Ok... so how did I end up going "Legacy"?

[CommonTater]

This is sort of a follow up to the threads about Windows 8 and our futures as programmers....
 
http://forum.pellesc.de/index.php?topic=4330.0
http://forum.pellesc.de/index.php?topic=4342.0
 
The big question on my mind was whether there's much of a future to programming given the way the computer industry is heading.  Some say it's all swirling the drain, others will tell us the really good stuff is just around the corner... Everything's going mobile, applications are becomming smarter, hardware is getting smaller and smaller... oddly enough, cited as arguments by both sides.
 
So after Windows 8 blew up my system and it didn't want to come back to life, I realized I had a "free" computer to mess with.  There are several others around but I seldom have one just sitting there... So I decided to do some trials of various operating systems and see just what was what... 
 
First try:  Ubuntu 8.04 ...  Nice, worked ok but problems getting the ATI graphics driver to work at 1080p...
 
2) Ubuntu 11.10 ... Now this was *horrible*... the "unity" desktop looked like a wanna be "metro" setup and it was ssslllloooooowwww.  Opening the web brouser would take 13 to 15 seconds.  I got onto a couple of websites and asked if there were any tweaks I could try, did a couple of them but they really didn't make much difference ( like most Windows tweaks).  It still used about 40% of an AMD x64 x2 2.2ghz processor just to play an MP3...
 
3) Kubuntu 11 ... not as bad but still nothing to brag about. Still 40% CPU to play an MP3... slow downloads, really really really slow startup (> 2 minutes)
 
4) Then came Linux Mint ... Took me about 5 tries to get it installed.  Video driver was causing all kinds of problems (ATI 4600 series) and kept hanging.  Once I got that straightened out it seemed a lot better, still a bit laggy but perfectly useable.  Playing MP3s still used a horrific amout of CPU time.  1080p AVI files (Big Buck Bunny) would balk and stammer using nearly a constant 100% (and apparently more).  Very frustrating.
 
5) OpenSuse got the next kick at the can.  Now this was impressive.  It installed perfectly, worked correctly right away (far as I could tell) and had a real nice KDE desktop setup. Playing MP3s used about 15 to 20% CPU depending on the bitrate of the source. FLAC files (which wouldn't play on the others) used up about 35%.  However, no matter what I did I couldn't get this distro to install video codecs so I never did get it to play video... which is not very good if you're building an HTPC.
 
Can you feel my frustration mounting?    
 
6) Next I thought I'd give good old FreeBSD a try.  It went in nicely, worked almost right away, after a few minor problems getting the package manager to download stuff for me (turned out to be a networking problem, easily fixed)  Nice enough Gnome desktop and lots of business and science apps... but once again codec problems.  It played MP3s at about 40% CPU and wouldn't play videos at all...
 
7) OK, says I... enough of this, and in went Windows 7.  This I KNOW works.  With media player classic it plays anything I throw at it. MP3s use about 2% CPU allowing the processor to scale back to 1ghz and run cool as a cucumber, with 0 fan noise.  Big Buck Bunny (35mbps 1080p AVI with AC3) plays ok but it's just a bit ragged with a couple of scenes being a bit jerky but only 25 to 30% CPU usage.  A little twiddling with the settings in MPClassic almost entirely gets rid of it...
 
So now I decides that just in case I get another system killer like that Windows8 experience I'm going to dual boot Win7 x64 and XP x64.  I have tools to restore the boot sectors for either of those and should be able to get into XP to fix the rest... so I'm thinking this is a good idea.
 
Then comes the big surprise... I put in XP x64, tossed in the service packs, installed only the video and sound drivers (in my experience MS Network, disk and IO drivers usually work better than NVidia's chipset drivers).  A little setting up and tweaking, nothing big just turning off a couple of unnecessary services and running Tweak UI on it... MP3 files play with almost unnoticeable CPU usage; 1 or 2%  My BBB video plays with --get this-- 15% CPU loading and it plays smooth as glass!  The web browser loads, usually before I get my finger off the mouse button... and it's booted up and ready to go in just over 10 seconds. 
 
A couple of other little things that should be noted... I've had a long term problem with incomplete page loads in the browser (any browser) and frequent file corruption on Flash Drives under Win7... not so in XP.  Also where Win7 runs a typical 350 to 400us delay in defered procedure calls... XP x64 is running double digits, typically 18 to 20 but occasionally dips to under 10 microseconds which helps time critical funcrtions such as video and audio decoding enormously. 
 
