Where to start? First of all, installing Arch went well.
It installed with relative ease, had a clean (text) installer, though it required me to do a few things such as install xorg and gdm, these were easy tasks. Initial thoughts are that it is a very basic system with almost no applications, kind of nice if you like to have control over every application installed on your system, but I find it a bit irritating. To be honest, I was expecting it to be very fast but it seems to take twice as long to open an application in Arch as it does in Mint. So because it only made things harder for me, and there was not an increase, but a decrease in performance, I will be sticking to Mint Linux.
It may be that I’m too use to having the Distro do everything for me, but it seems like too much trouble to bother with all the extra work, for at best, minimal performance gains. Maybe one day I will give it another try, but at current, it’s not what I’m looking for.
On a similar topic, I have convinced my brother to let me install Linux on his computer. He has a very old E-machine that has the same install of Windows XP that it had since we bought it, so as you can imagine, there are many documents, pictures, and music scattered throughout the hard drive. For the last few weeks, he has been having problems with spyware and viruses on it, I’ve tried to help him in every way I can, so when I removed the virus I thought it was fixed, but the virus keeps coming back from a mystery source. The spyware comes up on his computer, pretending to be an anti-spyware application, informing him that his computer may be infected with spyware, and that he should buy this software to have it removed. It wasn’t so bad before, but now he has one that completely removes his background and, in very large letters, informs him of this limited time offer. Long story short, he’s had it with Windows, and he said that he hears me talk about Linux a lot and wants to give it a try.
I’m currently in the process of backing up his files and when they are done, I will wipe the hard drive clean. I think I will set him up with Mint because it has been such a good distro for me and it is very easy to learn. All he does is use Microsoft Word to do some school work, Browse the web, and sometimes he plays Tac-Ops (A Mod for UT2004), so in this case, Linux can easily do everything he needs. I’ll set him up with OpenOffice, Firefox, and install UT2004 along with the mod. We should have another Linux convert soon.
auf Wiedersehen
