Hi everyone that clicked the link

yay

wait how can I chat when I don't have an ubuntu account

what witchcraft is this

You don't need to have an account to chat in other site chat rooms :)

chat.stackexchange.com is gloooooooooobal

except for chat.stackoverflow.com, but they're buggers anyways

oh

yay

soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo about advantages of ubuntu

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand how do I dual boot

Anyways. From a user perspective you'll find that Ubuntu tries to make the Desktop "easier" to use. It releases new versions every 6 months and it's of course free. Free as in Freedom, and free as in beer. To a lot of people that really matters

It looks a lot like this:

@MarcoCeppi yeah I have heard good stuf about ubuntu updates

kind of looks like MacOS

Well, for a point of reference, I just remotely upgraded a server for GameOn stuff from a version released in April 2011 to current without any issues

It does mimic a lot of the Mac OSX "style", with regards to window button placement (which was the hardest thing to get used to for me)

@Johann Get Cinnamon if you want normal Windows stuff.

A few things that are a bit different is the "Dash" (the Ubuntu button at the top). Is where you launch and do everything

Yeah, that's another great thing about the Linux community in general, freedom of choice

is cinnamon the one for kiddies or is that sugar

sounds like perl community

FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM

there are literally hundreds of versions of GNU/Linux operating systems out there. In general I think Ubuntu is the best to start with, but after a while people ususally branch out and try new things

Anyways, it's easier to point out negatives than positives

@mac

whoops

Esp since I'm biased

well fire away :)

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT, but for new users there's always hurtles to get through

such as

Netflix, can't use it without a "workaround" on the system

Any video streaming service that uses Microsoft Silverlight's DRM thing, you're pretty much SOL

there are few pc games compatible

using pc as personal computer here

Games. This used to be a really big drawback, but now there's Steam for Linux and they're constantly adding more compatible games to their library. People will say "Oh just use this WINE thing" but it's a workaround and not a native solution. Yes, some games will work but odds are it won't be 100% windows fun

ok

WINE is a "windows compatibility layer", so it's the communities attempt to translate windows binaries to be compatible with Linux. To their credit a lot of stuff works pretty well with WINE. Like for me Photoshop was a show stopper but I've got that with WINE now so it's OK

IMO It's still a negative because it's a workaround

You can checkout the application compatibility at the WINE HQ App DB

Finally, the vast majority of peripherals work, like mice, cameras, drives, whatever. One sore spot that is always improving but still lags behind in hardware compatiblity are Printers (most all work, but newer printers tend to lag behind), some WiFi devices (mainly broadcom), and the occasional graphics cards

well ok Ill look into it

Nvidia (finally) and AMD release regular linux drivers now, so it's not nearly as bad., and if you have an Intel based graphics card you're golden

any other good linux OSs

to try

Debian family (Ubuntu, and such) are my preferable choices. Starting out I think Ubuntu is likely by in far the easiest to use. You can try other family of Linux OS but really what you want to try out are different Desktop Environments

So, Ubuntu uses Unity (in the screenshot above), but there are hundreds of other just Desktop Environments that change the way you interact with your computer.

cool

There's LXDE, Gnome Shell, XFCE, KDE, etc

any closing statements?

wait is that gnome, shell or gnome shell

is the shell named gnome?

Gnome Shell

There's two parts to that, no need to dive in too much, but Gnome is a set of libraries for rendering stuff, and they released a Desktop Environment they call Shell, you'll likely just see it referred to as Gnome

oh

Oh, also the way you install software. Most everything you're going to install is in the Ubuntu Software Center

well ok nice talking to you ubuntu sounds interesting

You rarely download and install anything from the internet

Sure, have a go when you have some time Linux is an interesting world for sure, but like I said earlier it's not for everyone :)

Fell free to ping me either in gaming or in the Ask Ubuntu General Chat room if you have any other questions

ok