Windows' inability to search

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21

liudr:

Osgeld:
the driver issue is mostly solved ... i am much more confident firing up a linux cd and having all the hardware work than any version of windows

That is encouraging. Any distros you can suggest?

That's either easy or hard to answer. Up until a couple years ago, I would have recommended Ubuntu (either the std. Gnome-based distro, or Kubuntu, the KDE variant). Gnome3 is, in the eyes of many, a disaster. Of course, if you're completely new to Linux, you wouldn't necessarily notice the significant departure from previous versions. But Gnome (and perhaps moreso, Canonical) seem to be chasing the tablet/phone paradigm, which doesn't translate well to a desktop environment. Of course, there are those who disagree with this evaluation. But even Linus Torvalds dumped Gnome (he switched to Xubuntu, which uses Xfce instead of Gnome).

So, what are the alternatives? Well, there are lots and lots. Way more than I can discuss in a reply. FWIW, after reading various things, I've decided on going with Mint when I get to my next opportunity to upgrade. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, but they've unscrewed it a bit, and there are variants of Mint too. My plan is to install Linux Mint LXDE, and then use Fvwm as my window manager.

The #1 complaint I've read in re. Gnome3 (which will be present in any distro using that) is the disappearing overlay scrollbars. There's a workaround to disable that.

The nice thing about trying Linux is that you can download and burn a 'Live' CD or DVD, boot from it, and give it a go before installing. And, if you're not completely ready to dive in, you can dual-boot Windows and Linux.

22

RuggedCircuits:
On Windows, you will have to install Cygwin and run 'updatedb' the first time to update the database of all file locations (and run this program occasionally to re-update the database).

I haven't put Cygwin on a Windoze box in quite a while. In order for the locate utilities to index all the HDs in the box, don't you need to map them to a path first? Or does Cygwin just do that by default? And I think if I were doing that, I'd set up Cygwin cron to do the updatedb at night just like on a Linux box. (I haven't tried that, but it looks promising.)