Finally, I actually think my music sounds better with XP... Who Knew??? 
 
All in all it's been quite the week... But I'm now officially a "legacy user" and I've learned my lesson about keeping up with the latest toys.  As my smarter half suggests: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"... and I'm going to believe her.
 
So there's my adventure... and my entry into Legacy Computing. 
I now have a dual boot system XP x64 and Win7 x64 ... defaulting to XP.
 
And... most importantly... my headache is beginning to subside.
 
 
 
 
 
 

[CommonTater]

Oh... and one more little thing... If I ever see another OS installer, it will be too soon.

[Bitbeisser]

First try:  Ubuntu 8.04 ...  Nice, worked ok but problems getting the ATI graphics driver to work at 1080p...

Sorry, but that is waaaayyy outdated. Should have tried 9.04 or 10.4 instead...

2) Ubuntu 11.10 ... Now this was *horrible*... the "unity" desktop looked like a wanna be "metro" setup and it was ssslllloooooowwww.  Opening the web brouser would take 13 to 15 seconds.  I got onto a couple of websites and asked if there were any tweaks I could try, did a couple of them but they really didn't make much difference ( like most Windows tweaks).  It still used about 40% of an AMD x64 x2 2.2ghz processor just to play an MP3...

Yeah, that's why I am looking into an alternative to Ubuntum which I have been using for about 4 years now as my primary (non-servers) Linux distro....

3) Kubuntu 11 ... not as bad but still nothing to brag about. Still 40% CPU to play an MP3... slow downloads, really really really slow startup (> 2 minutes)

Yeah, same thing as with the "mainstream" Ubuntu, Shuttelworth is just trying way to hard to imitate Windows 8/Mac OS X...

4) Then came Linux Mint ... Took me about 5 tries to get it installed.  Video driver was causing all kinds of problems (ATI 4600 series) and kept hanging.  Once I got that straightened out it seemed a lot better, still a bit laggy but perfectly useable.  Playing MP3s still used a horrific amout of CPU time.  1080p AVI files (Big Buck Bunny) would balk and stammer using nearly a constant 100% (and apparently more).  Very frustrating.

What version did you use? I tried 10 ("Julia") as the latest (have downloaded but not installed 12 yet) and that didn't seem to bad. And it was pleasantly compatible with the FreePascal binaries I created on Ubuntu 10.4...

5) OpenSuse got the next kick at the can.  Now this was impressive.  It installed perfectly, worked correctly right away (far as I could tell) and had a real nice KDE desktop setup. Playing MP3s used about 15 to 20% CPU depending on the bitrate of the source. FLAC files (which wouldn't play on the others) used up about 35%.  However, no matter what I did I couldn't get this distro to install video codecs so I never did get it to play video... which is not very good if you're building an HTPC.

Can you feel my frustration mounting?    

Partially...

One major issue with the way how you are trying to use Linux is that too many distro's/application developers are infected with the "Stallman virus".  A lot of video/audio codecs are in their eyes "less than free" and not included by default, so some distros have a special release that includes all those "virus free" codecs and should not give you any problems in terms of codec support. Not sure how those CPU usage numbers come about you mentioned, but it can't be all that bad or such fine things as the "Raspberry Pi", which I have seen playing 1080p video just fine would not be all the rave right now (disregarding the f*** up of the actual manufacturer with the networking port on the B model)...

6) Next I thought I'd give good old FreeBSD a try.  It went in nicely, worked almost right away, after a few minor problems getting the package manager to download stuff for me (turned out to be a networking problem, easily fixed)  Nice enough Gnome desktop and lots of business and science apps... but once again codec problems.  It played MP3s at about 40% CPU and wouldn't play videos at all...

Never could get used to any of the BSD ones (Free*, Open*, Net*), though I am using a few FreeNAS setups at customers...

7) OK, says I... enough of this, and in went Windows 7.  This I KNOW works.  With media player classic it plays anything I throw at it. MP3s use about 2% CPU allowing the processor to scale back to 1ghz and run cool as a cucumber, with 0 fan noise.  Big Buck Bunny (35mbps 1080p AVI with AC3) plays ok but it's just a bit ragged with a couple of scenes being a bit jerky but only 25 to 30% CPU usage.  A little twiddling with the settings in MPClassic almost entirely gets rid of it...

