So i know the components i am going to use to build my mid range gaming PC and the peripherals. I can fit windows into the budget with no problem so this is purely a decision i will make because of the features. So i wont actually be just using this for gaming, i will also be using it for getting into programming and light video editing. Nothing really intensive just little quick shorts me and my friends will record just for the fun. I like that Linux is free even though i could afford windows. The distro (distribution? I'm still learning about Linux) is ubuntu. What do you think? If you have any questions i will try to answer as best i can.
Thank you,
We really can't tell you what OS to use that is personal preference.
Windows is better overall for gaming. (I am a Linux user of 10 years) Linux is pretty handy for most things and gaming has gotten much better.
It really is up to you what to use.
You can use both via dual boot and/or virtualization. You can also try out other distros with VM and live disc to see what you like. If you are really new you may want to keep Windows around while you are transitioning.
Explore. Have fun.
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Pick a distro of Linux and use it. Down the road if you feel you can't do what you need with Linux then go buy Windows.
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Linux with Windows in KVM/QEMU VM!
I highly recommend you use SUSE. It allows for a GUI configuration of KVM and an automatic installation of it. Simply use pass through.
I personally prefer a dual boot as it allows for flexibility.
Why not try Linux first? It's free, and if it doesn't do everything you need, you can dual-boot Windows later. Windows is better for gaming, but I find Linux for basic everyday tasks given how customizable it is, how efficient it is, and how cost effective it is. I haven't tried video editing, but programming was just fine on it. I actually got rather attached to Geany, but I did run into some issues that other students in my class didn't run into because I had to use a different compiler. I wouldn't way it was worse, just different. I couldn't stand MS Visual Studio.
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Why not both? I use Linux on my laptops -- have had for over a decade -- and W7 + Linux Mint on my desktops. Honestly, I only keep W7 around for gaming, and it'll be gone once developers get with the program!
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I used to run Ubuntu 12.10 on my laptop about 2 years ago, but I quickly moved back to Windows because I would get 3 hours of battery life vs 1.5 hours on Linux. Did you have a similar issue with your laptops?
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Why not try dual-booting?
My old laptop had a dedicated ATi GPU that I never bothered installing proprietary drivers for. Turns out the open-source drivers didn't have power management so my GPU ran at full speed and didn't downclock when idle. It made sound emissions unbearable, and easily cut my battery life in half. On windows I could get about 1.5 - 2 hours of battery life. Linux I could get about 45 minutes. Linux with ATi drivers installed I got about 2.5 hours.
On my current laptop the battery life of Linux and Windows is comparable. If anything I get battery life on Linux, which I can further improve once I figure out how to undervolt. I can push battery life to about 6 hours currently, which is about what reviewers got with my laptop on the idle test. Closer to 5 hours if I use WiFi. And that's with open-source drivers this time.
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Quickest way to see is look at what games you want to play, and see if they are in the steamos/linux section if not then you will need windows.
If your main focus is gaming on your system,
Then you will probably have a better experiance on a Windows envoirement.
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So you'll be using it for gaming, programming and video editing?
Gaming: hard to get around Windows at this point in time. A solution for more safety and comfort would be to use a kvm setup with a dedicated graphics card. Works great, and since Windows runs in a kvm container, you can snapshot it in linux and enjoy the instant repair feature if Windows breaks itself again lol.
Programming: hard to get around linux for this one at this point in time. Linux is pretty much a development environment at its core, the features and comfort are unbeatable for development, not only in terms of the available tools, but also in terms of setting up the ideal work environment for development work.
Video editing: this is a hard one. Hard because it depends on your needs. If you want to do really high end stuff, like video with 3D environments and high speed rendering using OpenCL and OpenMP features, these are pretty much only available in Linux. Linux has the most powerful video rendering features bar none. The Pixar studios renderman, which has been open sourced recently, also works best with linux tools, which are not always free and open source, but they outperform anything else, and the top performing professional grade tools in this category are just made primarily or exclusively for linux, the best tools just not being available on other platforms, because in the professional high value broadcast and cinema production business, other platforms are just not used. Another big thing is data storage, network access and network data management, and above all, the speed with which data can be downloaded from capture devices like camera storage, and the processing of that data, which is also something that works exponentially faster on linux. However, for light video editing, other platforms will provide more user-friendly consumer-grade video editing options. Windows is not the best option here either, but rather OSX, which now works considerably faster with Adobe Premiere for instance. Here also, there is the option of going for a kvm container, knowing that installing OSX with full features in a kvm container, requires some tweaking, more than Windows.
