What flavor of Linux do you use?

[neuronet]

I'm a Windows user, just installed Ubuntu 14.04LTS last night because I want to use this book, and ROS in general plays best with Linux.

In terms of versions of Ubuntu, is there a good description of the differences that might tempt me to go to Ubuntu 16.04? I know one thing already: 16 makes it easy to have menus show all the time, none of this hide-and-seek with the mouse where the menu only shows when you mouse over!

In terms of desktop, my hunch is I will end up switching from Unity to KDE, because I really like Windows 7 (and Qt) and KDE resonates with both of them. Also, lots of articles like the following make me want to try KDE, it just seems to win in most of these types of evaluations:
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/gnome-vs.-kde-vs.-unity-performing-seven-basic-tasks-1.html

[neuronet]

I ended up going back to Unity, partly because I am largely a noob and all of the really good tutorials I have for getting up to speed quickly with Ubuntu are all done in Unity. Also, I installed Kubuntu and played around in KDE, and frankly Unity is just a bit more intuitive.

The main book I used was this:
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Ubuntu-Linux-4th/dp/0133927318/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1464616707&sr=8-12&keywords=ubuntu

It's actually really good for getting up to speed quickly. You can skip parts you know already and it's no big deal, but it takes the time to explain basics like installation, and it includes an installation disc for 14.04LTS which is convenient.

Perhaps once I get comfortable with all the software that I know I'll need, and know my way around ubuntu better, I'll go back to KDE, but Unity was just much more intuitive and easy for me to navigate, install, uninstall, find, and run programs. KDE was a little more learning curve.

Since my goal is just to use software, not to become a Linux guru, I'm gonna stick with Unity for now.

[neuronet]

I have been spending the last two weeks learning Linux (using the book in the previous post), and blender. Unfortunately, I then had to get a new computer because my laptop has horrible graphics capabilities and can't render many of the 3D shapes in blender. My Lenovo laptop is so bad, it can't even render simple bar plots in Matlab! It turns out it's sort of a cottage industry figuring out optimal builds for Blender. But I think our Blender demands for chefBot are pretty minimal, so we don't need to go overboard with a million-dollar computer. Once I actually get my machine working, I will post the build here. Then I'll post my experience with Blender.

At any rate, this was the perfect excuse to build a new desktop with a good graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970). I should finally get my CPU in the mail this Wednesday, and build the computer this week.

I had forgotten how un-Pythonic Linux was. My goodness. Python has very clear transparent descriptive names, while Linux is like...xz, grep, less, and options strung together like -lzxsdf that are completely unreadable. It's truly night and day makes me so glad I use Python, and that Joseph's book uses Python.

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