Don't do too much multimedia stuff but can't stand any version of MultiMedia Player...
For some YouTube and similar stuff, I use Wimpy and for playing music, as the best MP3 player of all times (Zinf) doesn't work anymore on Windows after some DLL updates, I started to use Canopus MP3 Library Player, the next best thing in the way how you can create play list the way I want it... Don't even get me start on that pile of bovine manure called iTunes! 

So now I decides that just in case I get another system killer like that Windows8 experience I'm going to dual boot Win7 x64 and XP x64.  I have tools to restore the boot sectors for either of those and should be able to get into XP to fix the rest... so I'm thinking this is a good idea.

Nothing personal, but I think you made a basic mistake to install a preview release on an existing system. That simply is calling for troubles. I tried to install Windows 8 Preview on a spare system of mine, but that's a bit older (P4 2.8GHz, 1GB RAM, onboard Intel845 graphics) and that didn't like the video chips, but otherwise it worked, though I did not see the previous option to disable the Metro stuff and run like Windows 8. Will give that another shot later this weekend probably on a different system....

Then comes the big surprise... I put in XP x64, tossed in the service packs, installed only the video and sound drivers (in my experience MS Network, disk and IO drivers usually work better than NVidia's chipset drivers).  A little setting up and tweaking, nothing big just turning off a couple of unnecessary services and running Tweak UI on it... MP3 files play with almost unnoticeable CPU usage; 1 or 2%  My BBB video plays with --get this-- 15% CPU loading and it plays smooth as glass!  The web browser loads, usually before I get my finger off the mouse button... and it's booted up and ready to go in just over 10 seconds. 

Well, you might be lucky here, I never had any luck with getting any XP 64bit system working properly at work. Either drivers don't work (several HP and Lanier/Xerox printers) or work like crap (Intel Gigabit NIC), as well as lot of problems with business applications not working (there is no Cisco 64bit VPN client!) or not working properly (Bloomberg for example).

I am going next week Wednesday to a presentation at the local ITPro user group by some folks from Microsoft, probably showboating Windows 8 and more importantly the upcoming Beta of Windows 'Server 8', let's see what this is all about... 

Ralf

[Stefan Pendl]

4) Then came Linux Mint ... Took me about 5 tries to get it installed.  Video driver was causing all kinds of problems (ATI 4600 series) and kept hanging.  Once I got that straightened out it seemed a lot better, still a bit laggy but perfectly useable.  Playing MP3s still used a horrific amout of CPU time.  1080p AVI files (Big Buck Bunny) would balk and stammer using nearly a constant 100% (and apparently more).  Very frustrating.

You could try Commodore OS Vision, which is based on Mint, but adapted by Commodore USA.

[czerny]

Has anybody any practical experiences with ReactOS or fedora or Haiku?

czerny

[TimoVJL]

Testing ReactOS 0.3.14-REL in VirtualBox:

poide.exe doesn't work, missing menus and empty dialog tabs.
polink.exe crash.

[CommonTater]

Sorry, but that is waaaayyy outdated. Should have tried 9.04 or 10.4 instead...

   I had it already on a CD... so what the heck.

Yeah, that's why I am looking into an alternative to Ubuntum which I have been using for about 4 years now as my primary (non-servers) Linux distro....

I did a little searching and found quite a few aritcles saying how slow and bloated *Ubuntu distros are getting.  It started out as a small, fast and easy distro to attract beginners but now it seems to have gone Microsoft... bigger, slower, less useable... I do hope they don't think they can compete with M$ ... The whole point of Linux is that it's not Windows
 

What version did you use? I tried 10 ("Julia") as the latest (have downloaded but not installed 12 yet) and that didn't seem to bad. And it was pleasantly compatible with the FreePascal binaries I created on Ubuntu 10.4...

I believe it was 10 with the KDE desktop... Thing is it's based on Ubuntu and I'm guessing it suffers many of it's shortcommings.
 

One major issue with the way how you are trying to use Linux is that too many distro's/application developers are infected with the "Stallman virus".  A lot of video/audio codecs are in their eyes "less than free" and not included by default, so some distros have a special release that includes all those "virus free" codecs and should not give you any problems in terms of codec support.

