  It's really no different to Android...

[persia]

Yes, the market is fractured at the moment with desktop ruled by Microsoft, Server split between Linux and Microsoft and Mobile devices dominated by Google's Android.  With the release of MS Office for Android Microsoft has conceded that the split is likely to be long term.  

Operating System choice is becoming irrelevant as more and more software supports Windows, Android, iOS and to a lesser extent OS X.  The money has moved to the cloud.  Microsoft happily collects the same amount of money from an Android, iOS, or OS X user for Office 365.  And they collect it annually, not once like they do with an operating system.  In a single move they have negated the number one reason for buying a Windows tablet, because they make far more money from that Office 365 than they would have from from the tablet itself.

[persia]

Remember netbooks?  There was a year or two when they were very popular and then they  vanished from the market.  They were initially available with Linux as an option.  There was a story about a woman who was a uni student who accidentally bought a Linux netbook, she said that because it was Linux and she couldn't figure it out she was going to have to drop out of uni and become a prostitute and eventually die in a plague infested port screaming "hello sailor!" or something like that.  I remember that the press make a big deal out of it....

[persia]

Ah, found the story, she apparently didn't die in an unknown port city heroine den shouting "hello sailor" but the rest is pretty much true.


http://www.wkow.com/Global/story.asp?S=9667184&nav=menu1362_2