To those who still have Windows, when can you get rid of it?

[andlinux21]

wow I didn't know they had Nero for Linux my desktop computer may never seen XP again that was one reason I didnt switch it over sooner is because I burn a lot of CD's DVDs on it.

[veloct]

2. openoffice.org 2.0: yes, you read it right! oo.o 1.9.129 often crashes when dealing with ms-office word and powerpoint users. i will be updating to 2.0 right away after this - wished the repositories had the updated oo.o 2.0 immediately.

Add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/OOo2/ ./

then update:

sudo apt-get update

then upgrade:

sudo apt-get upgrade

you'll have 2.0 openoffice

[beameup]

I have just a couple of things I still use XP for.

-Quicken. Can't find a decent home finances app that has budgeting features. Gnucash is promising it though.
-IM. No Linux drivers for my webcam. I know, just buy a new webcam...

That's my only holdup so far. I'm stuck on that online banking thing with MS Money and have records going way back.

Have you tried MoneyDance (http://www.moneydance.com) yet? Yes it's "pay for" software but it's the best I've used with Linux. The trial version lasts a good while. May just be the straw to break the camels back.

[Ibbelz]

Well I just switched between windows and Ubuntu two days ago (after some testing on an other machine that is). Till now I am really happy with it, in despite of some small things I have to fix it's quite perfect for me. My windows partition is already history, hehe. :) It cost me lots of time to convert my 675GB from NTFS to EXT3 (EXT2/3 driver is kind of a bitch in windows) , I am not going to convert it back haha.

[CarbonPlexus]

1. My webcam doesn't work in linux even though I've tried to install the driver like 4 times.
2. Video IM and file transfer support
3. I can't get wine to run my games or PaintShopPro correctly even though they're on the list of supported programs... (the only thing that seems to work is IE and Firefox) (also not sure if it's wine's fault or my video cards fault for the game thing... I know to get an Nvidia card next time ;-)
4. My tablet doesn't work in linux since it's not a mainstream one.
5. I thought Evolution and Thunderbird wouldn't send my mail. I know now that at home it works so it must be some weird firewall my school has that keeps me from sending mail :( Which isn't linux's fault but it's still annoying my school does it since windows Thunderbird sends email fine...

But for everything else that I use daily Ubuntu works wonderfully ^_^

[kalosaurusrex]

Sorry if this is out of line, but has ANYONE got wine to work with ANY game that uses directx? I'm not new to linux, but good lord..I've tried Wine (spend HOURS trying to get it to do anything, finally got it to work with IE, yay. My ultimate goal was to make it work with Empire Earth, and my next query on how to make it work says something that wine doesn't support directx, and well that goes out the window. I want to badly delete my windows partition, but if I want to do any gaming without spending hours and hours trying to make it work, I have to use windows for it. but (in my best Cartman voice) I don't wanna!! Everything else about Ubuntu blows windows out of the water, if someone could just make the gaming portion work consistantly.....I know it's complicated directx and such, but there are a lot of brilliant people working on these projects. Can we make this work? and how come it's completly hit or miss with each game? some games like WoW (supposedly) work with cedega, but Empire Earth wont? I know they are using different libararies and such. Heck even vmware doesn't support much gaming. Where is the uber "how to"? Did I miss the memo?

](*,)

[spdl]

My wife. :p

As far as myself, I just about have everything working on Linux now. Final program I have to work on, the most important, is CS: Source. LOL And figure out a way to convert a .PST Outlook file to Thunderbird format or something.

[Badojo]

nothing, i got ride of my windows partion without hesitation today! theres lots of work to be done still but ubuntu is soo versital besides I really just want to create icons and wallpaper for ubuntu and it seems with ubuntu runs much faster. even faster than other popular distros like SuSe and Fedora at leat i think.

[sunshine02]

I still have my Windows partition because there are no drivers for my film scanner, a Minolta Scan Elite 5400, printer - an Epson Stylus Photo R1800, and no replacement for Photoshop; I'm no Photoshop power user but the gimp still doesn't make it for me. So, I use Ubuntu for everything but my photography, then swap to Windows for that. BTW: I decided Windows was on the way out when, after spending $200 for XP, I still had to call Microsoft and get permisison to install it.

Edit: Now I recommend Ubuntu to everyone considering a new machine or anyone who can't afford Windows.

[spdl]

BTW: I decided Windows was on the way out when, after spending $200 for XP, I still had to call Microsoft and get permisison to install it.

Yeah, don't yah love it?

[sunshine02]

Yeah, don't yah love it?

Oh, Yeah. It came to me, while I was waiting for permission to install, that Microsoft is maintaining market share by legislation, not innovation; time to move on. Still, I have all this unsupported hardware that will require Windows through the near future.

[Chris Tucker]

im a VB programmer :X
/me waits to get tackled by all the other language programmers
Well, im not a deep vb programmer, but i do a lot of robotics, and i already knew BASIC, VB device I/O was easy, so, now im glued to it, i have a competition comeing up, and its too close to pick a different language and learn it top to bottom.

also: games, DirectX works fine on my notebook, but its got SiS 760 video, so NO DRI support at all that ive found yet.. i may find it sooner or later .. but havent yet.

Hardware: well, wifi on my notebook is broadcom, so i use ndiswrapper, but i dont get any signal level feedback, and VMware HATES my setup, i cant install any OS in vmware so long as im using wifi.

Things work soo damn easy in windows: Well, mainly Audacity.. it complains that it cant find /dev/dsp! maybe i just dont have the right daemon running..
along with the working easy bit... some apps hog the sound system to themselves in linux.. yet in windows, that doesnt happen.

thats about it, i keep finding myself going to linux more and more, i love it, but these things kick me right back to that reboot button.

[Domhnull]

Nothing. There is no longer a Windows partition. It stuck around for awhile but running WoW under Cedega was the last straw. WinXP was gone. I've never missed it.

[lgmdaniel]

I'd love to be able to move away from windows.. but as I have to help people on XP its handy to have it for testing those other little things.. I may even be doing some role back soon and adding Win98SE (still people use it, but its better than that ME pish).
Once I've got Ubunta in a bit more control I also want to add a Solaris partition.

Is there a limit on the number of OS I can boot from?

[Knomefan]

im a VB programmer :X
/me waits to get tackled by all the other language programmers
Well, im not a deep vb programmer, but i do a lot of robotics, and i already knew BASIC, VB device I/O was easy, so, now im glued to it, i have a competition comeing up, and its too close to pick a different language and learn it top to bottom.
http://gambas.sourceforge.net/
I don't have any personal experience with it, but from what I read it's quite good. May be worth a look when you have more time.

[felixdzerzhinsky]

For me it is my iRiver T30:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=106684

[phazo]

I'm just too new. I try to spend as much time as I can in Ubuntu and I have to say, so far its the only distro that actually worked on my PC. Period. Fedora I couldn't get installed, Suse would lock if I didn't boot in failsafe.

Ubuntu, ROCKED, for a newbie like me it is the way to go... I'm ready to kill my XP Partition, just need to figure out how to install tarballs, increase my Wireless Security to WPA and I'm DONE with Windows! Oh yah... and get rid of those pesky NTFS partitions!

[phi]

Well.... nothing :p

[lutosdemayo]

If i'd delete windows right now then i can't surf the net and run ubuntu. My beloved Ubuntu is installed on vmware. Damn this usb modem i cant get it to work so i'm stuck with windows. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

[Elrohir]

My info... Documents, music and some archives... but going to delete it next week... I swear!

[The Warlock]

im a VB programmer :X
/me waits to get tackled by all the other language programmers
Well, im not a deep vb programmer, but i do a lot of robotics, and i already knew BASIC, VB device I/O was easy, so, now im glued to it, i have a competition comeing up, and its too close to pick a different language and learn it top to bottom.
After your competition, I strongly recommend you start learning C++. Trust me. It will help you a lot later on. Even if you're coding on Windows, C++ is a much better language, and once you get used to it, you'll probably find it easier to use, although, yes, it's harder to learn.

As for your other problems: I don't have a SiS card, so I don't know anything about that. As far as Audacity is concerned, well, Audacity is old and sort of out of date. Try using gnusound instead, it should work. Most programs don't hog the sound if you have it set up correctly, but if they do (Flash in Firefox does for me), install the alsa-oss package and when you start the program, start it with the aoss command, like so: aoss firefox.

[TheRealEdwin]

Games. Pure and simple. The day games work on linux on release day is the day I switch. I really, really, really want to move completly too.

[Stormx]

I agree with games. Soldat in particular.

But also, copying DLLs over for use with wine is a must. I cba to crawl the internet looking for something which i have on a windows partition already

[ubuntuB]

I wanted to post here, although I made the leap and deleted my windows partition. I still have a need to use windows, but now that I have vmplayer working, I can use windows when I absolutely have to. I am a 10 year + windows user, and I have to say that I am very impressed with Ubuntu. Im not sure its dumbed down enough for new computer users, but it was good enough to convert me. Now, if I could just get it to recognize my Mad Dog DVD burner....

[TheRealEdwin]

Another annoying thing is my mouse forward and back buttons not working out of the box. Seriously.

[chimera]

For Ubuntu Lovers, what is PREVENTING you from deleting your Windows Partition?

The fact that I don't have one anymore :lol:
I've left windows installed until a few days ago. I installed ubuntu six months ago and I never really booted into windows since then, so I figured I don't really need windows any more but I could use those 100 gygabites their partition is taking up:D

[cychem1]

Just Games. If linux could get mainstream gamming support I would make the switch entirely. Right now I dual boot but only use my windows partition for games. In my opinion this is one of the major obstacles to widespread adoption of linux as a popular OS.

[seashell11]

I have just a couple of things I still use XP for.

-Quicken. Can't find a decent home finances app that has budgeting features. Gnucash is promising it though.
-IM. No Linux drivers for my webcam. I know, just buy a new webcam...
I've been running Ubuntu for about 5 months now, and been trying to convince my folks to let me install it on their computer. Well I started messing around one day, and installed winetools, then with winetools I installed all the Base System, Windows System Software, and Microsoft Truetype core fonts for wine (even though it popped up a warning that winetools was designed for a different version of win). Then I popped in the Quicken Deluxe 2005 CD, and it installed good. So far I havn't had any problems with Quicken, it will download updates from the bank and everything. The neat thing was that I didn't have to configure wine at all to make Quicken work after I installed all that stuff with winetools.

[ganatronic]

-usb midi
I can't for the life of me get this to work. I have a lovely synth, and I just want to record on my laptop. I've worked so hard trying to get this stuff together.

-video
Both vlc and totem have been crapping out on me for no reason that I can discern. I just want to stream music videos, and, while I had it working well for a bit, some recent updates have made it not work.

That said, I deleted my windows partition a long time ago. I still need to update to Breezy. I haven't done it yet because I spent so much time configuring things in warty and hoary, and I just know another update will force me to spend hours getting various things set up again. I'm thinking of doing a fresh install, but I'm scared. But Breezy has some things I really want - but it's mostly little stuff, like scrobbler in synaptics, better rhythmbox, and junk like that.

[Supermouse]

nothing impedes me of deleting teh windows partition...

in fact, I already deleted it, about a month ago...

[mudguts]

I read the first 14 pages and got so sidetracked with researching all the tools, toys and gizmos that everyone was posting that I just jumped into the reply.
I have 3 computers. one is my wifes, one is my laptop for work and the third is my 'sandbox' for playing. Both the laptop and the wifes run XP sp2. I have all my mail on the laptop but am seriously thinking of trying to move it over to the Ubuntu sandbox and see if I can import it somehow. Then the plan is to see if i can install the Citrix for Linux option.

if I can get those options to work on the sandbox then I may buy a small 20GB drive for my laptop and install Ubuntu on it and make it a work machine. It's only a p3 1ghz 512mb machine so it's pretty useless as it is.

This is an excellent OS though, much better then the past few Linux O/S's that I've installed.

[Vinci71]

Crossover drives my office2000 copy (I'll consider OOO once it gets better.
Its a very good suite right now that deserves lauding, but its still behind Office).


Right now, the main problem is gaming for me. On my work PC, I already deleted the Windows partition, even if sometimes I have to use an Office 2000 with Crossover to read particular documents (for the documents I write, I try to use other formats when possible). Another slight problem at work is that I have to use shared documents on a Windows domain, but if I open them with my Linux box, there is no lock on the files, so this becomes an issue when I modify them while someone other needs to access them...

[bugaman]

I'm doing it on January 1st, Happy New Year!

[Mikeynewbie]

The only thing that keeps me or I should say was keeping me from getting rid of windows was simply my Thesis and the odd college course. Most professors wanted files sent as attachments and are too um lazy to download OOO to open those files so they want all attachments in word. Furthermore when I started using linux I was half way through the thesis and OOO would not format what I already had correctly so I kept windows.

