[phyrrus9]

this thread has gone so far off the rails its not even funny....

to all of you recommending kali, or parrot, or black arch, or whatever else: knock it off.

Mostly bastardizations of distros you can already get, without the bloatware (i.e. Debian, Arch).

Spoiler:

I still recommend Debian.

I consider a couple distributions to be pure (and by that I mean unmolested). In order they are:
lfs
gentoo
arch
debian
fedora

[zann699]

Linux is a Ferrari while Mac's a mercedes and Windows's a Ford Escort.
lol, not a car person?

ok..
linux is Chanel, Mac is Gucci and Windows is Gap.
Still no??

OK
Linux is an authentic chicago style deep dish pizza
Mac is a frozen, microwavable version of that
Windows is Domino's.

Linux= Gold
Mac= Bronze
Windows is like Plastic, newer; but cheaply made.

Cars, Fashion and Food everyone likes one or the other, hope this helped.

[phyrrus9]

Linux is a Ferrari while Mac's a mercedes and Windows's a Ford Escort.
lol, not a car person?

ok..
linux is Chanel, Mac is Gucci and Windows is Gap.
Still no??

OK
Linux is an authentic chicago style deep dish pizza
Mac is a frozen, microwavable version of that
Windows is Domino's.

Linux= Gold
Mac= Bronze
Windows is like Plastic, newer; but cheaply made.

Cars, Fashion and Food everyone likes one or the other, hope this helped.

I don't know where that load of BS comes from. BSD is better than Linux any day. @"Ender" ?

[zann699]

Linux is a Ferrari while Mac's a mercedes and Windows's a Ford Escort.
lol, not a car person?

ok..
linux is Chanel, Mac is Gucci and Windows is Gap.
Still no??

OK
Linux is an authentic chicago style deep dish pizza
Mac is a frozen, microwavable version of that
Windows is Domino's.

Linux=  Gold
Mac= Bronze
Windows is like Plastic, newer; but cheaply made.

Cars, Fashion and Food everyone likes one or the other, hope this helped.

I don't know where that load of BS comes from. BSD is better than Linux any day. @"Ender" ?

Isnt BSD unix based?
and
this was supposed to be a humorous post, which you killed with the negativity/bad vibes, great going.

[phyrrus9]

Linux is a Ferrari while Mac's a mercedes and Windows's a Ford Escort.
lol, not a car person?

ok..
linux is Chanel, Mac is Gucci and Windows is Gap.
Still no??

OK
Linux is an authentic chicago style deep dish pizza
Mac is a frozen, microwavable version of that
Windows is Domino's.

Linux=  Gold
Mac= Bronze
Windows is like Plastic, newer; but cheaply made.

Cars, Fashion and Food everyone likes one or the other, hope this helped.

I don't know where that load of BS comes from. BSD is better than Linux any day. @"Ender" ?

Isnt BSD unix based?
and
this was supposed to be a humorous post, which you killed with the negativity/bad vibes, great going.

BSD is UNIX

MacOS is XNU, which is Mach+BSD. Linux is a homebrew combination of SysV (UNIX, later was morphed into BSD by the University of California) and Minix (another homebrew UNIX OS).

[Blink]

Linux is a Ferrari while Mac's a mercedes and Windows's a Ford Escort.
lol, not a car person?

ok..
linux is Chanel, Mac is Gucci and Windows is Gap.
Still no??

OK
Linux is an authentic chicago style deep dish pizza
Mac is a frozen, microwavable version of that
Windows is Domino's.

Linux=  Gold
Mac= Bronze
Windows is like Plastic, newer; but cheaply made.

Cars, Fashion and Food everyone likes one or the other, hope this helped.

I don't know where that load of BS comes from. BSD is better than Linux any day. @"Ender" ?

Isnt BSD unix based?
and
this was supposed to be a humorous post, which you killed with the negativity/bad vibes, great going.

