After speaking with an extremely geeky friend who pointed out that Wine actually supports DX10/11, my interest in Linux has piqued. But I'm horribly noobish to anything not made by Microsoft, so where do I begin? Rather not try Ubunty, last time I did on my netbook it sucked horrifically.

If you dont like Ubuntu you won't like any other distribution.

Don't.

I'm going to try anyway so you might as well help me now instead of waiting for the inevitable "I broke everything help" post.

Buy a mac.

oh wait, by 'nix' you mean linux.

give up immediately, failure is inevitable.

Nope, not happening.
Gonna power along with or without your advice/support.

Tibby, man. Stop trying to garner yourself hypothetical nerd points that no-one gives a flying **** about.

You will install it. You will struggle with it. Things won't work. You will get disillusioned and cancel your plans and waste everybody's time and yours for the sake of trying something you have no need to try, for no benefit whatsoever, and no-one will think of you any differently except for "oh, look, Tibby's being Tibby. Move the hell along, nothing to see here."

Linux exists just so we can pretend microsoft and apple don't own us.

Meh, you're probably overestimating how good wine is. Your best bet, if you're really serious, is to completely forget about compatibility with windows programs and learn the linux equivalents (or near- or partial- or not-really-equivalents).

This x1000.

I've highlighted the red flags. You aren't going to play videogames in wine with much success at all, especially if you thought ubuntu sucked. It's not as if everyone here is using "'nix" and they don't want you at the party. I've had ubuntu on my netbook for a year or so and when I get around to it I'll be putting windows back on. There's just no point, and when something stops working, you have to switch from user to technition for a week scouring obscure forums looking for the one little hook for your hardware. Not worth it.

Tibby: Just stick with a VM and do your playing around there. If you actually have any desire to play Windows games made in the past 3 years on Linux (ones that aren't ported), you're going to be sorely disappointed.

Buy an android tablet.

/end thread

In response to the subject:

No, you don't.

I don't really see why everyone's so concerned that Tibby might waste some of his time

It'd be a learning experience, at least.

I'm using "nix."

It's a big IDE. Unless you know and use C there's no point.

It's a unix system. I know this!

Just go with Slackware. You won't want to use Linux anymore after a couple days.

Okay, moving on to other sites.
I like the amount of stupid that just happened here. I can almost see it coming together because of the sheer gravity of it all to form a Stupid Star that radiates pure idiocy and warps genes.
Thanks for the not-help.

Isn't that how you were born?

What were you expecting? A link to distros? You already said you thought ubuntu sucks, and that's probably the only one you'd be capable of using for wine with games. We're telling you that linux is not what you think it is. It won't do anything you want it to. It is the equivalent of ordering a disassembled car because you want a spoiler. It isn't fun, informative, or useful for you or most people. What could you possibly expect to gain out of not being able to play a majority of the games you can now?

Compounding on what kirbs said, everyone pretty much told you it was a waste of time and not to bother. It was pretty clear. Especially when people said that it wouldn't do anything you listed that you would like to do with it. Don't attack anyone for the lack of acknowledgement on your part dude.

Oh but it is both fun and informative, fun because I love ****ing around with computers even if it breaks them and goes nowhere, and informative because it's something I haven't really tried before.

Okay fine, if you don't want ubuntu, just go download the xubuntu iso and put it in your drive and reboot. Make sure your bios is set to boot from cd. Then you can either try it (run from disk) or install it. If you choose to install it, be careful it can overwrite all your existing stuff.

You can find all this information and more by going to one of the linux distro sites and reading the installation guide.

Or you can try Kubuntu! lol

Yeah, but cool people like you already have experience. Time to try random live disks, starting with that.

So why did you ask us about anything? Go install a random distro and break your computer, then? I think it's more likely that you just want to be Computer Guy Cool™ like your geeky friend which boggles the mind.

