Quote Originally Posted by Serkat View Post
*for the typical home user
Right.
Quote Originally Posted by Rakjavik View Post
Some? I think thats quite an understatement.
Many games run on Linux. Of those that don't, there aren't a whole lot that won't run on Wine or Cedega. There are some, however. Hence the word "some."
Quote Originally Posted by Rakjavik View Post
Mozilla firefox is becoming very popular among the windows browsers. It is easily installable and usable. I'm sure though that a good chunk of the typical home users are still using IE out of ignorance.
I was joking. When a Linux user claims that Windows at least has IE going for it, he or she usually is joking.
Quote Originally Posted by Rakjavik View Post
So is anything on Bittorrent
Not libre (or legal for that matter, so let's not discuss that on DV)
Quote Originally Posted by Rakjavik View Post
And how many typical home users want to use a command line. It's all about the GUI baby.
Studies have shown that the command-line interface is no harder to learn than the GUI. I don't see any reason why home users should prefer a bloated GUI-centric OS like Windows XP, Vista, or the default Ubuntu installation for that matter. My post wasn't talking about current Windows users contemplating the switch to *nix; I was talking about tabula rasa users. See Replicon's first post.
Quote Originally Posted by Rakjavik View Post
It is much more customizable, I agree. How much of a pain in the ass is it though? Remember I am talking about the typical home user.
It's very simple if you're comfortable with your distro's init system. And that comes from having actually read the documentation when you first installed Linux (or another UNIX variant).
Quote Originally Posted by Rakjavik View Post
And what do you have to go through to get it setup like that?
I had to actually use my package manager: pacman -S screen ratpoison gnome-terminal (plus adding a few lines to .screenrc and .ratpoisonrc). Very difficult stuff indeed.
Quote Originally Posted by Rakjavik View Post
So yes, Linux is great for the power user. I have 5 machines and I have linux on one of them (my main laptop) and I enjoy using it. I enjoy learning new OSes as well. But I also know that I have been playing with it for months and have not even scratched the surface. Ubuntu is the most user friendly Linux distro I've used.
Ubuntu might very well be the most Windows-friendly distro, but it shouldn't come as a shock to you that you prefered XP since you treated Ubuntu like an (inferior) XP substitute. A different operating system requires a different methodology. If you used the *nix command-line your whole life and one day tried Windows XP, you'd feel hobbled by the bloated GUI and claim that your couple minutes with Command Prompt didn't measure up to the UNIX way of doing things that you're so accustomed to. I say ditch the desktop metaphor entirely (or at least don't rely on it and do learn the command-line) and go with a less hand-holding distro like Arch, Slackware, or Gentoo, so that you'll really learn how Linux works.