BSD is UNIX based, and Linux is not. A lot of FreeBSD utils are different from GNU's, and those small-ish differences create a different feel to the OS. BSD code is generally more readable (try reading glibc code and comparing it with BSD's libc), and has a lot of nice advantages. On top of all of this, GNU software is generally under the hugely restrictive GPL license, wheras BSD-derived software is under a much more permissive BSD license. Linux is a clone of MINIX, which is a clone of UNIX. BSD is just a straight up fork of UNIX.

However...
Plan 9 is the best OS, hands down.

I consider a couple distributions to be pure (and by that I mean unmolested). In order they are:
lfs
gentoo
arch
debian
fedora

Some more:

• Alpine (something like 30MB installed)
  
• Slackware (old stuff)
  
• Void Linux (like Arch but better in some aspects)
  

[Blink]

Interested in other operating systems but don't know I'd do with linux or other OSs. (Currently use windows 10)

To start, most computers run Linux or some other UNIX-like OS. For example, most phones do; Android is based on Linux, iOS is based on FreeBSD, Mach, and other projects. Many small 'smart' devices run Linux, examples being thermostats, cameras, etc. And last but not least, the great majority of web servers run Linux.

Now... There is an IEEE standard for OSs, known as POSIX. Most OSs are mostly POSIX compliant or POSIX-like, such as GNU/Linux-based ones, Busybox/Linux, BSDs, Plan 9, QNX, etc. Some, are POSIX-certified, meaning that they are actually officially compliant, such as macOS X. However, Windows is not even remotely similar.

You can't do much on Linux that you cannot do on macOS (given you know what you are doing; there is often less documentation about how to do what you want to do on macOS). However, there is a great deal that you can do on Linux that you cannot do on Windows. There are a lot of C libraries defined by POSIX that don't exist in Windows. There are a lot of programs out there for POSIX OSs (I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than for Windows), and Windows cannot run these.

Furthermore, Windows OSs are slow as hell. You should notice this quickly if you run a live version of Linux or a BSD from a drive/disk. Windows may take from 11 to 20GB installed on disk. That's an insane amount of space. For reference, Alpine Linux, a minimal Linux distro, takes only 30MB. Yes, MB. Not only that, but Windows takes up to 2GB+ of RAM doing nothing, with no programs open. In comparison, a Linux OS can take under 5MB; now, this isn't a very fair comparison, since we aren't using a graphical environment, so now let's add one... xmonad, a common window manager for Linux distros, takes only 2MB of RAM. A larger graphical environment that is more similar to Windows' is XFCE; XFCE takes 70MB of RAM, which is huge in comparison to xmonad, but nothing in comparison to Windows'. Another one like XFCE, although somewhat smaller, but also more like Windows' than xmonad, is fluxbox. Fluxbox takes up around 10MB of RAM. Now, these WMs interface with Xorg, which will take another 40MB. On top of all this, Windows crashes a lot, whereas Linux rarely does (one of the reasons for it's usage in the server world).

There are many more advantages, but I don't want to write an entire essay on the topic (at the moment, at least).

Now, you should note, that if you install Ubuntu, none of this applies because Ubuntu is a bastardized version of Linux to the point that you may as well be using Windows. You need to use a decent distribution. If you wanna go all in, and learn everything in the process, do LFS (but don't, you'll get lazy and never finish). If you wanna be somewhat normal but also learn a lot, install Antergos with no GUI, then install the GUI yourself. If you wanna do the same but you don't want something Arch-based, try Debian Net-install. Another good alternative to these is Void Linux. Or, you can simply install normal Arch Linux, it takes around 10 minutes for someone used to installing, or up to an hour for someone new.


Now, there are a few cases where I admit that you must use Windows or macOS (which is still POSIX, and is a much better choice than Windows) for now. Those are, desktop gaming (not game development, you can still do that. Note that consoles actually often run Linux), graphic design (you can try and fiddle with WINE to get Adobe/Serif/Pixelmator stuff working, but you can't do it natively at least), possibly music creation (Bitwig is available for Linux, and Reaper plays well with WINE, but FL Studio and Ableton are not available), and possibly video editing (I don't know much about this one but I'm assuming it's the same as with graphic design).