Yes I noticed that... I believe it was Suse that had a special release with "all codecs included"... The thing is, when I step over to Linux, I am for all intents and purposes a near total beginner.  If I can't suss it out I'm gonna go elsewhere... and some of this stuff was clearly guite complex and poorly documented.
 

Not sure how those CPU usage numbers come about you mentioned, but it can't be all that bad or such fine things as the "Raspberry Pi", which I have seen playing 1080p video just fine would not be all the rave right now (disregarding the f*** up of the actual manufacturer with the networking port on the B model)...

I know almost nothing about the RPi but my understanding is they did considerable phenageling to ge the Linux distro to run well on the ARM chip used.  It might be that it's the difference between "written specifically for" and "in wide distribution". 
 
In any case I was quite taken aback by the CPU usage on a lot of Linux stuff.  Like all AMD systems mine uses "cool and quiet" which ramps the CPU speed up to 2.2ghz as demand increases or time specific functions are started.  The rest of the time it runs at a nice lazy 990mhz.  One thing I did notice is that on *nix the CPU almost never gets below 1.6ghz whereas on Windows it almost never gets above that...  (1.6ghz is the middle step in the throttling stages on this particular CPU.)
 

Don't do too much multimedia stuff but can't stand any version of MultiMedia Player... For some YouTube and similar stuff, I use Wimpy and for playing music, as the best MP3 player of all times (Zinf) doesn't work anymore on Windows after some DLL updates, I started to use Canopus MP3 Library Player, the next best thing in the way how you can create play list the way I want it... Don't even get me start on that pile of bovine manure called iTunes! 

And don't get me started on it either!  One of my biggest grumbles with media players is that they all seem to want to A) Do way more than they need to and B) Treat their users like a bunch of dummies.  Windows (and Linux) has a perfectly useable and smart filing system built right in... USE IT!     Don't be reorganizing my collections and moving my files around, and especially don't be rewriting my MP3 tags according to some idiotic notion of what's best for me!
 
A good media player will open when a file is clicked, play the thing then exit when it's done... it doesn't need to do anything else and thus should not. 
 
This is why I chose Media Player Classic (Home Cinema version)... put it in your system, twiddle with a few settings, the rest is done by clicking on files.  (Of course there is the little matter that it also does a really good job of playing those files...)
 

Nothing personal, but I think you made a basic mistake to install a preview release on an existing system. That simply is calling for troubles.

Gees... ya think?   
 
It's a mistake I won't be repeating any time soon... I guarantee that.  But it wasn't all bad... I've learned a LOT this past week.
 
 

Well, you might be lucky here, I never had any luck with getting any XP 64bit system working properly at work. Either drivers don't work (several HP and Lanier/Xerox printers) or work like crap (Intel Gigabit NIC), as well as lot of problems with business applications not working (there is no Cisco 64bit VPN client!) or not working properly (Bloomberg for example).

Maybe it's that we play in different puddles... but so far, so good... the only real problem I've encountered with XP x64 was that it won't install Direct X 11 and I have one application that needs it... But no worries... an older version of the same app works perfectly. 
 
So far my impressions of XP x64 are pretty good... I'm dual booting XP and 7 so I'll have plenty of chance to compare and get used to stuff as I go... I figure it will just work itself out naturally as I see what works better where... The one thing I do like about XP is being rid of all that UAC crap and a lot less background stuff going on... Right now it's running in 490mB and the entire system is quiescent except for me rattling these keys . 
 
In Win7 I had to go into the task scheduler and services manager and shut down a LOT of stuff before I had a quiescent system... Most of that I killed was spyware from microsoft (the call it "Customer Experience") that literally reported to them on my activities.  I wonder what it said about me shutting it off...
 

I am going next week Wednesday to a presentation at the local ITPro user group by some folks from Microsoft, probably showboating Windows 8 and more importantly the upcoming Beta of Windows 'Server 8', let's see what this is all about... 

I'd be very interested to read about your experience, my friend.
 

[CommonTater]

4) Then came Linux Mint ... Took me about 5 tries to get it installed.  Video driver was causing all kinds of problems (ATI 4600 series) and kept hanging.  Once I got that straightened out it seemed a lot better, still a bit laggy but perfectly useable.  Playing MP3s still used a horrific amout of CPU time.  1080p AVI files (Big Buck Bunny) would balk and stammer using nearly a constant 100% (and apparently more).  Very frustrating.