Now I am done and deposit this week. So someone tell me how I can get rid of the windows partition, repartition ubuntu and add a swap lol.

[Nightwind]

1.Our trucking,and logbook, software isn't compatible with Linux.
2.Our P.C Miler ($4000.00) mileage maping and fuel tax program won't run under it. Main reason #1
3.When I teach computer classes my students are so new to computers that they do not know how to start the computer, they all run windows if they even have a computer.
4.I'm too new at Linux to try to teach it, I need classes my self, which by the way are next to impossible to find here in rual Alabama.
5.All the software that I have for teaching classes is for, you guessed it Windows.
6.I'm a MS registered OEM/System builder(please don't shoot me)
I do my best to install Unbuntu on used machines that I sell, but folks want you guessed it again, Windows.
7.My S.O refuses to learn anything new at this point. Main reason #2
Other than that we'd be "Windowless"
So I am "stuck in the middle".

[endangst]

I'd love to get rid of Windows, but here are the reasons why I can't yet, unfortunately:

1. USB card reader won't detect xD picture card in Linux, but it works fine in Windows.
2. TV tuner card doesn't have audio in Linux.
3. GAIM doesn't offer voice chat in Yahoo, but Gyach does, however, Gyach looks like a complicated mess to install and is unstable. (I guess that's the fault of Gyach, not Linux though.)

From what I've read, there is no way to fix #1 and #2 could be solved (I subscribed to the Video4Linux mailing list, but no solution yet). #3 isn't that big of a deal, but it would be nice to use voice and view webcams in Yahoo.

[BSDFreak]

The kids like their games, apart from that nothing is preventing me from using only Linux/BSD.

[h0me5k1n]

The one thing that stops me from deleting the WinXP partition I have is that I cannot get Teamspeak working at the same time as Counter-Strike Source (via cedega). I cannot get the audio-mixing to work properly so that I can have in-game voice/sounds and Teamspeak voice in/out at the same time.

[Derek Djons]

The only two reasons in my case are games and Photoshop / Dreamweaver. Though I must admit I could also use Bluefish. But heck, if I'm still owning a Game / Devvin' machine why not continue using Dreamweaver.

As soon as there will be a very good Photoshop replacement (with at least the same capabilities) I will switch to it and Bluefish. Since games for me are pure entertainment I will even forfeit them to install my (fastest of all computers) with Ubuntu. There are many other ways to entertain yourself :)

[JimmyJazz]

The only two reasons in my case are games and Photoshop / Dreamweaver. Though I must admit I could also use Bluefish. But heck, if I'm still owning a Game / Devvin' machine why not continue using Dreamweaver.

As soon as there will be a very good Photoshop replacement (with at least the same capabilities) I will switch to it and Bluefish. Since games for me are pure entertainment I will even forfeit them to install my (fastest of all computers) with Ubuntu. There are many other ways to entertain yourself :)
I was dedicated to Photo Shop also but I have found that GIMP 3.6(beta) replaces PS quite well. Also I have found that Quanta and Bluefish both are much much better than Dreamweaver (which I used for over 4 years btw), its basically just a matter of learning how to use these apts.

[Derek Djons]

I was dedicated to Photo Shop also but I have found that GIMP 3.6(beta) replaces PS quite well. Also I have found that Quanta and Bluefish both are much much better than Dreamweaver (which I used for over 4 years btw), its basically just a matter of learning how to use these apts.

Probably my 'being used to' blocks the will to switch if GIMP comes indeed near Photoshop. I'll gonna try again and longer :) Bluefish, I've been using it a time now, it's very clean and it works like it should :) But thanks mentioning Quanta, I'll scope that one out too :)

[foof]

Can't run guitarport on Linux, too bad! :(
http://www.guitarport.com

[martinjanson]

I am using a tablet PC, havent got the pen to work and there is no hand recognition software to match that of microsoft tablet pc

[gosh]

There are still a few things I can't get to work with Ubuntu but do work with XP:

* Dymo LabelWriter 320 (might work if I hack the kernel, but I am a bit anxious to do so)
* GuitarPort
* Vox Tonelab SE Editor
* Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000

When I get these working in Ubuntu, I will loose my XP

[shade11]

I have been feeling about switching completley to Linux for some time.

BUT. . .

I have not been able to install things from source. Shell source is hard to do. I cant get a single media player that supports all audio formats. And plus I dont know how to run Wine withoug installing a Windows application first. I still dont know alot about Linux. Also, Wine is not fast enough. And Crossover Office runs very slow when using iTunes and Quick Time. I dont know how to import and export files in Wine. Also I have Maya 6 Unlimited, and it is too expensive to give up and switch to Blender 3d. Even though I said I would get rid of Windows after I installed XMMS and Wine. And even though I can apt-get now.

But once these problems are solved I will Nuke my Windows partition and keep with Ubuntu completley.

[Sp@z]

The fact that I am on my 7th install of Ubuntu..........I just can't seem to get it right........but since I use my computer for 100% entertinment and my preffered games (UT99 UT2K4) are native.............once I stop crashing Kubuntu I will remove my XP partition.........

[Kaul]

I would love to be exlusivly Kubuntu BUT, My Digital camera software is for windows, I have found no true equivelent to MS Front page, Palm software is Windows, My 3in1 Lexmark printer will not work under Kubuntu, Phone sync software is Windows.

[mstlyevil]

Now that I think of it, not a Fsking thing. I have not booted into Windows in a couple of weeks. I am seriously thinking of scrapping it altogether.

[chammi]

I usually go a few weeks at a time without booting into Windows.

But I still do, and here's why:

* Scanning! (even though there's SANE support for my scanner, until I figure it out, it's still easier to boot into Windows, run Irfanview, and hiot ctrl+A to acquire)
* Games. nothing beats an old school NES rom from time to time. I can't get NESTRA to work, but nesticle is still happy to oblige.
* PC-only games. Again, same sort of thing. Even if new titles were Linux compatible, that doesn't mean all the software sitting around my deskt would suddenly be so.
* Printing. My laser printer has CUPS support. but it still can do some strange things. If I'm having a LOT of trouble printing a doc or image, I'll make it a PDF and try again. If that doesn't work, I'll go to Windows.
* Online media. Some people insist on making you use Winmedia. Other people use Real and QT, but their embedded media doesn't load in Linux. If I REALLY want ot see it, I can always have the option of moving ove to Windows.

That said, there are also defintate reasons I can't live without Ubuntu.

* First and foremost, I meatheadedly copied an old HD to the free space on my new one and now Windows can't read it (b/c of logical partition limitations). So ironically, I can't access the HD which has MS Office on it unless I'm in Ubuntu, which won't run it! Oh well.. at least there's OpenOffice.

[chammi]

I usually go a few weeks at a time without booting into Windows.

But I still do, and here's why:

* Scanning! (even though there's SANE support for my scanner, until I figure it out, it's still easier to boot into Windows, run Irfanview, and hiot ctrl+A to acquire)
* Games. nothing beats an old school NES rom from time to time. I can't get NESTRA to work, but nesticle is still happy to oblige.
* PC-only games. Again, same sort of thing. Even if new titles were Linux compatible, that doesn't mean all the software sitting around my deskt would suddenly be so.
* Printing. My laser printer has CUPS support. but it still can do some strange things. If I'm having a LOT of trouble printing a doc or image, I'll make it a PDF and try again. If that doesn't work, I'll go to Windows.
* Online media. Some people insist on making you use Winmedia. Other people use Real and QT, but their embedded media doesn't load in Linux. If I REALLY want ot see it, I can always have the option of moving ove to Windows.

That said, there are also definate reasons I can't live without Ubuntu.

* First and foremost, I meatheadedly copied an old HD to the free space on my new one and now Windows can't read it (b/c of logical partition limitations). So ironically, I can't access the HD which has MS Office on it unless I'm in Ubuntu, which won't run it! Oh well.. at least there's OpenOffice.

[paulrobert_a]

Laptop's Wireless Enable/Disable button :(

Once ubuntu is able to master this XP will be gone and I can sell off the XP Home product code on ebay :D

[suziequzie]

Oops, almost posted it twice. My real answer below...

[suziequzie]

What is preventing me from switching to Ubuntu primarily and scrapping windows? 2 things:

1: Still learning about linux. When I feel I know enough to comfortably use it primarily, and when I feel comfortable enough to be able to teach it to...

2: My boyfriend: who is not very comfortable with computers. He will use it (the computer), but he doesn't trust it. But, he is familiar with windows, and since he pays for half the cable modem service, I leave it on for him. But if I can get him to prefer linux (once I start teaching him), then it's gone.

[jaredwhitehead]

I am posting this on an Apple iBook and I have and HP Omnibook running 98SE. Why? Why not? There are new things out there everyday that only work with certain platforms. If they are worth anything, we can force the issue of porting them to the other platforms. While I do regret EVER buying a CD that has a M$ OS on it, the fact is that I did so I might as well use them (except XP of course because it periodically kills itself by updating in the middle of the night).

[jeff--]

Photoshop.

That's the main thing keeping me in Windows. Also gaming keeps me using windows. Other than that, I have no use for it.

[vincebs]

Some things are just easier to do in Windows than Linux. There are a lot of things I want to configure and fix, which are easy to do in Windows but are a pain in the *** when using Linux. I try to avoid the terminal as much as possible, unless it's a one-line entry, and I also try to stay away from editing configuration files by hand. Little problems like DHCP taking forever to detect my internet connection on bootup, media file associations, as well as Alps touchpad being too sensitive, problems I managed to easily fix in Windows but not in Linux. Some programs like MSN Messenger and DC++ don't seem to work in Linux, and they don't seem to work out of the box on Wine, and their open source equivalents don't seem to have all the features.

[mohapi]

Games. That's all.

[Reb]

Counterstrike Source and Civilization 4... I enjoy them too much to give up. :mad:

[mohapi]

No, wait. I thought of something else that is kind of holding me back, but not really.

Something that will allow me to edit a pdf. I can create them with ps2pdf or with OOO, but sometimes I need to edit, clip, cut apart or crop a pdf. Perhaps there's a utility that will give me that kind of control, but I haven't heard about it yet.

So unfortunately, until I hear otherwise, it's back to Windows for Acrobat. :(

Oh yeah. And games. :rolleyes:

[shade11]

Another reason: MYST!!! Wine, Cedega, Crossover; they dont run it.



Photoshop.

That's the main thing keeping me in Windows. Also gaming keeps me using windows. Other than that, I have no use for it.

Photoshop can be run in crossover office.

[Bone Down]

well I jumped in head first, and have been win free on my laptop now 5 weeks.

I am a business professional and have moved over to OOo and evolution 2.4.1 so far so good, vpn was my biggest issue and that has been resolved.

Thunderbird for personal email

firefox 1.5

So far so good, I am still working on getting k9copy to work for 9to5 compression with gui.

other than that, im ok with this ubuntu distro.

[Tinuz]

Well, for one, ArcGIS. It's not there for linux, but it is absolutely(sp?) vital for me as it concerns most things i do for school. I have some problems with Maple and Matlab and Linux as well, which i have running in windows too. Other than that, not much.
I doubt there will be an ArcGIS for linux soon, and seeing how those guys program, its probably best there won't be(you'd need root access to do trivial stuff like looking at your files:rolleyes: )

I use linux for a number of reasons, first and foremost, it challenges me, i like to be challenged and for some reason i love the commandline as it gives me a feeling of power(can you see my evil grin? :p ). Also, my university uses alot of windows based software, but the workfield is slowly shifting towards linux, simply because it is free. I don't want to be like the rest of the students, lagging behind, and am learning to work with linux and its utilities.

