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From the USER'S point of view. Vista is the Poor-Man's-OS-X. There's no *reason* to upgrade unless you're ashamed of the Fisher-Price User Interface on XP.

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I have so much about Linux, but is it non geek friendly, I mean can a normal common or garden pc user install and use it like they would do windows?

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ORIGINAL: wkdshadow

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From the USER'S point of view. Vista is the Poor-Man's-OS-X. There's no *reason* to upgrade unless you're ashamed of the Fisher-Price User Interface on XP.

http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/
http://wincustomize.com/

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I have so much about Linux, but is it non geek friendly, I mean can a normal common or garden pc user install and use it like they would do windows?

Yes and no. Ubuntu will work out of the box on nearly any machine you pop the CD into, and it's rather user friendly. The learning curve is really more of a bump, getting used to the new user interfaces. Most windows programs can now be run in wine, most games will run in cedega(a "fork" of the wine codebase), and for that which doesn't run natively, there's VMWare workstation that'll let you start windows in a "virtual machine", with very little performance loss. VMware kicks ass, and is worth every penny.

http://www.vmware.com/

There's also free, more advanced alternatives to running vmware, such as xen or qemu.

Plus, for anything that you don't like in linux, there's a way to change it.

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ORIGINAL: wkdshadow

Man I'm not even going to get started in this thread, because I'll never stop typing. Well, maybe a simple answer.

There is no reason to switch to Vista.

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ORIGINAL: farglebargle

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What are the advantages of Vista over XP?


Also, what are the disadvantages of Vista?

Depends on the context.

From Microsoft's Point of View, if they don't provide the appearance of progress in keeping their O/S and Application offerings current, they're toast.

From the USER'S point of view. Vista is the Poor-Man's-OS-X. There's no *reason* to upgrade unless you're ashamed of the Fisher-Price User Interface on XP.

From the Corporate IT Point of View. Vista is nothing but a fucking headache.

I think a *lot* of people finally understand. *ALL* Microsoft brings to the table is Marketing, Smoke and Mirrors.

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an other possibility is to use a Linux Live cd (an OS that doesn't need to be installed)

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Anyone know what XP stands for, out of curiosity?

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Great point. While knoppix is the most popular, I'm partial to slax thanks to it's LZM modules to save changes for persistance across reboots. I carry an install of backtrack(slax based, offensive security focused distribution) on my USB key with me at all times. syslinux makes it possible to boot off a fat32 partition(that'd be the USB key), which means no need to mess with sectioning off and partitioning the drive.

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ORIGINAL: Justme696

you forgot to say that Miscosoft has a lot of software support..lots of hardware support.....but refuse to liste to users.
Please don't let this end in fanboy talk..like we see on Microsoft vs MAc vs Linux boards