We were thinking (maybe) of doing a distro roundup for the community for Linux Newbs. We've got a lot of interest from the community and I know there are a lot of linux vetrans here. So I thought I'd ask the community a couple of questions to help us organize our thoughts around the kind of Linux Content for the inexperienced.
(We have some more advanced content coming up -- like making your own private gmail, dropbox, etc.. but before you can run (walk at a brisk pace?!) you must first crawl.)
1. I have forgotten what it was like to be a Linux newb. I have thought back to a good friend and super expert helping me with things over the years.. conversations like me, asking the question "How did you know how to do that?" after watching a series of seemingly unrelated and arcane steps to resolve a problem -- and the response "shrug?" That about sums it how. So, newbs, what do you want to know? And veterans, do you remember something that stumped you?
2. There are *so* many distros. Which ones would you guys like to see? I saw the thread here "your fav distro and why" which was helpful, and we got some ideas from that. Here's the shortlist for Distros to take a peek at, and actually try to use (we may shoot for one or two distros per video and then do a round up? idk.
a) Ubuntu 14.04 LTS -- Because Ubuntu, Longterm support and reasonably up to date at the moment. Maybe we'll swap to 14.10. Not sure.
b) Elementary OS -- I had been considering this, but the release cadence has fallen off a bit in the last few years and Freya, the version based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, has some egregious bugs and this Distro dates from August. The updates have helped somewhat. This distro looks exactly like a Mac. Unabashedly like a mac, so that might be exciting for some of you? Honestly, I have no idea.
c) Sabayon -- I think we can skip Gentoo and cover this instead. I find that Entropy is probably a better idea than Portage for relative newbs, and your asshole friends on 4chan probably would leave you alone if you ran this over Gentoo (haha, kidding. mostly). I want to like this distro, but it's been a bit fiddly for me and I'm a crotchety in my old ways.
d) Probably not Debian, even though I love it. It's just not meant for newbs. They're too busy keeping the earth spinning.
e) Mint w/Cinnamon -- Popular.
f) Arch -- Popular Also
g) Fedora -- Maybe? Newbish friendly and I have the impression they want to appeal to the working man. So if you want to "do work with Linux" as opposed to "Run Linux at home" then this would maybe appeal to neophytes.
h) openSUSE -- I haven't tried this in a while but the fact that other distros are adopting their original work is probably a really good sign.
As for the format of the video, we were thinking maybe something like:
1) Talk about what the distro is known for, who typically uses it and what its niche is.
2) install, update, get chromium/firefox/iceweasel/etc going. Get some apps going. Community: What apps to demo?
3) Install SteamOS, Bioshock Infinite and some other games.
4) Maybe also show how to install virtualbox and windows? Or possibly how to do dualbooting?
5) NX Client / NoMachine demos / how to remote to your machine. My god how does everyone not know about this? This blows the doors off of MacOS built-in remote facility (hint: it's garbage) and is a really excellent way to get a graphica desktop to Linux w/o the overhead of the X protocol/tunneling and that jibbejabba.
These would be very short videos so that we don't have to spend more than 4-5 hours configuring each system permutation.
We'll probably use a lower end or midrange system for the demo. Probably something with ATI graphics. Maybe the Pentium Dual Core or an i5 or something like that.
Some other notes:
Video card passthrough for VMs is not there yet. You can do it! But this is something for the experts I think. And folks with more than one monitor input.
A sacrilegious thought I had was a VM on Windows/Mac w/Linux + the NX Client. You can do a VPN and any computing you want in Linux and still have the host OS for gaming or Creative Suite or whatever. The twist is Linux will work perfectly fine booting as a VM in the host OS AND booting natively, if setup correctly. So when you dual-boot, you could boot up Linux in Windows to do your day to day while you goof off.
If the video format works well, our plan would be to spread to very specialty distros like Backtrack and Data recovery/repair. So we don't want to cover very special-purpose distros in our "round up."
We actually have about 20-30 hours of footage for disaster recovery/data repair/etc. Just haven't thought of a youtube friendly way to use it. One of my favorites was using dd and less to repair a corrupt NTFS file system by doing surgery 512 bytes at a time from a donor NTFS filesystem. These videos are about 20% how-to and 80% "the scientifici method" for diagnosting really obscure problems. The problem is that after we put a few of these together.. they are not 'swiss army knife' enough -- meaning that they really only apply in one narrow situation instead of being useful in a wide variety of situations. (dd .. teeehehehehehe. That had a 1/1000 chance of working probably. ).
Also, the holy war question: What Distro for a total newb that doesn't want to distro hop and just wants one to go?
I am probably going to say Ubuntu or Mint, but you can possibly maybe troll/flame me into otherwise changing my mind. I am leaning toward Ubuntu + Gnome, 14.10.