[ghostaliaz]

Look I am a newbie also and yes some software I cannot find a replacement for like my PVR recording software & my modem software to run a voice mail piece of software on windows because my computer answers my phone for me and I use a program called phonetools and it is great because it answers my phone, it sends my faxes, it even sends emails, it does terminal and it also makes phone calls, but I love linux and yes I dual boot with xp & unbuntu, but I have no choice plus I like to also play games sometimes to and linux is just not the gaming machine unless you want to play 80's games. But I love linux and I am mostly using linux I have several boxes with unbuntu and xp and mepis linux and xp installed on them and I love them and to all of those users saying that unbuntu and other debian linux distros cant play streaming audio or streaming video, well I got news for you I found several pieces of software on other repositories that allow me to play quicktime,WMV(windows media format),real player,flash,java,ogg,asx,avi,mpg(mpeg),mp4,.264, etc and the list goes on & on, but the very problem is people are so lazy and take it I am a newbie but I found all of the info on just doing a google search and most of the time if I was looking for sorten type of software to play a paticular format, then I would just type in google search window something like ( wmv repositories) or (playing wmv on unbuntu) or (playing wmv using debian linux) or ( howto install wmv on unbuntu or use mepis) because mepis page , well there forums page has alot of info that can be used on unbuntu because it uses debian also. But the main codecs you need to install I think is called (w32) or (win32) or (win 32 codecs) or (w32 Codecs) and that is the one that installs most of the windows codecs to play most of the formats and then I went & installed most of the debian media players so I can choose which one I like and also be able to play all the formats like on windows and my mac and my linux boxes play everything that windows and my mac can, so I am set as far as I am concerned and I love it, but people you must put sometime in and if you do not want to then you need to stay off every computer and go and watch tv because when learning to do anything on any computer you have to read something in order to learn how to use it if not then you won't know and not knowing only hurts you because I have enough sense to do a google search and find everything I want to know about linux & not to mention all of the books I have bought like ( moveing to linux) which is the best book for us newbies because it taught me so much about linux that no other book could and also a book by the name of( Learning Debian GNU Linux ) which taught me alot about debian & how it works and how to use it. But anyway people give linux a try because windows and apple are coming preinstalled with more and more restrictions like all of that (DRM) crap and stuff and linux does not, so that is mainly what I like about linux because it let's me be total free of the pains in the computer geeks a**es, like big brother,sensors and all of the rest of the annoying people that do not even know how to use email. So learn linux because these new OSX & Windpws OS is going to have nothing but spy software in it reporting back to big brother and software companies everything you do and me I do not want that so I am preparing before this all comes, so yes I have done a dual boot , but I am gradually switching over more & more everyday to linux and I love it and soon I will not use any windows OS's, but for now I use both and will continue until I find replacements for my prime software that I use & people if you use microsoft office you all can open any MS office file on open office, but I choose not to use open office because it starts up so slow that is pi**es me off, so instead I use (abiword) because abiword works better then open office and it is way quicker and much smaller and less clunky then openoffice and it plays all of the Office files that I have sent to it and I use it alot. To me abiword is the real office software for linux that comptes for me against MS office and it is not boated with a bunch of crap that I do not use. But anyway people good luck and welcome to you all and myself to freedom by using the best OS in the universe which is Lux(unix). :D

[TechSonic]

Look I am a newbie also and yes some software I cannot find a replacement for like my PVR recording software & my modem software to run a voice mail piece of software on windows because my computer answers my phone for me and I use a program called phonetools and it is great because it answers my phone, it sends my faxes, it even sends emails, it does terminal and it also makes phone calls, but I love linux and yes I dual boot with xp & unbuntu, but I have no choice plus I like to also play games sometimes to and linux is just not the gaming machine unless you want to play 80's games. But I love linux and I am mostly using linux I have several boxes with unbuntu and xp and mepis linux and xp installed on them and I love them and to all of those users saying that unbuntu and other debian linux distros cant play streaming audio or streaming video, well I got news for you I found several pieces of software on other repositories that allow me to play quicktime,WMV(windows media format),real player,flash,java,ogg,asx,avi,mpg(mpeg),mp4,.264, etc and the list goes on & on, but the very problem is people are so lazy and take it I am a newbie but I found all of the info on just doing a google search and most of the time if I was looking for sorten type of software to play a paticular format, then I would just type in google search window something like ( wmv repositories) or (playing wmv on unbuntu) or (playing wmv using debian linux) or ( howto install wmv on unbuntu or use mepis) because mepis page , well there forums page has alot of info that can be used on unbuntu because it uses debian also. But the main codecs you need to install I think is called (w32) or (win32) or (win 32 codecs) or (w32 Codecs) and that is the one that installs most of the windows codecs to play most of the formats and then I went & installed most of the debian media players so I can choose which one I like and also be able to play all the formats like on windows and my mac and my linux boxes play everything that windows and my mac can, so I am set as far as I am concerned and I love it, but people you must put sometime in and if you do not want to then you need to stay off every computer and go and watch tv because when learning to do anything on any computer you have to read something in order to learn how to use it if not then you won't know and not knowing only hurts you because I have enough sense to do a google search and find everything I want to know about linux & not to mention all of the books I have bought like ( moveing to linux) which is the best book for us newbies because it taught me so much about linux that no other book could and also a book by the name of( Learning Debian GNU Linux ) which taught me alot about debian & how it works and how to use it. But anyway people give linux a try because windows and apple are coming preinstalled with more and more restrictions like all of that (DRM) crap and stuff and linux does not, so that is mainly what I like about linux because it let's me be total free of the pains in the computer geeks a**es, like big brother,sensors and all of the rest of the annoying people that do not even know how to use email. So learn linux because these new OSX & Windpws OS is going to have nothing but spy software in it reporting back to big brother and software companies everything you do and me I do not want that so I am preparing before this all comes, so yes I have done a dual boot , but I am gradually switching over more & more everyday to linux and I love it and soon I will not use any windows OS's, but for now I use both and will continue until I find replacements for my prime software that I use & people if you use microsoft office you all can open any MS office file on open office, but I choose not to use open office because it starts up so slow that is pi**es me off, so instead I use (abiword) because abiword works better then open office and it is way quicker and much smaller and less clunky then openoffice and it plays all of the Office files that I have sent to it and I use it alot. To me abiword is the real office software for linux that comptes for me against MS office and it is not boated with a bunch of crap that I do not use. But anyway people good luck and welcome to you all and myself to freedom by using the best OS in the universe which is Lux(unix). :D

I tried to read that, but because you didn't put that in paragraphs, I lost my place reading it 5 dozen times. Don't mean to be rude or anything.

[Serenader]

I use Linux almost 99.99% of the time. I am happy with Linux for all my needs. However, I would like to see support for Launchcast or musicindiaonline etc... in Linux. I never could get that thing working.

[shade11]

I have to come back to windows becuase the computer teacher at my school refuses to give me the wlan code. I am forced to use Windows.

I want to leave Windows for good. But it is too hard. I wanna leave it already!! Gahhhh!

[sga826]

Great question, because I ask myself the same thing every week.

I installed Breezy Badger last month and made a list of "must have" apps and functionality before I could go all Ubuntu.

The list is shrinking but I still need XP. If anyone knows of alternatives please let me know.

I must have a decent Wallpaper Manager (I use Panorama, a very old app at home and Wallmaster at work, Xcopy and/or DVD Shrink, and I haven't been able to get Streamload to work with Linux.

[Phlosten]

I have only recently stepped into Ubuntu. The reason I did so was as an upgrade from Windows 98SE. I have never had Windows XP installed nor will I ever have it installed. And hopefully I will never have to purchase another Microsoft product. If anything I will probably be staying a few steps behind.

So far I have been using Ubuntu exclusively for a few days. The only thing I have missed so far has been the ability to print on my main machine. This is another issue a friend of mine is dealing with as well. Not helping very much in our attempt to totally dump Windows.

I have also had trouble with successfully getting my dialup internet to work easily. I ended up setting up a proxy on one of my other machines with a Windows98 install. This isnt a biggie as I know broadband has removed the need for dialup for most people and hence support for this is dying. Hopefully we should have decent wireless broadband in our town in six months.

I even own a copy of MS Office XP, but I havent had it installed for over 6 months. I have been using OO exclusively and it rocks. There are lots of groovy tools in Ubuntu that I think are superior to Windows, however the basics of the system need to be made far easier.

Simple people are using simple things. Get the basics right and the general PC using public might give Linux a better look. When talking to people about moving to Linux I compare it to the days of Windows 3.1. That was a long while ago and Windows use and support has been building ever since. I think only now in the last year or two has Linux become usable for the average person, and it will be a slower process for the community to build on this. Win3.1 didnt really have much competition. Linux does.

[araz]

These are the programs that keep my windows alive.
-Photshop CS (12%)
-Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (80%)
-Office 2003 (because of compatibilities with my classmates in grafics) (5%)
-MSN Messenger (3%)

[cjm5229]

Well, I was going to delete it just a few minutes ago ago, but I can't seem to find it. I guess I haven't used it for awhile. maybe it's under my keyboard. Nope not there either. Seems like I'm getting kind of forgetful in my old age. OH!! I remember now, I'll bet it was where I installed Dapper Drake last week! Yeh, That's It, thats why my computer is working so much better. I'm still dual booted, just Ubuntu, & Ubuntu. That's much better.:smile:

[shade11]

These are the programs that keep my windows alive.
-Photshop CS (12%)
-Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (80%)
-Office 2003 (because of compatibilities with my classmates in grafics) (5%)
-MSN Messenger (3%)
-Photshop CS - Emulated in wine on Breezy. Sliver Rank. Only with Wine 0.9.2. and 20050725
-Macromedia Flash MX 2004 - Crossover Office (Emulates)
-Office 2003 - Crossover office (Emulates)
-MSN Messenger -AMSN or GAIM

[Bladerunner]

Only one thing prevents me from getting rid of Windows. My inability of getting my hdtv cards working even though support for them is already in the kernel. Why can't Ubuntu detect and load drivers for them during install like any other piece of hardware? Someone should write a HowTo for tv cards specificly hdtv cards. (not a Mythtv howto)

[Tibor60]

1. Time. Any change of the system, installiong a new hardware can be solved in 5 minutes in WINDOWS and 5 days activly working in ubuntu or other linux.

2. Corel Draw. Seriously, linux is a fun, a hobby, but still is not capable to help in serious work. In Windows I simply do the job, no hassles. In linux I feel that I am a permanent problem-solver...

[shade11]

1. Time. Any change of the system, installiong a new hardware can be solved in 5 minutes in WINDOWS and 5 days activly working in ubuntu or other linux.

2. Corel Draw. Seriously, linux is a fun, a hobby, but still is not capable to help in serious work. In Windows I simply do the job, no hassles. In linux I feel that I am a permanent problem-solver...

Linux can get the job done too as well. You need to know what you are doing though. Linux can help with seirous work actually very well.

[nismoskys]

like posted before, time. some things can be done easily and quickly in windows, while the same things take at least 3 times the time in linux. however, i do enjoy the feeling of satisfaction when i get something working in linux, because i actually worked on it to make it work. also, there's no support for my printer in linux! a real bummer. i really wanna go all-linux, but it sucks to have to boot all the way back to xp just to print something out. i have a canon i350 if anyone knows of a driver, thatd be really helpful.

[aysiu]

I'd stick with Windows and the next time you get a printer... get one that supports Linux.

[geekphreak]

Nothing's preventing me from deleting my Windows partition, I never had Windows on my machine in the first place... :P

[nismoskys]

I'd stick with Windows and the next time you get a printer... get one that supports Linux.
eh, but i really enjoy using linux.. ive actually had this printer for a while though, but it works fine, so no reason to go and get a new one just cuz theres no driver for it... yet...i hope.

[slider2800]

Two things.

(1.)
My mom is using the damn computer also and she's too stupid to use Linux

(2.)
I still compose my music on windows.
Yeah, i know... but Reason and FruityLoops only run on win...

[DragonX2]

What is preventing me?

1) Internet is very annoying.

I have to switch between 3 different networks daily. Home, School, Work. Two are wireless, one is with ethernet cables. For some reason it always takes an eternity to switch from one to the other, and then I will always have to waste a couple of minutes to actually reconfigure everything.

Windows, I turn it on, automatically detects the connection, and I'm good to go.

2) Messenger.

I use MSN alot for work and school. But sending files is such a hassle. Plus, Gaim lacks alot of features.

3) My linux partition is too small.

When installing Ubuntu on this laptop, it wouldn't let me reconfigure the windows partition, so now I only have 4 gigs of space to work with on Ubuntu, and 86 gigs on windows.

4) Sound support

Sound is somewhat of an issue for me. Sometimes it works in some applications, and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.

5) Laptop Annoyances

For some reason, when I'm using ubuntu on my laptop, the mouse likes to jump all over the place, click on windows when I didn't click on it, and paste things I didn't even know I copied. It may be a sensitivity issue with the built-in mousepad, but I can't figure out how to turn it off.

Other then that, Ubuntu is great. But I really only use it for programming.

[hafunui]

I use Windoz for:

A few games, even though I could play these in Linux, it runs a bit faster in winXp

Most of my applications are still there

I homeschool and they have these programs that only work in windowz.

And my camera, I cant get it to work with gtkam so I have to use windows for that too.

[drfalkor]

games, and photoshop .

[Chris Tucker]

just an update, i have been using my windows partition less and less... lately all i can remembmer using it for are some non-3d games that need DirectX .. played 1 of those this entire month... for about 30 minutes..
other thing ive used windows for was maybe 6 hours... that was for using ndiswrapper... my wireless card isnt friendly telling linux its signal and noise levels.. ndiswrapper.. and its a broadcom.. need to get a more suitable mini pci card...

all in all thats maybe 6.5 hrs this month ive used windows on my laptop.. i keep shrinking that windows partition... not long now and it will be even smaller..
/ = 34G
XP = 20G
shared FAT32 = 17G
annoying little partition left on the drive from the factory thats soon going to disappear = 3G

damn happy i went with an 80 gig model.. cant imagine if i only had 40G :S :O

[bumpusth]

Matlab. After using it's linux version for two years I'll take the hassle of using windows for it. In addition to being slightly less stable, my colleagues require s-functions for windows which are not the same when I compile inside a linux box. It's a small difference that is just a huge pain. The linux version is nice to tie into RTAI, but as far as simulink goes the inability to work with people using the windows version seamlessly just bugs the hell out of me.