You could try Commodore OS Vision, which is based on Mint, but adapted by Commodore USA.

WOW!  I just poked around the websites for the OS and Comodore itself... These guys are serious.  I especially like the idea of stuffing a mini-itx board into a keyboard... kinda tall but still a great idea. 

Hmmmm... I know a couple of people who would see great humour in having guests over to watch a couple of movies and there's a Commodore 64 sitting in front of the 60" TV set....

[CommonTater]

Has anybody any practical experiences with ReactOS or fedora or Haiku?
czerny

Fedora is a Linux distro... If you have an extra computer kicking around you could probably load it up for a look... just don't make my mistake and send yourself off into a week long struggle because you blew up your main machine...   

ReactOS is deeply incomplete.  As Copy Cats go, it's got a long way to go... Quite frankly you'd get better bang for the work by running a copy of XP through NLite and taking out all the crap you don't use.  NLite also lets you pre-load drivers and service packs so you can build machine specific install disks. (That's my project today... Getting XP x64 to load up with all drivers and settings, ready to use.)

http://www.nliteos.com/   <--- read everything on the site first!
 

[Monolith]

My desktop computer is dual boot XP and Fedora. Fedora is the default. I rather liked it once I got everything installed and working properly. I don't use my desktop as much anymore because I got my laptop. It has Vista installed. For what I used it for, Vista works fine.

I am a "Legacy" too, I guess. There are two reasons for this: (1) financially, I cannot keep buying hardware and new operating systems, and (2) I hate when things become more "user-friendly." I cannot stand the default, "user-friendly," settings of Microsoft Office (stop correcting my typing style Microsoft), so I use LibreOffice. I like to have more control and the more "user-friendly," the less control I have over the applications.

There are also security features installed in new operating systems that inconvenience me, but are designed to make the Internet safer for people that don't know what they are doing. These options get disabled day one.

Come to think of it, I don't use any of the programs that come with Windows or are downloadable from Microsoft. I found that open-source and free software is better. These programs are made by people that are interested in making the best programs they can and not producing artificial updates to make more money.

[CommonTater]

Hi Monotlith;
I agree in large part with what you're saying.  One of my objections to *most* operating systems is that there's a very strong tendency to treat users as though they're stupid.  But then I actually see my code in use and I'm forced to agree... most of the stuff out there is running almost entirely on defaults and very few people actually know or care about the settings in their systems. Computer users are less and less capable as time goes on. Technology is getting closer to magic all the time as more and more people know less and less about it... One can hardly blame an industry giant like microsoft for treating their customers like a bunch of dummies.  But it is equally true to observe that they've caused their own problems by not giving people any reason to learn.
 
Far as Office goes, just turn off the real-time spelling and grammar checks, takes about 10 seconds.
 
I will however disagree with you about open source software... There's an old saying: "Too many cooks spoil the broth"... and in a great many cases that is plenty apparent in OSrc projects.  Most of the stuff I tried out on my various linux installs over the last few days was open source (or program by committee) and without fail it was loaded up with a ton of features, had fancy schmancy looks but didn't work worth crap; really 40% cpu to play an MP3?  (I'm playing high bitrate MP3s as I type this and my AMD64 x2 CPU is throttled down to 990mhz with a nice even 2% usage.) 
 
There are exceptions of course... but they're becoming increasingly hard to find as more and more "scoop and poop" programming is used and developers receive less and less comprehensive training ... and don't even get me started on the problems in India right now.
 
What I'm finding is that starting with that whole UAC debacle in Vista --that OS lasted about 15 minutes with me-- Microsoft seems to be heading down a road that is way less than beneficial.  Only a few days back on XP, don't even have half my stuff installed yet, and I'm already noticing how fast it is, how smoothly it multitasks and how little memory it's using (less than 160mb when quiescent). 
 
Maybe we should all, just once in a while, re-visit the older stuff and ask if the newer stuff really is better... As much as I like Win7's eye candy.. XP is a better OS.

[Monolith]

I will however disagree with you about open source software... There's an old saying: "Too many cooks spoil the broth"... and in a great many cases that is plenty apparent in OSrc projects.

