Linux

[kwildman]

TW - so by your logic, our youth would be better served by the paid council staff because we are all volunteers?

Community is a wonderful thing. Just like we can get together and solve all of scoutings problems People get together to share software and make it better. The free is not necessarily about the cost but your freedom to do with it what you want. Free software is a lot more secure because the source is open. Security problems get discovered and solved quickly. The paid companies only let their people have access to their source code and they are slow to fix any problems with it. Google windows 7 security problems or "patch tuesday" and you will see how many issues there really are.

Again i would recommend Ubuntu or Mint for a first timer. If you have someone close that will help you out i would use whatever they are using.

[ThunderingWind]

TW - so by your logic, our youth would be better served by the paid council staff because we are all volunteers?

Not for all things. And Scouting is one that is clearly better for it's volunteers. But I have not found that to be the case with IT. I have stayed away from PC based UNIX because it was not being brought to the forefront of the IT world. I hold that if PC based UNIX was really that good, Microsoft would be out of business. It works great for back of house IT stuff and larger mini main frames (HP H series comes to mind).

Once the gaming community and the likes of Adobe start making PC based UNIX versions of their software, I will feel a lot better about it.

I have stayed away from Apple because of the price. I just do not see paying $2500 for a PC using the Apple OS when I can get 4 Microsoft-based PCs for the same $2500.

I accept your notion of porblems with the Microsoft OS and Patch Days. I am just one of those IT people (started back when COBOL was still actively used) that feel there needs to be professional support behind a product. Until there is a flavor of LINUX that I can purchase at Best-Buy and install like any other program on my PC and have the OS detect my monitor, printer, DVD R/W, scanner, bridge to HAM radio, etc....I will wait.

But I do have an older Pentium 4, 1.8GHz WBxxxx Intel motherboard installed in a case upon which I am goign to try a flavor of LINUX.

[kwildman]

there are lots of reasons that Microsoft is where it is at these days and a little research will show you that they have been guilty of some pretty heavy handed manipulation in order to get their market share. OEM deals with manufacturers, buying and suppressing competition, manipulation of governments, etc. I would agree with you on IT in terms of the desktop. The other thing is that nobody owns linux and it is free so there is no way of tracking how much penetration they have on the desktop market. Every new PC is required to be sold with windows and is therefore counted as a Windows computer. They have no idea how many are then reformatted to run an alternative OS. Distrowatch can give you some pretty staggering numbers of how many downloads for each distribution are recorded.

Overall, linux is in the forefront of the IT world. Redhat is one of the fastest growing companies, a huge majority of the web is run on linux - Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. A quick nmap of meritbadge.net reports that it is running an Apache server. Something like 90 out of the top 100 supercomputers are running linux. Banks, Wall Streek - NYSE and most of the other stock markets are all running on Linux. If you want to see some really cool stuff check out Weta Digital - they are the ones that did all the CGI for the Lord of the Rings, Avatar, and King Kong movies. They have over 900 servers with something like 40,000 processors and over 100 terrabytes of ram being used to process these effects. This is all done on linux and there is no MAC or Windows software in the world that can handle that type of system.

Gaming community - http://www.playdeb.net/updates/ubuntu/11.10/ and http://www.penguspy.com/#/All/free_and_commercial/open_closed/sort=1/view=1/limit=0 . There are tons of free alternatives to Adobe. Open source software is a different model than you are used to.

Professional support and Best Buy shouldnt even be used in the same sentence....dont get me started on Geek Squad. Redhat and Ubuntu offer paid support for their servers. Personally, i have never needed it and am a self taught hacker because i can use google. Linux has as good if not better support for the majority of hardware out there. I am the IT director for a windows company and I can tell you countless problems with XP and Windows 7 and driver conflicts, etc. That argument is pretty much a wash. Google HAM radio & Linux and you will probably find tons of applications. Most HAM people that I know are do it yourself types so linux would be right up their alley.

I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the performance of linux on your old computer.