I don't, In fact I really don't care what you think of me. I was just hoping one of the native 'Nix users around here could point me in the general direction of where to start, possibly tell me which distros absolutely suck and to avoid, and some beginner mistakes to understand. I got partially there.

stop ****ing calling it nix you poser

A beginner mistake to understand: That you need or will use linux in the first place.

Go find my first thread about installing linux. I reacted like you did. Then I used linux for a few hours.

My advice. Your first mistake was making this thread. You should put that effort into researching distros and then installing one. Where to begin? You have to figure that out yourself.

You hated Ubuntu, which is one of the easiest distros ever created. If you don't like IT, then what in the world makes you think you'd like Linux in any other form? We're not calling you too stupid to use Linux, we're saying you're going to waste your time aggravated, and quit. Why do we say this? Because we've been there.

If you can't get anywhere with Ubuntu, then there's no point in trying anything else.

Back in the good ol' days of Tech TV, before it was G4ified and ultimately destroyed, you could have learned quite a bit from Call For Help and The Screensavers on this topic. I know what you were expecting here, Tibby. You thought that by showing an interest in an alternative operating system all the smart people here would champion your interest. You still have much to learn.

If I were you I would look at some of the more specialized installations and uses that have been developed for Linux. Like building yourself a cheap Linux XBMC box or some sort of media server. Something where you will get the experience of installing and configuring the OS and software but might actually serve a legitimate and useful purpose later.

I think what people are trying to say is to have some better goal. I grabbed a free desktop from somewhere in high school, installed a linux distro, and then never touched it again because I didn't have anything to do with it, and it was easier to do everything else on my windows box.

Wookie's suggestion is great, or build a simple web server to host a website on (please don't host anything serious here, you'll probably get hacked).

Also, the series ends with him traveling through time and watching the ceremony that founds the Federation.

Hijacking this thread to talk about something that isn't completely retarded (in a sense.)

So, GNU Savannah's been hacked, right? Again, I mean. It happens every couple of years. For those not in the know, Savannah is basically the source code repository for the FSF. That's where they host the source code for a lot of software that basically everybody uses. They keep some control over it, so the Chinese politburo and the Russian mob (two organizations with similar goals and legitimacy) aren't able to sneak a rootkit into basically every computer that exists.

Pretty much just the essential infrastructure needed for any sort of distributed software development. Except Richard M. Stallman is a giant freetard ****** crippled by stupidity, orally ingested toe fungus and the NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here.) So, being a super smart and well-run organization full of people like JM, they took the software that powers SourceForge and forked it. Back in 1999. To make it more "Libre." And apparently to avoid fixing "sql injection exploits."

Also, the FSF is a terrible ****fest when it comes to any form of testing, engineering, reliability, security, performance and basically any other empirical metric for evaluating software quality. But hey, it's free! Software wants to be free!

And apparently your password wants to be free too, because the FSF was too retarded to hash them.

Stop editing your post, dammit.

oh god don't remind me about the toe

I got experience by building a separate computer for RedHat Linux 5, back in the 90s. I built the computer, struggled with linux for a couple of years, then realized all my problems were due to how ****ty redhat and rpm-based distros are. Once I switched to Debian I never had another package dependency problem.

You'll never get anywhere if you don't apply yourself. Nobody wants to help you if you don't do even rudimentary exploration on your own.

Linux is great for a lot of things: running servers, workstations where you do software development, general-purpose computers for everything BUT gaming, etc. The problem you're going to run into, with your unexplained aversion to ubuntu (which I don't like either, btw), is that you're going to have a hard time getting a lot of your hardware to work on other distos. Ubuntu makes it trivial to install closed-source hardware drivers such as graphics cards and network cards. They make it easy to get dvd and mp3 playback working. Other distros, especially the die-hard open source ones like Debian, leave that out of the base operating system. So yes, you have to compile your graphics card drivers into your kernel and you have to re-do it every time the kernel changes. Yes, I've recompiled linux kernels to get wireless cards working (less common nowadays).

I use ubuntu and derivatives nowadays specifically for that reason.

oh what the **** is that toe fungus eating ****. ugh