Linux or Windows

I have an xbmc center working with Windows 7 and everything works fine, my data is stored on the htpc, but i do pull some from my regular computer and all that works fine. I keep reading a lot of folks are using Ubuntu though or Live and am wondering what the advantages of these are over windows. One thing i do not like about my htpc is that it seem to PC'e if that makes since, i would much rather it just use the xbmc gui, although i do use boxee some for their live tv app.

Linux has the advantage of being free. Also, many people, as a rule, don't especially like Windows. That's the main advantage of Linux.

With that said, if you don't like logging into Windows or experiencing that "PC" feel, you are definitely welcome to give XBMC Live a go. With XBMC Live, the entire experience is more like just turning on a incredibly awesome and powerful dvd player and going.

Depends on you hardware. For NVidia, Linux is an easy to install and maintain OS, especially with Openelec. For Intel/AMD it requires more time and skills (should be as easy when ppa's, openelec and xbmclive are fixed for VAAPI).

Windows should be a hassle-free, but not free, solution.

Quality and ease of XBMC is equal on both platforms.

The other reason I was wondering what because of myth tv, i have a tv tuner and right now have just been using wmc for the live tv channels. For hardware I have a gigabyte mobo with an ati chip for graphics or I have a ati 4500 gpu. Both run through hdmi to my projector. I have a SSD 30gb as the boot drive. I do have iMON screen on my case too. Once i get this all going the only thing left is to get a good remote to program, but i think ill probably get a rii.

Win7 MCE, because it can do DTS-HD/TrueHD pass-through and it has a lot of cool remotes control for MCE too. I leave MCE on 24/7, and it can wake up on a dime with a button on MCE remote control. I never have to see the desktop. Since it is Zacate (I used eskro suggestion to build it), it is barely expose in the entertainment center.

Oh one other note, it's better than any HD media player that I owned (Boxee Box, Xtreamer, Roku, etc). I don't have to deal with all the HD audio playback issues that all the media players posses anymore. I have full control of the settings, instead of rely on Boxee, Xtreamer, etc to fix it for me. They never get their HD audio to work correctly yet!

Tow simple reason for me to use Windows on the HTPC:
1. full BluRay support
2. no hacking and messing around with lowlevel stuff on the console

I gave Ubuntu several tries, I even have it as dual boot playground on my notebook and in a VM on my desktop pc, but I always had issues with it - be it blacklisted drivers I had to spend hours to get them working, no LAN because I wasn't able to set the connection to 100Mbit FD (gigabit fails on my wireing), easy automounting of smb shares etc. You still need to be a little techie and mess with the console to use Linux - although it already got a lot better.

I used Ubuntu for a good long time and then I had a hard drive failure. It took months for me to get my Ubuntu install with XBMC working the way I liked. I decided I didn't want to go through that and installed Windows when I bought my new ssd.

I do work in tech support. I work with Windows systems all day long. If anything goes bad in Windows I know how to fix it. With Ubuntu I spent a lot of my time Googleing. It took me roughly two hours to install Windows, install popper drivers, optimize it for the SSD and and install XBMC.

Linux was a great experience and I'm glad I gave it a try but I'm glad to be back on Windows where I'm comfortable.

htpc guy Wrote:I used Ubuntu for a good long time and then I had a hard drive failure. It took months for me to get my Ubuntu install with XBMC working the way I liked. I decided I didn't want to go through that and installed Windows when I bought my new ssd.

I do work in tech support. I work with Windows systems all day long. If anything goes bad in Windows I know how to fix it. With Ubuntu I spent a lot of my time Googleing. It took me roughly two hours to install Windows, install popper drivers, optimize it for the SSD and and install XBMC.

Linux was a great experience and I'm glad I gave it a try but I'm glad to be back on Windows where I'm comfortable.

+1.

I Love Linux and i hate windows but but when it comes to easyness of installation and make everything work, windows is ahead of linux. I tried Openelec too, but the image was stuttering in random times and there was a bug with stuttering when the first two subtitles hit the screen, so i went back in Windows.

P.S. I just hope that that the Eden Live version will work out of the box, especially when it comes wih proper 24p playback.

I use Linux on my desktop at home and I love it. It beats Windows hands down for the type of things I do - managing downloads, copying files, transcoding video and audio files, etc. But for the HTPC, I gave Linux a try, but ended up using Windows 7 and never looked back. Since I use the HTPC for other things than xbmc, it just made more sense. Not having Netflix was a real dealbreaker. Also, setting up bit perfect audio output using foobar2000 was a real plus (I stream to an external DAC using optical, while xbmc uses HDMI). Everything just works out of the box without any problems. Linux is great for a lot of things, but when it comes to setting up a full-function HTPC, Windows is still the choice in my humble opinion.

I've just been trying out both Windows and Fedora linux on my new Dell Zino, and Windows is really the only choice that works well. I can't get hdmi audio at all from the open source radeon driver, and I can't get decent video from the closed source catalyst driver. Fortunately the Windows xbmc works pretty much perfectly for me. My full story is here:

http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/hard.../zino.html