So you have to first figure out which tools exactly you want to use, and then pretty much make a Venn-diagram, and figure out what system requirements would meet your requirements best. With that, it's useful to consider a few developments that might change the landscape in the future: 1. SteamOS, which is pretty much a standard linux distro delivered together with the Steam Client that runs on any distro. Obviously Steam being the primary distribution platform for games, and Steam moving to linux, will impact the main platform choice of game developers in the future, and in fact, has been influencing that decision for a few years now, and 2. The radical changes in support model, license model, update model and privacy rules that come with Windows X, which are a pretty big concern going forward, and this evolution on the Windows platform has been going on for a while, especially with Adobe CC for instance.
The decision of operating system from a purely practical point of view is easy and very hard at the same time. If you go for linux, that gives you a more modern and potent system with lots more customizability and features for far less money invested on hard- and software, but there is an investment in time involved during the first few weeks, and some cords have to be cut to a certain extent, and everyone knows the benefits of cord cutting, of stepping off the commercial train, it doesn't need further explanation to be honest, everyone can decide for him/herself whether or not they want to cut that cord or not. If you opt out of open source, you know exactly what you're going to get also, you're going to be able to look at any marketing material, and you'll know what you can do, but you'll never know what you can't do, but can do with open source. Not everyone has the need to cut the cord, not everyone has problems with the umbilical cord by which big corporations and instances keep the users in check, and some people do have problems with it, but they hate the problems that come with remedying those problems even more lol.
The reality is that everyone has to decide for him/herself. The only thing we can do, is urge you to at least explore open source, so that you know what you're giving up when you would decide to not cut the cord with the commercial ransomware/spyware.
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Sorry I don't wanna be a nitpicker but as a programmer I disagree and I'm wondering why people repeat that over and over again as if it was a universal rule.
Linux is a good environment for a lot of areas of 'programming' but it's not definitely the best for everything let alone that there's no way around it.
"Programming" covers such a wide range that you can't make such a statement.
If you wanna develop C# software you couldn't pay me enough to do that under Linux, with any IDE which is available for Linux, plus Mono over Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio.
If you wanna do something where you need both, development software and multimedia software (some jobs in the front end web development branch) clearly OS X is the way to go.
And that's a general problem of Linux: In a lot of IT/software development jobs you don't only need to somehow write your code down, you also need software for more general tasks especially when you're one of the 'IT guys' for a larger company (which I'd say is almost more common than being some independent programmer who just gets paid to deliver his code, that's not reality for a lot of persons) and especially when that company does not use Linux as the standard OS for their employees.
And a lot of times your company determines what software/formats to use and obviously also determines how your work is included in a bigger picture.
So neither do most people who would be called 'programmers' or earn money by writing code necessarily run Linux nor is Linux the best for everything which is called programming or has to do with professional IT work.
It really depend on what you plan to do.
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My opinion: Windows for Gaming, Linux for everything else. :)
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Visual Studio is coming to Linux btw
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That's actually not Linux's fault. Just because Microsoft or Apple don't provide developing tools for Linux, that does not mean we have to blame Linux, and in this case Mono. But with the current trends of MS releasing more and more code as opensource I'm pretty positive that the mono project will get closer and closer to the actual .Net framework.
Well... If someone (generally speaking) opens a post saying (again generally speaking): "I'll be using it for programming" but doesn't provide useful information about the laguage he'd like to program with, the platform, the tools, etc; I assume that whatever language he's going to use (with the few exceptions we all know), he will be able to find the tools that suits his/her needs
Yes this is really true. But again if you don't tell me what your plans are... I can't really give you an aimed advice.
I know.
But that doesn't change anything in this case.
It doesn't matter if it's Linux 'fault', it is what it is.
It's also not Linux fault that Photoshop isn't released for Linux, but if you need Photoshop you won't care, it's not there, period.
But you also can't just make some general statement like XY is the best and that's what I wanted to 'criticize'.
The sentence 'Linux is best for programming' isn't more or less true than 'Windows is best for programming' or 'OS X is best for programming' - it depends on your goals.'
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.NET is getting open sourced and Visual Studio is getting ported to Linux by MS. So it really isn't a big deal anymore.