[zorkerz]

Civilization IV the bane of my existance

[agapito]

What is that Windows thing you are all talking about? ;)

[Chris Tucker]

What is that Windows thing you are all talking about? ;)
wish i didnt know.. if i grew up with linux or even mac.. i would have no reason to want windows.. but because they have a strong monopoly.. i couldnt have.. i had no idea what linux was till about the year 2000. i immediatly wanted it.

[shade11]

What is Windows partition that you speak of? :-k

[Prefader]

Pro Tools.
No drivers for the M-Audio BoB I use.
Annoying forms done in Word Perfect, used by the office I work in. OOo doesn't play too nice with these, and I need to save out to .wpd as well.

I can deal with the audio stuff. It doesn't bother me in the least to have a partition just for that, especially since my laptop would only get booted into windows when I'm actually recording / editing . . . but this .wpd stuff is really annoying. I'd love to see an open document format take hold, so I can stop booting into windows once daily JUST to do paperwork.

[radioraheem]

I just removed my win98 partition today, and everything on this old-ish laptop is running great except for ONE little problem that (so far) I haven't gotten any help with at all.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=126122&highlight=laptop+power+management

I'm not about to reinstall 98 just for a battery monitor though [-(

[saphil]

A windows patition is a logical (virtual) drive staked out on the hard drive to run windows out of. Your linux installation needs its own logical drive because windows and linux refuse to use storage in quite the same way. If you ran a default install of Ubuntu, you have only linux partitions on your hard drive and they are essentially transparent to you as you look at the linux file system. window.

I have 2 hard drives on this machine and they look like one big file system in the file system window.

Does that help?

[imhdd]

I can't move to Linux completely until I understand how to use it. I do a lot of personal business online - I know very little (nothing) about security (and utilities) in Linux. I know it's supposed to be more secure than Win but not if you are a big dummy, which I obviously am at this time. But I'm trying. To see how I'm trying, go to my Website and read my experiences thus far:

Go to my main page and the LINUX link is near the top; can't miss it.

http://imhdd.ms11.net/

-----------------------------------------
Thanks LordBug. I fixed the link.

[LordBug]

imhdd - Interesting read. Link 1 doesn't work, FYI.

For me, I'm currently running Ubuntu on a secondary system and seeing if it has everything I need to convert the other PCs over permanently. I'm slowly checking things off the list. Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM, XMMS, and OO.o take care of most of what I need. Cedega handles the game front well enough. Mplayer is decent for video and DVD playback. I need to find a CD/DVD burning package that isn't stupid (unlike Gnomebaker). Little more time and testing should get it finished.

[BobSongs]

This post's too long to figure out if I've already answered it. I'll make it brief: music. The current and future kernels are not designed to handle low latency. They're not as efficient in Ubuntu (present and planned) to be as responsive as Windows.

[featherdown]

Quicken, and my husband.

[Adrian_b]

Games, games, games and Rainlendar.

[kakashi]

i had deleted windows. then i upgraded my comp. now i can't delete windows cuz i need it top play games.

[Strev_123]

I have to put in my 2c... Hardware... My Zen micro, canon scanner, web cam etc... All either won't work (zen) or have very random results (web cam). If these things would work then I would happily delete my windows partition, I hadn't used it for a while but I booted into it to uninstall some stuff and free up some space, windows crashed 5 times uninstalling 5 pieces of software!!! It was then I remembered why I started my quest for crash free computing.

BTW; Linux has never crashed no matter what I do to it :D

[centyx]

Change this to "what is PREVENTING you from deleting your Gentoo Partition?"

In Breezy, I have a slew of precompiled media players, none of which are very functional. In Gentoo, I am able to emerge the latest xine-lib and frontends, which worked nicely along with the Media Player Connectivity extension for firefox. Not to mention emerging mplayer and other media players with customized build flags/options if I so desire. Unfortunately, there is no source package in Breezy for xine-lib 1.1.x. I'm going to try rebuilding mplayer from the source .deb and see how far I get with that.

[SkyNet2029]

I seem to recall having some 'buggy' performance from the wack-job way I had installed ubuntu, then got smart, did a fresh install and killed the redmond junk. Guess what? All of those issues went away as soon as some good old fashioned Linux was running the show completely. Incidentally, mine was a dual boot job with Ubuntu and Windows Server, RC2.
-Just Say No! .

[alynx]

I have converted 6 moths ago , and i don't miss windows a bit :)

I play my games (generally wow) and do all the other things i "need" in Linux:p

[Kenotic]

I have only recently started back using windows. I would be glad to go back linux 100% if I could get my video card to work. I also need to get WoW working in linux.

[KrazyPenguin]

If I had a Windose partition I would delete it.
Unfortunatley, I don't have one ;-)

:twisted:

[tofudrifter]

Just started using windoze again just to play UFO:Aftershock
also cause i can't get anything in breezy to play h264 encoded .mkv's

otherwise i'd be m$ free too

[maxdevis]

.NET (c#)
access
COD2

[tikal26]

Modo
Rhino
illustrator
photoshop
Rhapsody
napster

Modo is going to release a linux vaersion soon
I am learning inkscape and maybe Xarax extreme would od it once it comes out.
So far photoshop is keeping me glued to windows, but I like that direction that krita is taking and maybe 2.0 will be good enough for me to move.
Rhino has no plans to make a linux port.
rhapsody and Napster- I don;t think that I'll ever habe them in linux, specially now the the GP3 thing I don't care about DRM on the tracks I don;t own, but I do care about on the music I buy.They should really let the user decide wheter to put or not DRM on theri system, but if krita keeps on moving in a good direction, and Modo in linux I thinkt aht I would switch full time to linux and leave windows on my laptop for my music.

[Tibor60]

I need windows for reliability. When I have no days for problem solving. For example after the last automatic update of ubuntu my pdf printer works only if I log in as root. And all config files are done as requested. (Before updating was all ok)
Up to now nobody could help me to solve the problem, and I my work can not be stopped for this time. (As the printer is stopped!)
And in ubuntu-linux there are rare days without problem:)))

[cetol]

Changing to full time ubuntu is simply a reliability issue for me. I have been wanting to make the change to linux in earnest for some time now, trying different distros, but with such a steep learning curve it isnt easy. While ubuntu has been the easiest for me so far I feel like I am taking a step backward to win95. I cant seem to get my dvd's to play in ubuntu, and no one on the forums seem to be able to help. Another example is my digital camera. I plugged it in the usb port and ... nothing! This may not seem like an issue to some. But I think that ALL of my hardware should work at least as well as it does in XP.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

ATI TVWonder USB 2.0

[gsanse]

To keep it simple, portable version for Palm for Office and Microsoft Money. I have no problem using OpenOffice and GNU cash, but I use Datavis Documents to Go and Ultrasoft money a lot and I just could not find a replacement that runs under Linux.

[totfit]

I will probably keep Windows because its paid for. I use Ubuntu exclusively on my desktop now, though I still have a hard drive with Windows on it. My laptop I finally have split with Windows on one partition and Ubuntu on the other. I still haven't gotten my wireless to work with Ubuntu. I just dropped the project for a while, because I got burned out going around in circles. I have the driver installed and the card is properly connected, but all I get is irradically flashing light on the card that detects the wireless, but no connection. Well, I'll continue some other time. I am extremely pleased. I find Linux much more functional and quicker than Windows for most everything I do. I have just been using Linux for a month or so and still have much to learn, but other than the wireless and mounting the Windows drive on my desktop nothing is unsolve. All said and done, I am definately a convert. One other minor detail is that I haven't mastered CD label making with a Linux program. Sonic X in Windows is easy. I sure I'll get it with time. I haven't really figured out Wine, but haven't found a reason to use it. I dropped Microsoft Money and use GNU Cash instead. Took some getting used to, but now serves my purposes adequately. Well, I am rambling.

[Tarmon.Gaidon]

Iam still have my windows partion because i just don't know enough. And every once in a while there is something i need to do fast and i don't have time to spend looking up how to do it. Maybe once I learn how to do more thig and i make sure theres support for everything i need to do I will delete my ntfs partion.

[dj1120]

I currently have a dual boot setup with windows xp and unbuntu. For the the past 2 months I have had ubuntu installed I boot into it 90% of the time.
That said, though what keeps me from deleting my windows partition are all the little apps and things I need to do and have working right away

For instance I still have to change permissions via the chmod command to use my scanner everytime I boot into ubuntu,I cannot create PDF files or send faxes (major apps I must have). At some point I hope to get the kinks out and get everything working right but it takes time and that's why Linux has not overtaken windows-yet.

I like ubuntu and am sticking with it for now but basic apps have got to get easier to install and get working in order to make a dent in Bill gates wallet

[BeatBoxRocker]

I have a dual boot with winxp and kubuntu because i cant get ride of windows due to in linux i cant access my mobile phone (Siemens SL55) to storage data and the lack of games in the linux system. I know that there are great games ported to linux (Quake, Doom, UT) but still not a lot of them.

Saludos!

[Aviatrixie]

For Ubuntu Lovers, what is PREVENTING you from deleting your Windows Partition? Nothing! My primary use of my PC was as a Digital Audio Work Station. I grew tired enough of daily updates of virus definitions, spyware definitions, ridding my children's PCs of of CWS browser hi-jacks (apparently a natural consequence if file sharing), etc... that I felt like I'd had enough. I used Mac before I used Windoze and only came to the dark side because a friend gave me a 3.1 PC many years ago.

It's time for something new... ergo, the only OS on my PC now is Ubuntu. Outside of the DAW issue (addressed by my stand-alone Roland DAW), it's a none-issue.

BTW... the DAW issue is being addressed as we speak. ;)

Erika

[thibaud]

In short legal issues, or rather wondering what is legal and what is not. Note that I'm living in the USA.

Is installing w32codecs legal?
Does it change anything if I have a windows XP license?

Also I noticed that when you usually install the NVIDIA Drivers by hand, you accept some license. But if you just apt-get, you don't see any license. So is it still legal to just apt-get ?

Please help.

[Scunizi]

I have several online systems that I have to use via Internet Exporer that won't work in Firefox. Haven't tried wine or another to run Office 2k. Microtek scanner won't work, web cam won't work.. Of course I'm still working out all the bugs with these things and more. It'll take time. I've only been running Ubuntu for a day!:D

[mstlyevil]

Windows XP partition - Deleted!!!!!! \\:D/

[guine]

Laziness. I never actually use windows(which cant even find the internet for some reason), I've just never had the need to delete my windows partition since dell accidently left me with an extra hard drive when a bunch of my hardware was breaking.

[nblythin]

Preventing me from deleting my windows partition? Easy, there is nothing to erase! I've been windows free (at home) for over 2 years.

As for work, I've got the place nearly windows free too. However one computer has a windows virtual machine (using parallels) for the sole purpose of running QuickBooks. We tried just installing QB using Crossover - but it just doesn't work right.

[mechanic]

Blimey, this is a long thread!

What prevent me...?
networking; MS-Office; Anquet mapping software; Digiguide (tv); Mailwasher; Starry Night Backyard; Age of Empires; Trainz; .... I could go on. Lots of investment in that software!

M.

[nickle]

What's a windows partition... Never had one.....

[aysiu]

I will probably keep Windows because its paid for. Same here.

I've probably answered this thread a dozen times since it started, but my situation keeps changing. At this point, there's nothing I regularly do on my computer that I need Windows for.

It used to be I needed/wanted iTunes. Even after I stopped wanting iTunes, I still shared the computer (and music) with my wife, who has an iPod. Soon after that, she just put a whole ton of music on her Powerbook, so I ditched iTunes altogether.

Then, I needed a VPN connection to work. The Cisco VPN client is very easy to set up on Windows, not so easy to set up on Linux. I had a really hard time getting VPN to work properly in Ubuntu, and the support at my workplace for Linux is almost non-existent. Eventually, though, I did get it figured out (thanks to some helpful threads here).

So why do I keep Windows around? Two reasons:

1. I paid for it already. Why delete it? It seems silly. My hard drive is 160 GB. Having a 10 GB partition for Windows doesn't leaving me hurting for space.

2. Just in case. Who knows? Maybe there will be some reason I need it later. Maybe I'll want to do a Windows/ Linux comparison with screenshots. I wouldn't go out and buy Windows, but since we purchased the computer with Windows already on it, why delete it?

