alternatives to XP

i had a quick look at that anti spy (?) looks like some german program for disabling the more invasive xp features?? those things are pretty easily turned off through the gui, i don't see why you need a program to do it, but maybe i'm missing something.

one thing i remember being paranoid about was the activation thing. but i have by this time reactivated my copy of windows xp probably 5 times and have never had a problem. however, i am considering swapping out my motherboard and am again a bit nervous that it won't think it's the same computer... does anyone have experience with this?

btw anyone have multiple boot pc with different OS like the one I mentionned or others from that ms boycott list?

However Red Hat and Slackware have proven to be difficult beasts, needing quite a degree of geekness to get yr head round, refusing to recognise quite common vid cards/sound cards on kernel compile, and frankly Xwindows is an ugly clunky pile o crapola.

Mind you I havent played with an X incarnation in a few years now, maybe things have changed. But with a decent firewall and virus scanner, and refusal to use MS mail products, I've had no hassles whatsoever. So like... eh?

My distribution of choice has been Slackware, although I think they've dropped the ball in the last couple of years. The new ILX database server will be running Gentoo (so I can tune the fuck out of it).

Also I must mention that only in the last month have I stopped using Outlook Express as my mail client at home. (although I still use it on my laptop which I do all my work work on) It's great, security flaw aside. I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird shortly after changing browsers from IE to Mozilla Firebird (which is truly excellent, and I recommend it highly).

exactly. "invasive". what a werird way to go at things isn'it?

I also had an odd problem last night where, upon reload of a page, my browser was hijacking itself off to random yahoo, freehost and other pages, mostly 404s. All kinds of diff ones. It wasnt a browser hijack as far as I could tell, as I ran AdAware and an up to date virus scan and got nothing. But on a reboot, IE started behaving again, and just before it, Eudora, IE and then the whole system fell over in a big way. Left me wondering if I should use something else for mail... Eh.

ok. but it's not relevant to the question at hand that is : have you tried easy does it alternatives to XP.
(ps Andrew, when everything will settle down could you have a look at the problem I wrote you about, you know like I'm unregistered in the "Active Users" but I really am, maybe it's an accent thing or ?)

I only mentioned the goodness of Windows XP in response to the overblown crisicism of MS earlier.

In the free *nix world you have several choices the main one between BSD and Linux (OK so there ar eprojects reviving BeOS, AmigaOS etc. but none are mature enough yet).

OpenBSD leads the free *nix world on security, SuSE is meant to be very easy to install, maintain and use. Lindows is good for off the shelf backwards compatibility with windows.

However its not just about the OS, it's about the desktop. This is where ease of use comes in. The choce here is really between Gnome, KDE and variations on these produced by SuSE, Slackware, RedHat, Sun, Lindows. which all to a greter or lesser extent try to emulate the functionality of XP, which I find far less friendly than OS X. The Sun offering is the latest and has been getting some very good write ups as an alternative to XP on an ordinary drone's desktop.

Also someone mentioned needing a book, this is so far from true, there is so much help and advice out there, a lot of it good even, that it's not too much of a challenge to get things going.

So if i had to choose a *nix

cost irrespective it would be Mac OSX
on a budget it would be OpenBSD or SuSE Linux probably with Sun 'java' desktop or SuSE version of KDE

User friendly is just about what you're used to. If I try to do anything w/ XP nowadays I'm not comfortable at all because I haven't used it in a while, and it's not very user friendly. Same thing with OSX. It took me a little bit to get comfortable with it.

With a different motherboard it may ask you to call in, but generally it's not a problem. They don't ask you for any identifying information, typically, and as long as you tell them what is going on (motherboard go foom, had to buy a new one) then they're generally pretty cool about it from what I can tell.

i would like to get an abit it7 max 3 but i'm pretty sure then that i'd have to get a newer processor. i should probably just get a bit older board that would let me keep my 1.8g p4 but get me into ddr ram and maybe a raid controller. then maybe someday build another computer with the fancy abit

Gentoo is my favourite Linux, but you're better off using Knoppix for something like that. The best things about Gentoo are a) ease of package installation and updating - much better than RPM-based systems b) amount of configurable stuff b) very little distribution-specific customisation of packages - things work the way it says in the package's manual, not in whatever way the distributor has decided to mess around with it.

www.morphix.org

trayce:
>something like XP which comes bundled with my system already installed
>(and therefore no cost and hassle to me)

that is, of course, rubbish.

andy

"...Windows XP together with Office XP is US$560 in the U.S. This is over 2.5 months of GDP/capita in South Africa and over 16 months of GDP/capita in Vietnam. This is the equivalent of charging a single-user licence fee in the U.S. of US$7,541 and US$48,011 respectively, which is clearly unaffordable. ""

I realise what you meant there Andy but in my case it was true, cuz I got a staff discount/salary sacrificed laptop that was not only tax-free, it was sold at reseller cost to me as well. So the possible 1-2 thousand dollars I've saved in taxes and loan interest has, I'm sure you can understand, negated any small OS costs :) Thats more what I meant.

The actual XP price in South Africa is ~R750, or $109USD. Average income is R11000, making XP a little more than one half of a month's salary - still exorbitant and Microsoft is evil, etc. - but leftists lose when they try to manipulate numbers and do it badly.

(x-xpost)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH!

Dahling.