The stupid question....

[Beardedragon]

Dude, you claimed software in Squeeze was 2 years old. You are wrong. No amount of dodging and weaving will change that. Jeez, anyone with an ounce of sense can tell the difference. But hey, keep on being in denial. It doesn't change facts.

I said Squeeze will be two years old, July 30th. That does not infer the software is. There you go again, misquoting and doing a poor job of that. Evidently you do not comprehend what you read. The forum rules are wrong, there is a stupid question. We cannot answer what cannot be understood in simple terms by the poster.

[DORowell]

Linux Mint is based on Sebian.... Why should i use Linux Mint and not the origional?

For me the reason was I didn't have to discover the right codec, then find it, to play music and video which I had to both on Win 7 and Debian.

Mint #9, 10, ... isn't based on Debian in a direct sense. It is more firmly based on Ubuntu which is, in turn, loosely Debian based.

Of course I'm not a gamer so I'm not interested in all the things you are. I run Mint (much of the time) preferably using software not available on Windoze because I have the feeling that my data isn't being harvested as deeply and I want something simpler. I also notice that Mint 9 boots faster than my Win7 or Ubuntu 9.04 LTS and shuts down VERY MUCH faster.

In one very real sense software is easier to find and install than it is on Windoze IF its available in the repositories or a PPA. Otherwise it is frequently a pain. I suspect that availability of huge repositories is a main reason for Mint to be based on Ubuntu or Debian.

[IOStorm]

The question was and still is: Why should i choose Linux Mint instead of Debian?
And what is the best way to go about making sure the compilers and ide's and so on are installed and configured?
Is there a program that does something like for example the cccleaner? Checks out the windows configuration, removes errors and cleans out the drives from files you'ds nog gonna use?

Come on people, turn me over to the Penguin side!

The Synaptic Package Manager works great for me. It finds all of the dependencies and such and is pretty good at cleaning up after an uninstall. Be sure to choose "Mark for complete removal" if you want for tidying up. I have also installed a few deb packages and they work good also. No major problems so far, and I have been fiddling around A LOT - installing,testing/toying, uninstalling, perhaps then reinstalling, etc.

Installing packages manually? Well, that's for a time when we are more experienced. That is the whole point with Linux, and Linux distributions in particular. There is a very wide range of how much manual labor is expected to get a fully functioning system. Debian is further back on that chain and requires a lot more knowledge. Mint is futher forward and requires much less. But that always means that you might complain about a decision that was made for you. That's just the way it goes. With Windows you have only one choice, Microsoft's. (You can change the GDI in Windows, but that's far more involved and prone to errors than with Linux.)

As for Windows games running better under Windows than on Linux... what would you expect? Running them under Linux is an emulation. You'd get the same performance hit if you ran Linux programs under Windows.

I'm similar to you in the respect of having started in MS-DOS. I always loved the command line. That proved quite lucrative when it came to Windows administration. Newbie MCSE's who had just taken classes to become MCSE''s are generally clueless about the command line. It's always fun to run circles around people who don't know how to do anything without a GUI. I once saw a guy sitting at a Windows Server working on creating over 2000 user folder trees on a new Snap drive. They needed permissions set correctly and such, and he was doing it all in the GUI. That would have taken days. Geez, there's a cacls command in Windows for crying out loud. A batch file the job in minutes.

But anyway, keep up with Linux. I'm not a Windows hater my any means. I make a lot of money administering it. But it's gotten boring. Nowhere to go with the command line. Linux is a new frontier (newer for me at least) that makes it all fun again.

BTW, try installing Ubuntu Tweak. It allows you to tweak all sorts of settings in the system. One of the panels is a package cleaner that helps you clean out all sorts of stuff - downloaded packages, old kernals, etc.

[deuZige]

Well, time has passed and so have many, many, many linux distributions. Especially since i found Lili ive been installing, confifuring and testing distros on my laptop like fashion models chance their outfits. From gentoo to ubuntu and from Slackware to Fedora with everything in between. If its installable from USB ive tried it and ive tried lots that didnt install from usb. General conclusion remains, to me at least in my humble opinion, that Linux is not yet in the same league as Windows as far as 90% of the users and uses on the desktop is concerned.

I see the post ive done here a while back has inspired some... eeerm... "discussion" on several levels and topics and most ill safely refrain from commenting on but my point was eloquently made by IOStorm:

(...)
As for Windows games running better under Windows than on Linux... what would you expect? Running them under Linux is an emulation. You'd get the same performance hit if you ran Linux programs under Windows.
(...)

If Linux was better, wouldnt games and software be origionally created on and for Linux and then emulated on Windows?

Problems ive found with Linux, and basically they all suffer from the same problems, are spawned from the very simple fact that Linux is open source. No one has the authority to say what can and cannot be done to linux. As long as you include the source code in the files you distribute you can do anything you want to it, create your own "Distro" and introduce more splintering into the ever more fragmented linux civilization.

Windows is very simpel. If Microsoft doesnt want it, it isnt happening. There are only 5 or so versions of any Windows version and every peace of software that works on say Ultimate works as well on Home or Media center. Compare that to the hundreds of different distros there are of linux where one has synaptec, another has zypper and yet another has no package manager and requires the user to compile everything manually....

* So the capabilities Linux offers for quality for software programmers are insufficient, otherwise theyd develop their games on Linux and not Windows.
* The community is fragmented and at odds with each other (i need only to point to the debian squeeze discussion in this very thread...) to make unified software development possible. This leads to the next point
* Software for windows 7 will work on windows 7. Software for Linux Ubuntu will not work on Gentoo (unless you get the source code and compile the lot, or download the right package from the right repository.
* I wont even start about the grief the repository nightmare has caused me, let alone "normal" users.

On my laptop i now have a Opensuse/Backtrack/Win7 trioboot installed which allows me to do what i need but frankly... If i need anything done quickly and easily its Windows i boot. Only when i have special needs ill boot up in one of the two Linuxes. Things like tinkering with android roms, needing a wpa passphrase, controlling tcars in a wharehouse... thats when id like linux but for gaming, officework, mediastuff, anything not custom.... Windows is still kicking the crap out of any linux out there.

[Lumikki]

This is nice picture how different Linux distributions are connected in timeline to each others.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... c/Gldt.svg