I'm hoping that the next time I get a computer, I can get one with Linux preloaded, though. Maybe one of System76's Gazelle laptops...

[Breepee]

The number one reason is games. I'm a gamer, have a fairly large collection paid-for games (and of course a few pirated ones but I keep that quiet ;) ). 99% just doesn't run in Linux. I already use almost only OS software in Windows that's also available in Linux (OOo, Firefox), but the games keep me in Windows.

The funny thing is that I also have a HTPC-like device, which runs Ubuntu perfectly.

[dralaroc]

Xp is paid for and I need it for my Emu 1820m, audio appz, plugz and vsti's.

laroc

[garyng]

Why delete something(XP) that is overall better which I have paid for ?

[midwinter]

mmm... Windows free.

[sithia]

I've used debian and more recently kubuntu on both my desktop and laptop. The desktop is 100% linux and has been for 3 or 4 years. The laptop I used for both work and personal. Due to the "work" aspect I keep Windows installed. I also haven't found anything in linux that can remotely compare with QImage for printing high resolution photos (both B&W and color) on my Canan i9900 (I print 8x12 and up).

[derekd]

Once I figure out how to get Cedega working with WoW, I will be Windows free :)

[telengard]

Games, music stuff (vsts, ableton live) although I can't wait for energyXT to be ported to linux, and quickbooks pro. I also use a few emulators that aren't available on linux unfortunately.

~telengard

[MrChips]

Dialup support (winmodems suck in Linux) oh... where, oh where is DSL!
Work
Having to teach my wife how to use another OS
Having a different computer flavor....other than that not much.;)

[LateNighter]

This Ones Simple, While I do play a few Games in XP.
I could live without them because I also Play them in Linux ie Quake, Doom.

But my Wife has from time to time have me Scan in Color Photo's for her Using my Microtek 3600.
And while yes I use this Scanner in Kooka to do you Basic Scanning, Text Docs and the like.
It is minamly Supported by Kooka/SANE So the Color Photo Scanning SUCKS.

I can't afford another Scanner that is Fully supported right now.

So I'm kinda Stuck, but I have'nt booted into XP for well over 3 months, One day I won't have to Cringe everytime I see my Bootup Menu because Windows will finally be gone for GOOD.

Like when Vista comes out, My Wife wants it, And I told her fine, Get It...

But it ain't NEVER gonna see the Space of My Hard Drive....:twisted:

AND THAT SHE CAN TAKE TO THE BANK!!!![-(

[Gijith]

My basic reason is that I use XP as a sort of retreat.

As someone who's sorta computer illiterate and new to linux, there are still lots of headaches, lots of times when I get very frustrated at various problems. For example, it took me almost 6 hours to compile kxmame so that it was actually sorta functional for some games. After episodes like that, there's nothing better than spending the rest of the night with nice reliable and easy to use XP. But by morning, there's some bug or missing functionality that leads me back to kubuntu.

[Bandit]

My basic reason is that I use XP as a sort of retreat.

As someone who's sorta computer illiterate and new to linux, there are still lots of headaches, lots of times when I get very frustrated at various problems. For example, it took me almost 6 hours to compile kxmame so that it was actually sorta functional for some games. After episodes like that, there's nothing better than spending the rest of the night with nice reliable and easy to use XP. But by morning, there's some bug or missing functionality that leads me back to kubuntu.

Hange in there, one day you will look back on windows the same way..
I cant stand to spend anytime what so ever messing with windows. It just gets on my nerves...

[LateNighter]

Hange in there, one day you will look back on windows the same way..
I cant stand to spend anytime what so ever messing with windows. It just gets on my nerves...

SIMPLY PUT WINDOZE "SUCKS"....:evil: \\:D/

[Brunellus]

Dialup support (winmodems suck in Linux) oh... where, oh where is DSL!
Work
Having to teach my wife how to use another OS
Having a different computer flavor....other than that not much.;)
if you have a free serial port, buy an external, hardware modem and be done with it.

The question becomes recursive, also: What's keeping your wife on Windows, other than your lack of confidence in her abilities?

[sparch]

MP3 player on ubuntu isnt working...
I dont like XMMS, i like Amarok, but no way to get it working... :(

[amunimanghi]

i wish i had a windows partition. :p

[htinn]

Windohs? What Windohs? We don' need no stinkin' Windohs.

[Trisa]

Two games:

AIRRADE -AIR-
Pocket Kanon & AIR

Both don't even start in Cedega, so yeah. The other game I have [Eternal Fighter Zero] works perfectly (except for some sound glitches).

Other than that, I use Ubuntu for everything else.

[LateNighter]

Windohs? What Windohs? We don' need no stinkin' Windohs.

AGREED earlier in this Thread I said I kept one because of Quake and Doom.

Well after Losing some Save Info a Couple of weeks ago, DUE to a WIND:twisted: ZE "FOUL UP" I finally said Frigg it......:-D

Totally Redid my HD with Ubuntu Breezy, and Burn't my Wind:twisted: ze Disk.

I guess you could say I "GAVE IT the BLUE FLAME of DEATH"

[Dragineez]

Printing - I have the Epson R200 CD/DVD printer and the printing software (which doesn't suck) won't work under Wine.

CD/DVD Backup - options are much more plentiful, robust, and rapid in their Windows incarnations and - again - don't run under Wine.

Games - Many of my favorites do - in fact - run under Cedega, but after a few months of "subscription fees" I finally realized I was going to end up paying more than the cost of the games to get inferior performance. I like playing games, but don't do it enough to justify the subscription fee. Windows came on the box when new so I consider the OS cost to be zero in that equation.

VOIP - Got a really cool device that I can plug a regular 2.4ghz base station in to and get phone coverage throughout the house. Device drivers and VOIP software only available for Windows. Yes, I've tried the Linux version of several - but I would be giving up too many features I really need and use. Maybe some day.

I'm surprised that I've actually come so close to complete Windows independence. Most days I don't interactively use any of my Windows machines at all.

[Sidk]

Actually there are quite a few reasons why I still have lots of windows boxes. There was a post in a thread I read here and basically it said if you are a windows power user then you will have a difficult time converting or using Linux. I am far past the power user in terms of knowledge of MS systems.

It's difficult to understand, although I am learning. No real good financial software(nucash sucks), guitar pro won't run on it, no musicians pro tools, no support for my digital sound cards. The list could go on but no real need.

Too be honest I find most of the software lacks a lot of features and polish. IMHO Linux as a desktop OS will never be better then windows until the software authors start charging for the code. People that are paid for their efforts do a better job. Matter of fact I've already paid for software, I bought drivers from linuxant, why, because they work well and they have good support.

Every time I leave Linux it's because of software and good hardware support. When you see these big software companies start producing code for Linux for a price you will see great migrations of people from MS to Nix. A good example would be Red Hat and Mysql enterprise servers, the world flocked to them and Linux to run the WWW and large companies, let me tell it ain't free!

I don't mean Linux should cost, just the apps we use. Yeah I know, it's a hard to balance free and paid.

Please don't flame me or troll for arguments, it's just my perspective. I don't use Linux because it's free, I use it because I prefer my privacy.

[vidak]

When I bought my laptop, I had no choice, I had to buy windows too...](*,)
So I won't delete it after paying ~150$ for it... :cry:
ok, there is one thing: I can't use the built-in winmodem under linux... (once in a month)

[vidak]

AGREED earlier in this Thread I said I kept one because of Quake and Doom.


There is a package named lxdoom, if you got the wad files, and we got quake ander linux ;)
By the way, one of the doom-clones are even better than the old ones (please, don't kill me) - full mouse-look (also up-down) and jump is implemented

[Sidk]

I can't use the built-in winmodem under linux... (once in a month)
$19.99 for the Linuxant drivers and they work with just about all winmodems.

www.linuxant.com

download the test drivers and make sure they work before you pay for them.

[Totzo]

photoshop CS2

[jim43]

I have finally binned xp. For me it was a hardware issue. I wanted basic funcunality and tried several distros before settling on breezy. It does it all for me and I could not be happier. Great OS. Great community.

[LateNighter]

I use it because I prefer my privacy.

"EXACTLY THE POINT"

And the other point/my reason for USING Linux Only is it allows me to use my PC as I see fit.
I don't have to worry about someone telling me what I can and can not use on my PC by making a Program that will Only run on their OS.

While I can see the point if you are a Business User as it's Hard to find others Computer Systems that are compatiable with Certian forms of Linux.

If your a User like me who Only uses your PC to Surf the Web, Search things out, and Play some Simple Games and not all Linux Games are that simple.
Basic Scanning of Text, and a few Digital Pictures.
Then Linux is the one OS for you, which ever Linux Form you Choose.
And liking to fiddle with things to get them to Work does'nt Hurt any either.

BUT Then Again I fiddled with Windoze plenty to keep it working to begin with...

So whats the Dif...;)

[lemix]

I think that when Dapper comes out in june posts like this will be empty. No reason to keep windows partitions. Except the game issues. But what the hell is wrong with Tux Racer??

[YokoZar]

CD/DVD Backup - options are much more plentiful, robust, and rapid in their Windows incarnations and - again - don't run under Wine.Not sure if this helps, but DVD Shrink works under Wine.

[LateNighter]

But what the hell is wrong with Tux Racer??
Absolutly NOTHING.... "I LOVE IT"
Even if I can't get the Sound to Work with it, and a few Other Games as well.

But then again No Sounds No Distractions Either....:p :-k

CONGRATS on being 100% Ubuntu...:cool: :cool: :cool:

[RRS]

Still have windows because I broke it!
And now I'm enjoying the challenge of trying to "fix" it w/Linux

Actually I first started checking out Linux because I was getting bored with tweaking XP using freeware and no programing background (am learning fast with Ubuntu though)

Decided to try Ubuntu as intro when I found they'd mail me free CDs, too kewl to be true!

Shortly after setting up a dual boot on my secondary machine I was messing around in windows and corrupted a couple files and now it won't boot so I installed Breezy and have since upgraded to Dapper.

I simply enjoy the challenge of trying to fix windows while learning more about computers with Linux. I've always believed you can learn more by failing in new and interesting ways then from easy success.

BTW, most of my friends just shake their heads and question my sanity.

[IYY]

What's preventing me from deleting my Windows partition?

I think it's the fact that it doesn't exist. Makes deleting it very tricky (not that I haven't tried).

[LateNighter]

I've always believed you can learn more by failing in new and interesting ways then from easy success.

BTW, most of my friends just shake their heads and question my sanity.

Both of these Statements are SOOOOOOO VERY TRUE.

For me at least.

But once you figure out that WIND:twisted: ZE Can't be fixed.
It was built Broken, You'll Just finally "GIVE UP"

I learned that the hardway myself:D :D :rolleyes:

[derjames]

UBUNTU is really perfect, however the only reason I do keep my Windows XP is for VirtualDJ, I do really love this DJing software, (http://www.virtualdJ.com),
I haven't had the time to look around for an open source package, however I know there is a Musical LINUX (musix) which has a lot of OpenSource tools for Music creation, mixing and broadcasting. If it looks promising I will start installing those tools in my Ubuntu System....

[dacritch]

Several reasons I cant port over to linux completely.
-- Lara Croft wont let me, Im an avid gamer, love my PC games, but they just dont have them for linux... yet...
-- I use Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, photoshop, and indesign) So until they come out with a linux version Im stuck here too
-- Some hardware drivers for linux are still a little under-developed or buggy.

Other than those reasons (mostly the gaming issue, Im sure I can work around the others), I see no reason NOT to go with Linux. Cause IMO it rocks windows :D

Give me games and I will convert to anything

[tracewalk]

The kids find Windows games etc easier to install. Windows was reinstalled so we could upload to our lad's Creative Zen mp3 thing (couldn't work out how to do it on Ubuntu - maybe someone has advice on this...)
Moz

[Vadim]

Multimedia codecs and gaming support. Ubuntu detected my hardware flawlessly, I got over my initial fear of the command line, and I don't even mind all the extra work linux entails, but these two factors are a huge blow to useability. Well that and I'm only using 15% of my 250 GB hard drive at the moment.

[n00blar]

In my case three things prevent me from getting rid of my XP partition.

One. Native MMORGP games like WoW, EQ2, DAoC, etc, etc
Two. Native applications like QuickBooks, etc, etc.
Three. Good support for L2TP and VPN (this is mainly for work reasons)

Other than that I'm pretty much set with Ubuntu ;)

[MenZa]

Graphic design in Photoshop
Games


That's just about the only things keeping me off Windows for good.

[Stormy Eyes]

Multimedia codecs and gaming support. Ubuntu detected my hardware flawlessly, I got over my initial fear of the command line, and I don't even mind all the extra work linux entails, but these two factors are a huge blow to useability. Well that and I'm only using 15% of my 250 GB hard drive at the moment.

