Given that a lot of the forum members are Linux fan-boys we shouldn't forget that some here use Windows, even if they don't want to admit it publicly

One of the guys in the clan I'm in has been having all sorts of problems with getting Vista to talk to his XBox 360. After several "I told you so" posts on our forum from me. I came across "orb" and you know what it's great.

MyCast your digital media with Orb 2.0 remote pc access software

It's one of those "It just works" things. I mean it really dose... Install orb on a Windows PC and register with orb. Then you can stream any media straight from your PC to any Internet enabled device. It figures out what bandwidth is available, how big the screen is that is viewing it and adjusts automatically.

I'm using it to stream movies from my main PC to my laptop(ubuntu). My m8 is doing much the same at home watching movies on his TV through the XBox thingie. Also he is wasting time at work watching movies on his laptop.

I'm about fed up with Ubuntu and Linux with some of the people that you ask for help and they come across with that whole "i told you so" "LOL you didn't know that?" "that's so easy i'm not even going to tell you, figure it out" thing. I was being perfectly polite, and I only wanted to mount an NTFS drive with firewire. I won't bore you with the details (I almost wrote a long ranting post there about it ) but it's nearly enough to make me just scrap Ubuntu and go back to using Windows full-time. It has its problems, but at least you don't have to talk to Linux users when you have a problem.

that's rough man. i havent had a hard time yet with my linux brothers and sisters being difficult.

When things in Linux work, they work perfectly. When they don't, then oh boy, you're gonna have a looong trip to make it work.

Extreme Coder

Completely false. Long trip was back when I was on Mandrake 3. It seems like there are virtually no problems going unsolved or being attempted at anymore. Even my Toshiba Satellite sound problem that was believed to have no fix by even the Ubuntu Kernel Dev Team was fixed with 2 lines of commands.

The only reason I can see you being annoying in any way is asking stuff that could be very easily learned by a simple search on google; other than that ubuntuforums.org has very great people, willing to do nothing BUT help.

#ubuntu, #ubuntuforums, #altschule, and #social-discussion on irc.freenode.net is also a prompt way of learning a lot about anything you need to know.

Likewise

Heh. I've calmed down now. It was a mostly-isolated incident, but I've had a few of them It's actually only a handful of people I've spoken to that are like that.

Still with Windows for a few more days until i can be bothered tackling this hard drive thing again... Most problems with Linux, at least for me, a veteran windowsophile, take a while to solve because I'm not familiar with commands etc. Questions often have follow-up questions and follow-ups to those

I've been hijacked!!!

OK, I'll accept the thread hijacking cos this topic is more fun LOL

Here is my take on the whole Windows v Linux thing...

They both work, after a fashion, they both have strong points and week ones. The trick is knowing what they are... Linux is great if all of your hardware is supported. Windows is just fine if you know how to protect it. I use both for different things. Windows for gaming, Linux for everything else.

I have been running each one of the M$/IBM OS's since DOS 4 and Linux for the last 5 years or so. Linux takes more setting up, Windows takes more looking after. Windows becomes slow and needs clean installing once a year or so. Ubuntu has a new version every six months and your better off clean installing. Difference is playing with a new version of ubuntu is fun and clean installing Windows i like groundhog day.

I do everything I can to promote Linux (ubuntu in particular) to all that will listen. Given that my main hobby is FPS gaming I have to accept that there has to be a little Microsoft in my life, however much I dislike the company and how it operates.

I think the Ubuntu community support has changed since I started using it. I really didn't know much at all and Ubuntu was nearly my first experience at running Linux and my first experience with installing it for more than a very short period just to see what the GUI looked like. This was back when Breezy was just released and I've impressed myself with what I've been able to learn, but when I first came to Ubuntu forums for help, I almost always found posts in the search results that said for exaple, "Click on the Ubuntu logo and then go to applications then click on 'Terminal'. Next type sudo gedit /etc/fstab..." where now you might find a blunt short reply that isn't so easy to understand and people really don't know where to go to learn more. Now, you would more than likely read "edit your fstab file to look like the following line, but to someone who is new that's just a very discouraging thing to see and that would make a person feel reluctant to ask for clarification because they might feel like they'de look dumb.

I've done this myself... "Make a script that does this and edit your sudoers file so it can have root permissions without hassle" That isn't helpful to someone who has a problem after just installing the OS because they kept coming accross articles that stated how it "just works" when it just doesn't all the time and that the support community is really good.
If I had run into that I might have given up on the effort but here I am now finding myself doing it.

A million thanks to whoever first posted the sound fix for Toshiba laptops too, cileas, but in reality, we can't say that Linux is better here when the laptop has a "made for XP" sticker on it and the hardware does work without issue in Windows.

As for Windows vs. Linux, well really it ought to be Windows vs. Mac but people are stuck on what they're used to. If you want something that's going to have that sort of compatability then Linux isn't it and although I've had really good success with my hardware on 2 laptops and 2 desktops now, it would be naive of me to say that things work better even as good. I can say that things are easily 1000 times more flexible and that as a bored geek I've learned to accomplish more with a Linux OS in a far far shorter period of time when compared to the length of time I spent using windows and googling cryptic registry hacks and things like that. It's fair to say that when we do have a problem in Linux, we can often times fix it and think to ourselves "If this had been Windows then I could have done Zero to solve the problem," but aside from that, usually things do work in Windows... Security nightmares set aside. Ever have to clean up the spyware of someone who doesn't know how to do it on a Windows machine... it's frustrating. Anyhow, the Windows user has to worry about lots of viruses and spyware and puts time into it. The Linux user is going to run into problems, in my case most recently getting suspend to ram working properly.

I didn't exactly mean that type of working. I guess I didn't make myself clear.
Software problems on Linux are rare, and easy to fix. What I meant was using a bit obscure hardware, like cameras with old or no drivers, GPS devices which need propreitary software(or any other type of device).
For example, my phone(Nokia 3220), I could upload some images, java games and music on it using software(not the official one though). yet, nothing is close to giving me that functionality on Linux, all mobile tools sync mostly calendars, lists,contacts,etc... and my phone uses internal memory.
I am sure its getting better, but there are still some stuff out there that can't work.

Extreme Coder