Here's this, 64MB install with X and Openbox in the wild:

(thanks @"Pikami")

[DragonicRek]

Interested in other operating systems but don't know I'd do with linux or other OSs. (Currently use windows 10)

To start, most computers run Linux or some other UNIX-like OS.  For example, most phones do; Android is based on Linux, iOS is based on FreeBSD, Mach, and other projects.  Many small 'smart' devices run Linux, examples being thermostats, cameras, etc.  And last but not least, the great majority of web servers run Linux.

Now... There is an IEEE standard for OSs, known as POSIX.  Most OSs are mostly POSIX compliant or POSIX-like, such as GNU/Linux-based ones, Busybox/Linux, BSDs, Plan 9, QNX, etc.  Some, are POSIX-certified, meaning that they are actually officially compliant, such as macOS X.  However, Windows is not even remotely similar.

You can't do much on Linux that you cannot do on macOS (given you know what you are doing; there is often less documentation about how to do what you want to do on macOS).  However, there is a great deal that you can do on Linux that you cannot do on Windows.  There are a lot of C libraries defined by POSIX that don't exist in Windows.  There are a lot of programs out there for POSIX OSs (I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than for Windows), and Windows cannot run these.

Furthermore, Windows OSs are slow as hell.  You should notice this quickly if you run a live version of Linux or a BSD from a drive/disk.  Windows may take from 11 to 20GB installed on disk.  That's an insane amount of space.  For reference, Alpine Linux, a minimal Linux distro, takes only 30MB.  Yes, MB.  Not only that, but Windows takes up to 2GB+ of RAM doing nothing, with no programs open.  In comparison, a Linux OS can take under 5MB; now, this isn't a very fair comparison, since we aren't using a graphical environment, so now let's add one... xmonad, a common window manager for Linux distros, takes only 2MB of RAM.  A larger graphical environment that is more similar to Windows' is XFCE; XFCE takes 70MB of RAM, which is huge in comparison to xmonad, but nothing in comparison to Windows'.  Another one like XFCE, although somewhat smaller, but also more like Windows' than xmonad, is fluxbox.  Fluxbox takes up around 10MB of RAM.  Now, these WMs interface with Xorg, which will take another 40MB.  On top of all this, Windows crashes a lot, whereas Linux rarely does (one of the reasons for it's usage in the server world).

There are many more advantages, but I don't want to write an entire essay on the topic (at the moment, at least).  

Now, you should note, that if you install Ubuntu, none of this applies because Ubuntu is a bastardized version of Linux to the point that you may as well be using Windows.  You need to use a decent distribution.  If you wanna go all in, and learn everything in the process, do LFS (but don't, you'll get lazy and never finish).  If you wanna be somewhat normal but also learn a lot, install Antergos with no GUI, then install the GUI yourself.  If you wanna do the same but you don't want something Arch-based, try Debian Net-install.  Another good alternative to these is Void Linux.  Or, you can simply install normal Arch Linux, it takes around 10 minutes for someone used to installing, or up to an hour for someone new.


Now, there are a few cases where I admit that you must use Windows or macOS (which is still POSIX, and is a much better choice than Windows) for now.  Those are, desktop gaming (not game development, you can still do that.  Note that consoles actually often run Linux), graphic design (you can try and fiddle with WINE to get Adobe/Serif/Pixelmator stuff working, but you can't do it natively at least), possibly music creation (Bitwig is available for Linux, and Reaper plays well with WINE, but FL Studio and Ableton are not available), and possibly video editing (I don't know much about this one but I'm assuming it's the same as with graphic design).

Thanks alot for your in-depth explanation. Really helped me.
My plan now is to use windows for gaming and some form of Linux to explore around.

[Vultra]

Well, thanks for sharing some helpful ISO @Ender <3

[psightz]

Yes Ender very cool info.

On topic,
-Linux is very fast, im using a 2008 pc, (Libreboot) Thinkpad , and its running faster than a modern-day pc.
-Linux is Open Source, you can change anything.
-Linux is more secure, thanks to the open source point. You can install Snort IDS, or make your own, to allow connections only you want.

Rasperry Pi automated grow-room