Multimedia codecs can be installed; there are a metric assload of HOWTOs on this forum for that. Ubuntu can't install them for you because of stupid copyright/patent regs in certain parts of the world (like the USA, dammit).

[TheRealPhate]

Anyways short of someone handing me Vista in the future I will not have that so when XP is unsupported and dead I will definalty be win free. Need a defrag lol..........or less coffee.

If I were you I would hang on to XP for as long as possible, I am Beta testing Vista with build 5308 and 5342 and ill tell yah, it's not worth installing, yah theres tons of gadgets and crap but it is overloaded and slow, with all there Legacy stuff it is huge and in my opinion worthless, pay 3x as much $$$ for something that isn't up too the hipe, any one wants screen shots ill be happy to post any for yah, unless u have a screaming machine Vista is not for yah, stick with Ubuntu or XP if yah need too, Beta testing Vista is the reason I am Ubuntu only. But dont let microsoft hear that :-#

[jarocooke]

Haven't had Winblows on either of my computers (desktop or laptop) for more than a year and a half.

You know what, once you get over the cold turkey, you realise you can do most everything you could before. Though you might need to spend some money getting third party help (Cedega / Crossover Office).

The things you can't do aren't Ubuntu's (or Linux's) fault, they are the fault of the ISVs and hardware manufacturers.

What do you do when someone doesn't sell the product you want? :-k

Well you don't change your operating system just to suit them! You are paying them, not the other way round.

For example I wanted legal music, iTunes a no go (thanks Apple!!!), now I use eMusic.com, plus I have found some very good artists I wouldn't have even heard of otherwise.
:-D

[pitkali]

What keeps me using Windows XP included with my laptop is Trados Freelancer computer aided translation software + MS Office 2003 needed to get spellchecking in TradosTag. It's all about my job then.

Regards,

[jarocooke]

If I were you I would hang on to XP for as long as possible, I am Beta testing Vista with build 5308 and 5342 and ill tell yah, it's not worth installing, yah theres tons of gadgets and crap but it is overloaded and slow, with all there Legacy stuff it is huge and in my opinion worthless, pay 3x as much $$$ for something that isn't up too the hipe, any one wants screen shots ill be happy to post any for yah, unless u have a screaming machine Vista is not for yah, stick with Ubuntu or XP if yah need too, Beta testing Vista is the reason I am Ubuntu only. But dont let microsoft hear that :-#

I'd like to see some screenshots of the "gadgets".
What have the boys in Redmond been up to for the last 5 years?
I'll tell you what, Vista had better be able to transport me across space instantaneously or something, they've had long enough!!!

:-k

[Intell]

There is only one, I repeat one, thing that I ever go to my Windows partition for.

My Canon MP390. There is support for it, but not very good support for it. Scanning, I have never gotten to work, and the printing isn't very fast or high quality. :)

[Goatee]

I only have one reason for keeping windows: music software. There are a couple of VST plugins I really need, and I haven't really liked any of the Linux sequencers I've tried.
I dunno but I thought that the whole idea of open source was that you could change stuff you didn't like without being sued?

[SomeoneWhoIsntMe]

I can't get the better sound chip on my soundcard to work, but if I could I might use Linux exclusively.

[WrathofthePenguin]

2 things have been preventing me from blasting windows for the past several years.

Visio and Nortel's Contivity VPN client.

Dia, well, there's no way that'll stand up to Visio. Kivio is much closer, but still a bit off. I could probably make due with it if I looked a little deeper into its output or export formats.

As for the VPN client, well, the Contivity really doesn't play well with anything else - no FreeS/WAN, vpnc, openvpn. None of 'em work. Nortel will provide a Linux version of the client, but, well, I'm not willing to shell out the cash for something that I can't make work (at least, not in Ubuntu/Kubuntu). And the last thing I want to do is use FC3 just for a VPN client. Perhaps if I understood more aobut compiling software, it might be a bit easier to make work, but, well, make errors are just Greek to me :???:

Actually, the Contivity plays very well with most clients. What's most likely happening is that the administrator of the Contivity has set it to allow access by the Nortel Contivity client only. It can also be set to allow access by other clients.

[volvo7576]

you guys will like this. i have a 4 year old toshiba notebook. i created a dual boot last year with warty, quickly upgrading to breezy then dapper recently. i am in college...well for 4 more days, so i needed windows and linux ( IS major). well i had 3 partitions. windows, data ntfs, and ubuntu. 2 weeks ago i got sick of having 2 windows partions i thought it was dumb so i used partion magic to try to combine them. well grub had a fit because ntldr was gone. so what did i do. i mounted the destroyed partition and backed up the important data. then i formated it to reiser ;) . this has proved to be a switch i dont regret because of the new nm-applet. i dont have to worry about wpa authentication anymore.

hope you enjoyed laughing

oh yeah lesson learned ... dont mess with your partitions 2 weeks before you graduate especially when your 20 page senior project is on your windows partition.:mrgreen:

[garbage792]

I'm a newbie. Just tried linux becasue I liked the cover of ubuntu. Why I won't delete windows.

I find GUI rendering slow in Ubunut as compared to XP and fonts are not as clear.

Unable to play a lot of media files. No matter how hard I try.

Some videos work on some players, some or others. I hate that.

Media player classic. Light weight and plays everything.

Winamp!! No linux media player comes close to that.

Games. I love RPGs and am currently playing Morrowind.

Visual studio. There is no substitute for that.

X-pro software.

Xilinx.

Net transport.

Sftp drive.

ALso GUI seems to be very limited. For most of the things GUI isn't there and you have to type in (and I'm such a slow typer) cryptic nonsensical commands.

No wpa support. In spite of all the cryptic commands and scripts I've tried, I cannot get my wpa network to connect.

No automatic wireless network switching.

Hate command prompt because I'm not good at remembering. Hell I cannot even remember poeple's names. Cannot remember any commands at all.

Cannot find a video player that has a "video desktop" feature.

For doing something as simple as setting shortcuts I had to search pages of forums till I got that to work.

My volume bar does not do anything. Changing that has no effect on the volume. (Crap)

Flaskmpeg.

Basically I don't like command prompt. I don't understand how it gives you *power*. It has so far given me headache and frustration and am sure that I will NEVER be able to do anything on my own without reading pages and pages of forums.

Literally cried while installing wine. Still doesn't work. It just says creating bla bla folder and hangs Nothing happens.

So in short ubuntu had such a hype about friendliness. All I've gathered is headache, millions of cryptic commands and impolite replies of *linux fanboys* on asking a simple question.

*am read to get flamed..after all I'm in linux lair right now *

[htinn]

Flaskmpeg? Well, no wonder you had a bad experience. *shudders*

[aysiu]

I find GUI rendering slow in Ubunut as compared to XP and fonts are not as clear. And you tried Anti-aliasing and subpixel hinting? XP's fonts aren't that great if you don't use Cleartype.


Unable to play a lot of media files. No matter how hard I try.

Some videos work on some players, some or others. I hate that. Use Automatix for Ubuntu or use another distro that comes with proprietary codecs--PCLinuxOS or Mepis or Blag.


Winamp!! No linux media player comes close to that. Really? I thought XMMS was a clone of WinAmp pretty much.


Games. I love RPGs and am currently playing Morrowind.

Visual studio. There is no substitute for that.

X-pro software.

Xilinx.

Net transport.

Sftp drive. With all your specialized needs, I don't even know why you bothered trying to switch. I don't even know what those programs do.


ALso GUI seems to be very limited. For most of the things GUI isn't there and you have to type in (and I'm such a slow typer) cryptic nonsensical commands. That's not entirely true. First of all, just in Ubuntu, people will often give commands because it's simpler to give commands--it's not necessarily because you cannot use the GUI to do the same thing. Also, Ubuntu is probably the most command-line-reliant of all the major "friendly" distros. If you use Linspire, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Xandros, SuSE, or Mandriva, you're far less likely to need the command-line for configuring things.


For doing something as simple as setting shortcuts I had to search pages of forums till I got that to work. You must have been using Gnome, then. By the way, I've never been able to get shortcuts to work in Windows XP or 2000.


My volume bar does not do anything. Changing that has no effect on the volume. (Crap) Sorry. Your experience isn't typical.


Flaskmpeg. I have no idea what that means.


Basically I don't like command prompt. I don't understand how it gives you *power*. And it doesn't sound as if you made an effort, either, so that's not surprising.


Literally cried while installing wine. Still doesn't work. It just says creating bla bla folder and hangs Nothing happens. Here's the power: one command: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine


So in short ubuntu had such a hype about friendliness. All I've gathered is headache, millions of cryptic commands and impolite replies of *linux fanboys* on asking a simple question. I don't see how you can come to this conclusion considering you don't have a single post in the support subforums of these forums. When did you ask us for help?


*am read to get flamed..after all I'm in linux lair right now * You asked for it far before this last sentence. Good luck with whatever you put your heart into, because--God knows--you didn't put your heart into learning Ubuntu. If you'd asked for help here, people would have been more than happy to help you. Since you decided to write this essentially useless post... we won't miss you. Bye.

[TheCaptain]

I don't delete it because at times i find it amusing to log into XP and remind myself how good life on the free side is. :D

Actually, my sons and daughters cellphoness only work in XP, but eventually i'll make them work in FreeBSD and when that day comes XP is gone.

[htinn]

FlaskMPEG was an awful all-in-one DVD ripper. If you insist on going that route in Windows you should seriously consider Gordian Knot.

[Nikos.Alexandris]

Hi there... !

I need for my research remote sensing & digital image processing tools... (like ERDAS Imagine, e-cognition and more). There are some open source tools but, i think, they still are not doin' what has to be done concerning remote sensing projects. I hope within the comin years they will...

Greetings!

[rambutan]

Sometimes I need it for applications that only run in Windows. Wine is good, but nothing beats running an application in its native system. Other than that, NOTHING! :D

[DJ BinkS]

I am new to Ubuntu, I installed it to take over from XP Pro on the box upstairs in my bedroom, but as it doesnt (any linux distro not just ubuntu) support either one of my wireless adapters (usb) 'out of the box', I cant use it properly :(. I wanted it for a challenge but reading up on how to get Linksys adapters working hmmm bit to complex for me :p. I cant find what wireless PCI cards it supports 'out the box' either, but to be fair I havent looked hard enough :p

One day I will have Ubuntu on that machine and no 2000 pro (i changed from XP yday due to it being a slow pc)

:) - I have used it before, and it was my main OS on 2nd pc, but i dont use that no more, and my mum does so its back on XP Pro. My main rig is XP aswell due to ATI with crap drivers etc :(

[apanloco]

1. Multimedia. This is where Linux just doesn't shine yet. You (I?) can't just install Linux, open firefox, browse around and see some movies (quicktime, wma and real), without litterally HACKING every detail of the system to get it working (exaggerating). I am currently "researching" mp3 support in Dapper when I came to this thread. For every new Linux distribution you install, you actually have to RESEARCH for mp3 support (exaggerating).

2. I don't like tux-rider and gnometris (trying to be funny), I want to play real games from time to time. WINE is good, but not nearly good enough. However, I was surprised that I got an enormous performance increase playing Warcraft3. But the sound was lagging+stuttering.

3. Flash BIOS firmware. (No, I can do that in FreeDOS)

For burning things, non-multimedia surfing, server things, chatting, well everything else, Linux just rocks. Have some problem with sound and printing from time to time though. That depends on your hardware. Have given up on wireless... I always end up with the broadcom models, lol, and they never work. Smart choice... NOT.

[aysiu]

1. Multimedia. This is where Linux just doesn't shine yet. You (I?) can't just install Linux, open firefox, browse around and see some movies (quicktime, wma and real), without litterally HACKING every detail of the system to get it working (exaggerating). I am currently "researching" mp3 support in Dapper when I came to this thread. For every new Linux distribution you install, you actually have to RESEARCH for mp3 support (exaggerating). You're talking about Ubuntu, not Linux. Plenty of Linux distributions include proprietary codecs. Try Linspire, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, and Blag.

[jak]

Really? I thought XMMS was a clone of WinAmp pretty much.
XMMS doesn't even come close to WinAmp unfortunately, WinAmp is easily my favourite Windows application there is! Closest I've found is amaroK.. although I'm getting myself used to Rhythmbox now..
but that doesn't keep my Windows partition around.

Ubuntu is my primary OS on my laptop, with XP laying around because my college course is all Delphi so I'm kinda stuck with it.

I tried using Ubuntu on my main pc.. but that didn't go so well. Things that kept me using Windows on there are:-
- There is no decent support for an ATI Radeon 9200SE PCI card (and student here! Can't afford a new linux friendly nVidea card! :-( ). I have dual screens plus output to my TV, and multimonitor support in Linux is, unfortunately, appalling.
- Games.. I only play about 2 every now and then, but it's enough to keep Windows around.
- School. Yet again. My Physics A-level CD-ROM's provided to me will only run on Windows (and Wine is painfully slow). I'm stuck using Delphi for my Computing studies.

