What computer/OS are you using?

[Bella]

Hooooray~

[Nichi]

Cool :3

My bro-in-law said he's going to be buying a computer off of one of his coworkers; who is in the process of building himself a new PC. Both he and my sister claim that it's more powerful than 2k-tan the Desktop, but I'll have to see it first; I don't believe anybody who builds their own PCs would sell something that powerful for as low as $300. But, we'll see once they work it out

[Red-Machine]

They obviously don't know what they're talking about.  My money's on a Core2 Quad at most.

[Krizonar]

lol, 2k's processor costs more than that, so good luck to them.

[Chocofreak13]

if emoticons were real, i'd get an anime vein every time someone made a dumbass assumption like that. bring it on, fools. >>;

[Krizonar]

I switched Cheetah and Mac's positions since both look better in each other's positions tbh.

[Nichi]

So, my sister's netbook is in need of a new hard drive...plus an external DVD drive to reinstall Windows with :\

Just earlier this month, her netbook (Chibi, as seen here next to Sonata) began to act slowly and crash a lot, so thinking it was a virus, she handed it to me to look over it. After some checking, it turns out it was not a virus, but hard drive failure; as reformatting and reinstalling Windows using the on-disk recovery software had no effect, while attempting to install Fedora lead to it crashing during setup.

So, hopefully it won't be too expensive to fix up :\

For the curious, specs:

Model: Acer Aspire One D250
CPU: Intel Atom (1.6Ghz)
RAM: 1GB
HDD: 160GB
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit)

[Red-Machine]

Run Spinrite on it.  Could fix you up.

[Nichi]

Is there a free version of it available? I looked it up and saw it had to be purchased

Thanks, Red. I'll try it out once my sister buys a DVD drive for her netbook :3

[Nichi]

So, I'm at my sister's house now, using my bro-in-law's desktop (His current one, not the one he's supposed to be buying soon that's somehow superior to 2k-tan the Desktop >_>)

To say the least, I don't see how he can do anything on this, let alone play games. It's agonizingly slow, with is using 100% of it's processing power just trying to load Google Crome >_<

Here's a rundown of the specs, for the lulz:

Dell Inspiron something-or-other (Circa '08)
CPU: Celeron (2.2Ghz)
RAM: 2GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4350 (Hand-me-down from 2k-tan the Desktop)
OS: Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)

Yeah, this one needs to be replaced badly, or to be turned over to somebody that knows how to properly use it instead of loading it down with so much pointless stuff it's nearly unusable >_>;;

[Chocofreak13]

TK's no better. curse this Turion. >>;;

[Nichi]

Ah. I might be able to help that somewhat, if Mel doesn't mind me reformatting it :3

Anyway, while I now have access to the last few beta versions of Windows 2000, as well as prototype versions of Windows 1.0 that I'll likely setup Minefield for sometime soon, I also downloaded the other desktop interface variants of Fedora just to see what interface I like the best; since I've already used 2 of the 4. Anyway, my thoughts on them:

- GNOME 3
Let's just say, there's a reason why the signature of our own Fedora-tan says "Gnome 3 developers where paid by Microsoft". While GNOME 2 still holds a special place in my heart, for it was the default interface of Ubuntu 8.04 (The first version of Linux I loved), GNOME 3 takes everything I liked, threw it out the window, and said "I wanna be like Android". The interface is fine on things like tablets and smart phones, but on a desktop with a traditional keyboard-and-mouse setup, it just feels awkward. Also, its requirements are very demanding; as I more often than not received the friendly message of  "Your graphics card is not compatible with GNOME Shell. It has booted into Fallback mode" unless I was booting from 2k-tan the Desktop or Asagi at the very least.

This is the default interface for Fedora, but I'd strongly suggest trying a different one

- XFCE
This was the other one I had already tried, and is as of present my favorite one. With XFCE, Fedora is very lightweight; it feels like it can run on pretty much anything that Windows XP will. Also, the interface is not that bad; it's not as good as GNOME 2, but it's thankfully not GNOME 3 either. This is what I'd personally suggest so far.

- KDE
This is the main competitor to GNOME; being the other fancy, full-featured interface. From what I've used of it, KDE is much nicer than GNOME; more like, say, Windows 7. It's quite nice what I've used of it, so I'd suggest checking this one out if you have a fairly powerful desktop. I don't know if it's near as demanding as GNOME 3, as I haven't tested it that far, but I'd suggest being prepared anyway.

- LXDE
This one I honestly never heard of...and after playing around a bit with it, I want to know why I don't see it talked about as often as GNOME or KDE. It's like a dream; it's lightweight like XFCE, but with a feel comparable to GNOME 2. It's hard to really decide between the two, so I'd suggest trying both out first, but so far I think LXDE might be my new favorite :3

[Bella]

@Pent: Have you considered giving the MATE desktop environment a try? It's essentially a renamed GNOME 2, created by devs who didn't like the way GNOME was headed.

GNOME: Kind of ugly, but also really customizable, so you can generally de-uglify it with a bit of tweaking.

XFCE: Lightweight, put plasticky and cheap looking, sort of like Fisher-Price toy.

KDE: Bloated and shiny.

LXDE: Never seen, can't comment.

IceWM: Is good is you want to be rocketed back to the year 1995 without having a time machine.

Open-, Black- and Fluxbox: See above comments

[Nichi]

I'll have to check out MATE, then :3
Thanks for mentioning it

[Chocofreak13]

i need to fix my computers so i can begin experimenting again. :\