A majority of the open source projects are ... well, crap. I must say free software is preferable in most cases, if updates are somewhat regular anyway. In cases of when you are looking for a free or open source alternative to some bloat-ware, there is usually a solid supplement. Admittedly, this does not apply to all cases. Windows is the best operating system. Shareware security applications are usually better, faster, and more up-to-date.

For Windows, I think that the best media players are free or open source. VLC, Foobar2000, AIMP, Media Player Classic, MediaMonkey (pay-for-upgrade is free to me)... are all better than Windows Media Player. Maybe the, "Too many cooks spoil the broth," applies internally to some Microsoft products that have been around for a long period of time. I seriously doubt that Microsoft has the applications completely rewritten (with large updates), so thus after years of being around there will have been several (>30?) programmers that would have worked on something. Plus, there is also other programmers working on the frameworks that run the applications, leading to even more issues.

[CommonTater]

A majority of the open source projects are ... well, crap. I must say free software is preferable in most cases, if updates are somewhat regular anyway.

Y'know what... I have software out there I wrote for Win2000 in 2000 that is still in use and I've never updated it.  No reason to.  As they say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."   (Yeah I got lots of old sayings). 

I typically run my systems with Automatic Updates disabled and will add service packs when they come out. If there is a specific problem I will seek an update to correct it... but for the rest, once a system is stable I prefer to just leave it alone.

In cases of when you are looking for a free or open source alternative to some bloat-ware, there is usually a solid supplement. Admittedly, this does not apply to all cases. Windows is the best operating system. Shareware security applications are usually better, faster, and more up-to-date.

I've never hesitated to use freeware or shareware.  I find that some of the work done by people who sincerely care about what they are writing is usually the best quality work. The difference being between "The boss told me to..." and "I really wanted to..."  I've offered freeware in my days, both intentionally and accidentally (through piracy) and I rather suspect I put in more time on half as much code as the "big guys" do for the same functionality.

For Windows, I think that the best media players are free or open source. VLC, Foobar2000, AIMP, Media Player Classic, MediaMonkey (pay-for-upgrade is free to me)... are all better than Windows Media Player.

Media player wise I'm a fan of Media Player Classic -Home Cinema version.  I've been using it since it began and I have to suggest that it's one of those rare "open source" projects they did get mostly right; although their advanced renderers (VMR9 and EVC implementations) need a LOT of work. They seem not to do a very good job with On Screen Displays... For example: if you select EVR custom (which gives you the "Play", "Volume" etc tags on screen as well as subtitling) and note the CPU usage then uncheck the "Show OSD" option the difference is plainly dramatic... sometimes half or less.  But other than that it's a very good player. 

I've used VLC too.  In my opinon it does a good enough job for most uses. But in the work I do --which includes IP-LAN remote control-- it's nowhere near as friendly as MPC.

Winamp... well that just sucks.  Never liked it.

Maybe the, "Too many cooks spoil the broth," applies internally to some Microsoft products that have been around for a long period of time. I seriously doubt that Microsoft has the applications completely rewritten (with large updates), so thus after years of being around there will have been several (>30?) programmers that would have worked on something. Plus, there is also other programmers working on the frameworks that run the applications, leading to even more issues.

I have to agree with you there.  I rather doubt Microsoft starts from scratch on anything other than brand new products.  And the cooks do occasionally taint the broth. WMP is only one example... Their CD and DVD burner setups are the worst. 

What I REALLY wish Microsoft would do is put together a "back to basics" version.  Just the OS and Desktop nothing else... Give me enough to run and manage my software and files... let me worry about the software.  Windows is the size it is because of silly "built in" features, like 800megs of speech recognition --which, no matter what I do seems to get "their" everytime I say either "bear" or "share".  Then there's all the drivers nobody ever uses... They could cut the OS size to a third without all that crap; I know, I've done it with NLite and VLite... Let it download a driver when it needs it... let me pick my own notepad and speech recognition... Right back to bare minimums...

[czerny]

Windows XP SP3 Support Ends April 8, 2014
Firefox Support Ending for Windows 2000, Windows XP Pre-SP2 now

czerny

[frankie]

Linux 64bits distro's are known to be buggy and not safe.
Unless you really need 64bits try the 32 bit version.
For multimedia you can get the sources and compile it straightforward on your system, simple and fast.
Maybe the graphic is not as 'sharp' as on win systems, but things works without big problems.
I use UBUNTU running in an Oracle virtual box with no problems at all.