What's more annoying about the Windows computer I have to keep around is that I end up reformatting and reinstalling the same old OS about every 6 months. I get a new version of Ubuntu every 6 months!

Windows is a necessary evil.

[SleepyZ]

Games, everything else I do on Ubuntu.

[mfarquhar]

I have to be knowledgeable about Windows for job reasons (i'm a Computer Technician) and most consumers who will actually pay me to fix their problems don't run linux, so i need to stay up to date with Windows in all it's buggy glory.

also i like to do a lot of gaming (HALO is good ^_^)
and i can't seem to get the CODECS for multimedia

as a compromise i dual boot Windows Me:-$ and Ubuntu on one computer.

[ubonetu]

For me, it was selling my iMac... And now, nothing:

Crossover (http://www.codeweavers.com)

Flash MX (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/esd/flashmx_trial_en.exe)

hehe,

ubontu

[MasonM]

As a trucker I use specific truck route planning software that is only available as a windoze app, otherwise I wouldn't have it on my machine at all.

[Athropos]

To preserve windows from extinction.

[Mr.Auer]

Nothing prevents me from deleting XP...I did it a long time ago! :)
Now I have one laptop on Breezy, two desktops on Dapper. I threw away my original XP oem disc. Yes, threw it in the trash after sticking it with a big knife.

[nightweave]

I have a window partion... well I have an NTFS formated drive where I backed up all my stuff before I moved over. It's not bootable so I don't think it counts.

I keep it around just in case that's all when I have been with ubunto longer I'll probably reformat it for the space.

[philipt]

Well all stuff (wireless, touchpad) etc just WORKS in windows. So for stability reasons I will never delete the windows partition. I mainly use ubuntu for testing/coding purposes. But I have realized that even though Ubuntu is one of the most userfriendly distros out there it still has a long way to go before it can seriously compete with windows XP or Vista. Let's face it, conf files is a way of the past.

[RavenOfOdin]

The fact that my mom still uses Windows XP.

:p

[Anduu]

Can't print...'nuff said :rolleyes:

[burl_dean]

I can not get sound to work. The correct module loads (snd-es1371 the card is a Creative Sound Blaster AudioPCI128) but the sound will not work. On the windows side I must check the digital output box under the sound driver dialog. Besides that I would dump the windows drive and setup a software RAID to increase drive speeds, :D

[SubWolf]

The only reason I'll go back to Windows now is to play games like HL2 - I've tried Cedega, but I need much more powerful (i.e. top of the line) hardware to get acceptable framerates. :-/

Otherwise, I'm in Linux (first Hoary, now Dapper test) 24/7.

[rez]

Been using Linux/Ubuntu for almost 3 weeks now. I log back into Windows purely to watch any WMV's (as the support is pretty low for Dapper at the moment), to keep some torrents finishing over night ... and for Flash development.

The biggest problem I face as a web developer is the very, very crap support for Flash. If I need to develop something in Flash, I have to switch back to windows and Flash 8 to do it. Even if I wanted to view it, I have to use windows as there isn't any support for Flash 8 until Adobe releases the Flash Player 8.5

Even then, it's going to be a long time until someone develops a free (or even pay-for) development proggie for Flash 8 on Linux. Bit depressing. I'd shoot my Windows partition today if I knew I could overcome this.

Crossover Office is sort of getting there ... but still too far behind.

[nolongerlivecd]

Me, I use Windows for some compatibility stuff, LifeDrive Manager and of course, my favourite Counterstrike: Condition Zero, unless someone can walk me through on how to get both working on my Wine for free!

[KeithCu]

I don't delete windows because of laziness, deleting things can cause problems and its nice to have it as a backup just in case. I almost never boot into it, tho.

[cil3urn]

The only reason I have not totally rid Windows from my laptop is for two reasons, I can work alot faster in M$ office than in open office. (As a kid I was brainwashed) Gaming in my spare time.

I noticed someone metioned something called Cedega? What exacty is that? Cause it sounds like some sort of emulator of types? Ill check it out cause if I can play games I can free up another 20 gigs by deleting windows. Gaming is whats really holding me back M$office is minor I can learn Open Office.

[SomaHoliday]

Besides the fact I'm still getting use to ubuntu, I can't connect my Wireless Linksys USB Adapter to it, since I can't figure it out, Ubuntu is kind of useless until I can get the internet on it.

Might anyone know what to do?

[simone.brunozzi]

I cannot remove Windows XP because:

- Dreamweaver runs on it;
- In the office in which I work there is need for windows domains, and all sort of things related to it; I'm not a real expert, and I wasn't able to figure out how to "emulate" those needs in ubuntu;
- The license of Ubuntu is not easily accepted in public administrations in Italy.
- Some dedicated software NEEDS windows XP. Poor strategic planning, I know :-) (but it's not my fault).

Cheers,

[Rhapsody]

I have a new good reason for not deleting my Windows XP partition.

The fact that at any moment, and in a matter of minutes, my Ubuntu partition may end up completely and utterly broken.

This isn't because of instability or bugs, it's because of me. Why can't I just leave stuff alone?

[moore.bryan]

let's be real... ooo is just as good, if not better, than office and can even save in .doc format if absolutely necessary.

[Reshin]

let's be real... ooo is just as good, if not better, than office and can even save in .doc format if absolutely necessary.
Better in what way? :-k

It supports more formats and it's free, but in other ways it's equal at best. I like MS Offices interfaces better, though. OOo's apps take longer to start and seem to be heavier....OOo Base is pretty much limited and unstable compared to Access...

[zAo]

Whats preventing me:

Breezebrowser
Photoshop
Grabit

[Banter]

1) Its really easy to uninstall programs in windows. Its difficult to uninstall non-synaptic programs in ubuntu.
2) The wireless mess (im on xp right now)
3) All the command line business. I think its fine if you like the command line. I, on the other hand, find it extremely annoying.
4) Google Earth
5) Inertia

[Maurice]

I really want to kill windows on my ubuntu installation. Just starting up in the ubuntu world.

I still have a NTFS partition. What do I need to essentially format it and mount this somewhere (probably /home/) but not sure how to do it.

And should I bother tidying GRUB up (this is dual boot at present but the Windows OS will soon vanish).

Grateful to anyone with the chance to help out.

[moore.bryan]

Better in what way? :-k

It supports more formats and it's free, but in other ways it's equal at best. I like MS Offices interfaces better, though. OOo's apps take longer to start and seem to be heavier....OOo Base is pretty much limited and unstable compared to Access...

i suppose interfaces are a personal choice... ooo only takes longer to load up because ms makes office and so they get along better. i've found no issues with base; hmmm. could you let me know what are the specific limitations and stability issues?

[wylie348]

Well, I use Gamemaker (gamemaker.nl) for high-level development for my students, so it is nice to have - but vmware does not do a great job of supporting directx apps, and I cannot find another alternative that will.
Now, on the other hand, I just said "forget it" yesterday and trashed windoze for good - I can always use it on a workstation at work. Now I am Dapper Dan - clean and smooth all the way!
:P

[lafnlab]

What Windows partition? ](*,)

I've had Linux on my home PC exclusively for years (Mandrake, SuSe, Slackware, and now Ubuntu). At work is a different story, but I'm not in control of that. At home, I'm free of Microsoft. :D

[BlastXng]

Games, Certian applications, Games, OSX

Games and support for them in Linux isn't the best. While Ubuntu has made installing Linux alot easier, it still has a way to go to meet what I call the simple requirements, meaning my Mom installing OSX on her G3.

I still have network applications that I need to run and install "easily" such as IP phones and VPN Clients (Cisco) which require way to much of my time to jack around with in Windows or OSX for that matter.
:evil:

Even if I was able to remove Windows, I still wouldn't run full Linix and Linux only for that matter on my PPC that I have in addition to the Intel/AMD platforms that I have and use.

[GreenfrogCT]

1 - My job. I'm a telecommunications engineer, and there are many pieces of software specific to the equipment I work with that only run in a WIndows environment - and trying to get them to run in a compatability layer is way too much work.

2 - Ooo isn't quite there yet, particularly with some of the more advanced functions of Excel which, for professional reasons, I HAVE to use.

Other than that, I'm spending more and more time on my Ubuntu partition and less and less time on my XP partition - except during business hours.

:mrgreen: Ribbitt

[kitts]

i deleted my Ubuntu Partition as it doesn't allow me install any other application other than those which come with it..the basic applications.
i am very greatful for whatever support this forum and the wiki has given me in installing and running firefox and internet on Ubuntu.
The reason i am quitting Ubuntu is ..i didn't find a proper program installer despite all my effort.

[GreenfrogCT]

i deleted my Ubuntu Partition as it doesn't allow me install any other application other than those which come with it..the basic applications.
i am very greatful for whatever support this forum and the wiki has given me in installing and running firefox and internet on Ubuntu.
The reason i am quitting Ubuntu is ..i didn't find a proper program installer despite all my effort.

You deleted too soon. :eek:

You can add more Ubuntu repositories, and really ANY Debian repository to Synaptic. See: http://ubuntuguide.org/#extrarepositories (http://ubuntuguide.org/#extrarepositories)

:mrgreen: Ribbitt

[aysiu]

You deleted too soon. :eek:

You can add more Ubuntu repositories, and really ANY Debian repository to Synaptic. See: http://ubuntuguide.org/#extrarepositories (http://ubuntuguide.org/#extrarepositories)

:mrgreen: Ribbitt That guide is extremely out of date. It refers to Hoary repositories, many of which no longer exist. http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/sources

[DSn0wMan]

I love Ubuntu. I started using it on my laptop about 3 weeks ago. I just deleted windows and took the plunge right away (limited HD space 40 GB). I use AIX (IBM Unix) at work, and Windows at home. I think linux is a happy medium between Unix and Windows.

If I ever stop being lazy I will probably wipe Windows off my home computer. I just have to look into some open-source music studio software to see if there are some good equivelents to QBase, Reason, and a few other fun digital audio applications. I may have to user VMWare to run some of my hardware interfaces.

[Nonno Bassotto]

For me, the main reason is PowerTab. I couldn't find any linux program which would open .ptb guitar scores, and I have a lot of these I don't want to lose.
Secondary, I wasn't able to share files on my network with Samba the easy way, so I guess I'll have to take some time and play with it until I'm able to make it work.

[punkybouy]

I'd switch if there were an update to Flashplayer. I find too much content on the web that apparently requires Flashplayer 8 and its not available for Linux. I heard that 8.5 might be available but yesterday I heard Adobe would just release a version 9 for both Windows and Linux sometime in the fall.

[centered effect]

For me, my design programs, whether it be web, graphic, or game design.

Adobe suite, macromedia suite, Quark, Lightwave, GTKradiant (doesn't work in Linux).

But my laptop is more and more like Linux. I have Gimp, Inkscape, Synfig, Firefox, thunderbird, sunbird, ooo, xchat, gaim, Pythonwin, nvu, and wamp.

[sda5150]

Free Printing support for my Canon i350 is the only thing that keeps me from getting rid of windows completely

[JMO707]

Nothing!

I used to think that I NEEDED Windows, but eventually I found that the only thing that I do on it that I cant do in a GNU/Linux or *BSD enviroment is play games, and hey, guess what, I found that I neither play games for a long while. Fantastic. Just convinced my sister, burned the motherboard, the video card, trashed two keyboards and destroyed a mouse pad in a rage of fury. Fabulous. It took me 2 weeks. At the last I was seriously thinking that Zeus, Thor or any other vengative god of thunder hated me, but well, **** happen and now I have a shiny happy opensource system ^^

Yay.

[aysiu]

I need it in order to do tutorials like this one (http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/windowstoubuntu.html).

[qpieus]

DVD burning. I can't get dapper to burn at greater than 4x :mad:
If/when that is fixed, windows=deleted.

[se7ensamurai]

I'm reading a few pages of posts in this thread here and there, and seeing the same stuff over and over...

Messenger
Games
.Net
messenger
games
work

Personally, ATM, the only thing preventing me from clearing off my WinXP disks is a technical problem. I installed Breezy on my primary slave, and am trying to figure out a way to get grub on it without having to re-install Ubuntu. thats basically it. [And NO, I'm not asking for help here, I'm still browsing forums to find my answer (I know its out there).]

As for messenger, screw it. I barely used it before, and rarely if ever now. In fact I hadn't even used the MSN features in GAIM untill the other night when a friend wanted to send me a file, which worked perfectly.

