Linux or Windows?

Alexander Stephen

Hello there Linux community! I write this post to know what would be better for me, linux or windows? I heard that Linux has some limitations and I will tell you at what I am using my laptop mostly so you can tell exactly if I can switch to Linux or keep the Windows.

Listening to music, movies here and there, some Microsoft Office projects for school and alot of gaming, more exactly hardcore Fallout and pro DotA 2 gaming. Other games I play : Company of Heroes, Company of Heroes 2, Dishonored, Mafia 2, Cities XL,Don't Starve, Magicka ( my favorite! ), Hearts of Iron, Red Orchestra 2 and in the near future, who knows?

I heard that not all games work on Linux so yea, I don't know if my games will suffer because of Linux.

I am using mostly Steam to launch my games so since I see that Steam is interested in Linux, hey, why not?

Drivers! I heard that not all drivers are working on Linux so ye, I am telling you what kind of laptop I am using so I can receive good informations from all of you.

This is my laptop Your text to link here...

I am waiting for your honest opinion and answer to my question : In my case, shall I use Linux or Windoes 7?

If you want to know more info, ask me.

mfillpot

I would verture to say that not all of your games currently work on Linux but with the Steam Machine coming out soon many of them may soon be supported. You cannot natively run ms based software like office without a compatibility layer app like wine and even then they still may not work correctly, however there are many open source and web based alternatives to office and other popular apps that run on Linux based systems.

As for your hardware, it looks like it is using broadcom ethernet and wifi, both are possible to run but you will have to get the drivers after the installation (due to licensing issues with broadcom) which can be hard without internet access. In most cases the hardware will work out of the box, the major exceptions are broadcom networking, realtek networking and cheap printers.

For your specific uses at this time windows looks like your best option, but if you have a free disk space consider installing a Linux based distro along side of windows as a dual boot system and trying it out for yourself.

Alexander Stephen

I want to hear more.

Yes, I can abbandon Microsoft Office and use programs for Linux and the Steam thing, AWESOME!
Also today I found http://www.playonlinux.com/en/ so my games might run but I don't know how many resources this program will require to run it.

The point with the drivers, damn, I can search for them before switching to Linux, put them on USB and run them after I install Linux but I need some help.

Now, I am still at thinking phase and if I take the decision to switch to Linux I will ask for neccesary steps and some guidance on the forum before I do it.

mfillpot

Instead of using MS office you can use things like calligra, libreoffice, goffice or even google drive from browser.

playonlinux has a database that you can use to search the operational status of games, but the steam games that are incompatible will not be downloaded.

Yes you can download the drivers to usb and install manually or get an external wifi card that supports linux and use that. Before you go looking for the alternate options I recommend doing a test installation and seeing what does and does not work, there is a chance that the wired could work out of the box.

As you are a gamer and looking at using steam I recommend checking out ubuntu since that is the distro that steam is officially supporting and testing on.

To start off you need to download the ubuntu ISO image and write it to disk, this will not be a data write, but you need to make the disk by using the write image to disk option in your cd/DVD writer program. Once it is on disk you will need to shrink the primary windows partition to make installation space, reboot the computer with the distro disk in the drive, then choose the install option and choose to install along-side windows.

Alexander Stephen

It seems that I will decline the idea of switching to linux and I will wait for SteamOS. I hope that will come soon.

dannydamsky

Alexander Stephen wrote:

"It seems that I will decline the idea of switching to linux and I will wait for SteamOS. I hope that will come soon."

That won't do you any good, since SteamOS is Linux-based, all the games that will work on it, will also work on regular Linux distributions. My situation is pretty similar to yours, so I can tell you what I did.

I got 2 disks, don't worry though you can do it with one too.

I installed Windows on one disk, cleaned it, turned off many services, effects, etc..In other words, made it gaming-only.

On the other disk I installed Linux Mint 16, and installed everything else on it, which includes, Music, Videos, all the programming stuff, and LibreOffice.

I've been doing this for quite a while, and from my experience it's a great way to combine both systems into what they're currently most useful at. (And of course when games are released on Linux I play them on Linux and delete them from Windows because Linux is awesome! )