Ubuntu is faster, leaner, and in some respects easier than Windows, and the best distro of Linux that I've tried (limited though my experience has been).

as soon as I can get all my videos and MP3s off the drive, I'm done with windows!!! Woot! (well, Unless I decide to get back into MXO) :rolleyes:

[Basfriends]

There is nothing that prevents me from deleting windows, so i did... I'm finally free...:-D

[mjm115]

Quickbooks

That's it. Once they port that I'm done with Microsoft.

[Moebius]

VPN access to work through my network setup at home. Could never set it up with Breezy, hope to have better luck when I move to Dapper.

[shrimphead]

nothing anymore

mwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha :lol:

:rolleyes:

[LateNighter]

There is nothing that prevents me from deleting windows, so i did... I'm finally free...:-D

WELCOME HOME!!!!;)

[donar73]

Need it only for playing "The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion" at the moment...

[drfalkor]

usefull software, such as photoshop.. and some useless good games, such as COD2 and so on ! :KS

[Phrostay]

After Trailing Ubuntu 5.10 & Ubuntu 6.06 on the only i386 machine I have sadly I have gone back to a full blown windows XP install. The main reason is because I need Microsoft Visual Studio .NET & trying to be unbiased as I possibly could I did not enjoy my experience with OpenOffice and have gone back to Microsoft Word. My main reason in doing so is the lack of hardware support for my tc4200 HP laptop. I am disappointed with not having wireless support out of the box, and the fact that I lost desktop icons from installing NetworkManager.

I also experienced many of the applications I was trying to install from the repositories did not run after I had install them. Maybe it was just me or the way I was doing things. However with that said the main reason for having a go at Ubuntu was the fact that I wanted a rock solid operating system on my laptop similar to my experience with OS X.

Being a long time Windows user I was blown away by OS X, with its simplicity and power. OS X is now my primary OS on a iMac G5 after using windows XP for many, many years and thank god I did make the switch. In my time of testing Ubuntu it felt very much like OS X. However I think Linux is the perfect OS in principle. It tries to make accessibility to a computer possible to all people with all backgrounds and all different types of hardware, however the major problem I think is that this takes ALOT of TIME & MONEY specifically, always helps along with support from hardware vendors.

The way I see it and how I have for long time is that Linux is for servers and admins. I believe Ubuntu aims to mesh a once server based OS to a desktop user audience, however this road seems long and hard, but not impossible. Windows I believe has always been a desktop orientated platform however I don't think windows 2000 server would ever cut it as a server based system for me (However I think the best OS Microsoft released EVER was the original WINDOWS NT)

OS X and Apple right now have the perfect balance I believe. A lot of people complain about Apples products costing too much money but I can safely say for me personally every red cent I spent on my iMac did not go to waste, it has been the best computing experience ever in my life. Hope this helps & I would have raved on for a bit more but I think this is enough ;)

Lastly I would like to say that I think all current OS right now are equal. The big show down will be when Dapper, Vista & Leopard are all released. But for now OS X & Windows are my primary OSes & Ubuntu is something nice to play with every now and then.

[adolfotregosa]

I'm going to delete ubuntu because i can't firmware flash what i need, if i don't have internet i can't do allmost anything. If i reformat, on windows i can install all drivers/software from hardrive, even updates.I'm much less internet dependant in windows. If i want to share some program in ubuntu i don't know how if the other person doesn't have internet... there's so many dependencies bla bla bla! my laptop card reader, my external tv card, games, especific programs to play with my phone. There's allways something that doesn't work :( it makes me sad. My laptop battery lasts more time on windows and i freeze my cpu at 800mhz (centrino) on ubuntu. With nlite i made my windows much faster than ubuntu! god, i really really liked to change to linux but i simply can't... i like the fact that if the hardware is supported i don't need to install drivers. that is nice! but what's the need on having two OS if i can do everything i need on one and not on the other ?

But it's just my opinion, please don't throw stones at me ](*,)

[sorrow777]

As much as i would love to:

1. VPN to work with a rolling secure id number... i can't seem to get it work Just recently i've started to try this again.. without purchasing the cisco linux vpn client that is.

2. video support. I've posted here before and i've gotten my rig to work once in 5.10... but i'm always on the cutting edge of vid cards and monitors, so i'm constantly having issues. I just wish that linux had better hardware support. I have yet to get any linux distro to work "video wise" with my current rig.. ](*,)

3. games games games.... i'm going to attempt this again, try out wine.. but i have never had any luck. and paying monhtly for cedega isn't an option, nor should anyone pay for that... charge me 50 bucks once. and i'm in

If anyone knows or wants to chat via some im client and thinks they can help me get these things going... please by all means. I would love to use linux at work and at home for work only.

[Bragador]

Well Sorrow777 you definitely shouldn't have completely migrated to linux if you wanted the latest hardware support and all the games. Support is always made for the mass first and then the corporations catter to the smaller markets.

As for cedega it only costs 15$. You don't have to pay monthly. If you buy cedega one per year it costs 60$ after 4 years for professional gaming support. It is still less than what windows costs.

[sorrow777]

Well Sorrow777 you definitely shouldn't have completely migrated to linux if you wanted the latest hardware support and all the games. Support is always made for the mass first and then the corporations catter to the smaller markets.

As for cedega it only costs 15$. You don't have to pay monthly. If you buy cedega one per year it costs 60$ after 4 years for professional gaming support. It is still less than what windows costs.


true, i might have to look at it like that...

[gmcle454]

Adobe Photoshop CS2 - Sorry, the GIMP just isn't there yet, and I've been using Photoshop since version 5.0.
Adobe InDesign CS2 - Again, Scribus is a great, but not yet where it needs to be for me.
Font Management - My font library is now at 4,127 fonts. I have to have something (even simple like Adobe Type Manger to turn them on and off at will.
Macromedia DreamWeaver 8 - Glad to see some some serious improvement in Quanta and nVue, but again not ready for the serious, day-in, day-out, workhorse production environment.

All three of these apps are now owned by Adobe. Once they decide to release for Linux, I'll be all set!

[dr:)py]

My Canon LBP 2900...
But that's really it!

[LORD_PoLvO]

nothing at home my personal pc is now completely windows free :)

[zorba64]

Nothing...got rid of it quite a while ago. Annoying bloody thing!!!

[Xilon]

Adobe Photoshop CS2 - Sorry, the GIMP just isn't there yet, and I've been using Photoshop since version 5.0.
Adobe InDesign CS2 - Again, Scribus is a great, but not yet where it needs to be for me.
Font Management - My font library is now at 4,127 fonts. I have to have something (even simple like Adobe Type Manger to turn them on and off at will.
Macromedia DreamWeaver 8 - Glad to see some some serious improvement in Quanta and nVue, but again not ready for the serious, day-in, day-out, workhorse production environment.

All three of these apps are now owned by Adobe. Once they decide to release for Linux, I'll be all set!I believe there is a chance that Adobe will actually port their apps for Linux. It is doubtfuly but they have made a start with announcing that they will port Flash Player 9 for linux, it's a small start but always a start :)

Google and other companies are also mking an effort to better support the Linux OS and I hope many more will follow and support this truly amazing OS.

For me my main problem is that I cannot find a good Gadu-Gadu (Polish IM network, quite popular actually) client (my fav is Konnekt) and the best I have found is Kopete which is of course from KDE (the only app I need the KDE libs for...), so it is a bit of a niusance. Apart from that there is the issue of Photoshop, I am about to try and WINE PS CS2 and hope it works... GIMP doesn't really feel right, I know there are a lot of people that can do amazing things with GIMP but for me the GUI just doesn't cut it and I can't install GimpShop for some reason.

Another thing is in terms of filesharing... there are three networks/protocols which are almost not supported at all.
BitTorrent... this one is probably the most supported out of the three with the mainline client as well as Azureus and other alternatives available but the only client that cuts it for me is uTorrent which at this point isn't cross-platform (although it is planned to be).
Second comes DC, with only 3 stable apps in existance that I know of and 1 in development (the best I have found - Linux DC++). The ApexDC++ project aims to port it's client for Linux but I doubt it will happen anytime soon and it will be based on LinuxDC++ anyway.
Third comes Gnutella2 or "Mike's Protocol", even Gnutella isn't supported well with only Java based apps being available and gtk-gnutella which isn't too nice. I would really like to see some kind of minimalistic G2 client similar to uTorrent (in terms of code) because even Shareaza on Windows is a bit crappy although the network itself is pretty nice. At least we have aMule :)

I also miss foobar2000 from windows... all the audio players I have found are similar to Winamp rather than foobar2000 and none offer anything close to foobar's customisability.

Wine does not work well with these apps apart from maybe Photoshop and uTorrent, but it's still buggy in many aspects.

As you can see the only problems I have with Linux is the lack of good programs, the OS itself etc is great... I don't really mind not being able to play games since I'm not much of a gamer although it would be nice to support them. I can't really blame Linux for the lack of 64bit codecs either since none exist for Windows :)

Either way I will continue using Linux as my primary OS and only booting into windows when I NEED to.

[Scarabomb]

Dapper is half passed stable. There's a lot that I can comment on Dapper and that's
If I mess something up, I can some how go back and fix it VIA live CD or through the different...tty's? Honestly though, it's a good desktop environment and I got XGL and Compiz working *mysteriously....I honestly don't know how I did it. I ran into A TON of problems* and the desktop is 80 times more fun to look at and mess with..not to mention Linux is faster.

Buuuuutt..

I need to keep Windows incase Ubuntu goes down. I say this because I'm not sure how long this will be stable. Sure, I really do enjoy not having AntiVirus and firewall pinging 100% every moment I'm using my computer but Windows is still there for those transitioning over. Like someone said, the hardware support. When I first Dist-upgraded, I had some issues with my vid card (what's it with ATI and Ubuntu anyway?). Then there's the lack of MP3 (fixing that now I hope) and my DVD works really wonky under Ubuntu (Breezy of course...I hope Dapper is better). Then like someone else said, I'm a photoshop guru and I like photo shop so I can't really let that go. I also greatly enjoy NTFS 16 Terabytes over FAT32 32gigds (my "share" partition so happens to be NTFS and sharing it over Ubuntu..I'm scared I'll corrupt it).

I think I'll honestly use ubuntu to death but I'm gonna have to keep Windows for those "just in case" moments.

[SHodges]

Civilization IV.

[grsing]

Microsoft Money (I know, I know, but it's what I'm used to, and I haven't liked any of the Linux alternatives), Google Earth (supposedly, a port is in the works, which is good, because it sucks running in Wine), games (though I play less and less these days, which makes it not worth my while to mess around with trying to make them run in Linux).

[codypumper]

Coincidence or not, an hour or 2 after recieving the ubuntu cds from ship-it, Windows :evil: decided to act suicidal](*,) ...and indeed it succeded :KS .

[kuriharu]

I wish I could say goodbye to Windows, but the drivers in Linux simply don't stack up.

I can't get wireless to work in Linux unless I broadcast my SSID. This isn't a huge security hole, but wireless in Linux just goes dead if I don't. I personally think that's stupid but I've spent in excess of 100 hours trying to get wireless to work.](*,)

My video resolution in Dapper won't go above 1024x768. Now that I've fixed my wireless problem, I can now spend the next 100 hours trying to get the video resolution to hopefully come close to what I get in Windows.

In short, I spend more time just trying to get my system to work in Linux, whereas I can actually use my computer for work in Windows. I envy people who can kiss Windows goodbye because they obviously have better drivers than I do.

[aysiu]

I envy people who can kiss Windows goodbye because they obviously have better drivers than I do. They just have different hardware. Almost all my stuff worked out of the box. I spent literally two minutes adding a couple of lines to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and everything worked. If I had to spend hours making things work, I probably wouldn't have stuck with Ubuntu.

Maybe next time you can get something with Linux preloaded?
http://www.system76.com
http://www.linuxcertified.com
http://www.emperorlinux.com
http://groovix.com/store/

[panurge77]

The only reason windows is still on my hd is I'm lazy about porting my games to linux.

[deodatus]

For the post about Microsoft Money, I use Moneydance. Its pretty decent.

Anyway, My main excuse for having windoze is pc gaming:(

[rafaelsdmf]

I consider myself 100% WinFree. I just gave that leap of faith and here i am. No worries about my computer whatsoever. But just in case i keep VMware installed for an occasional uso for my brother's cell phone. He needs a program for tranfering files back and forth and I haven't figured out which can I can use. But othen than that I switched over and have no regrets baby... that's the way it is :cool:

[Avian00]

Two things keeping me from dumping Windows altogether:

1) Games
2) My Wife

Games are becoming less and less of a problem each day, as most of the games I like to play have native Linux binaries now.

My Wife, on the other hand, gets SO angry when I try to abandon Windows. She's scared of Linux, and she hates OpenOffice. Well, I suppose some day she'll come around. I really can't stand the idea of dual-booting. It's such a hassle, and just doubles the work I have to do. For now, at least I have my laptop.