I am a Linux user and positively am not going to ever go back to WinDOHs. NOT an option. I have used windows, from 3.1 to 7, and they lost me for good and forever, irrevocably, at W8. IB and TDAmeritrade support Linux users, yeah. I am just looking for all my options. On the face of it, a web interface seems a bit kludgy, but I was wondering if it is actually all that bad, or not. I will be trading stocks, intraday, and starting off undercapitalized, and I might only make three trades a week, yeah, starting out, but I don't want to be limited to three trades a week. I won't be capitalized over the PDT limit until later this year. I was looking at possibly going with CMEG, which uses DAS trader, to make my bones on my first trades. However we don't have a single Windows computer in the house and we will not have one in the house. I do have several Android phones, notably four Note 3s, and a tablet. I would like to run at least two, preferably three, monitors, though. Newsfeeds will come via one of my general purpose Ubuntu laptops and trading will be done on a not yet built or purchased machine with SSD, lots of RAM, good video card, running either Ubuntu or Debian, and used for no other purpose. So the limiting factor will be the speed of the web interface. Probably will use FireFox for the browser if I go with the web platform. So how bout it? Anybody with actual experience on DAS web version?
No, not using DAS Trader. But I have to agree with you about Windows 8. My problem with W8-10 is that afaik, Microsoft did not tell anyone about the Secure Boot feature. Attempting to install a second OS to dual boot is really a problem (impossible ?) with it enabled (and it is enabled by default). I am also a lover of Linux. The speed, no defragmenting, normally no virus scanner (and I was a Unix developer for about 13 years ). Anyway, I use Fedora almost exclusively, and Windoze when I have to. That's the great thing about Linux, there are enough distributions that you can find one you really like. Cheers to another happy Linux user
Yeah I bought a laptop with W8 installed when I couldn't find one with W7. After three days I had enough, so I tried to set up a dual (duel? LOL) boot system with Ubuntu, and after a week gave up and formatted the HD, then installed Ubuntu straight up. Never looked back. Now, I don't understand why all the sheeple tolerate microscrap and their secret sourced operating system when Linux is available. But the fact of the matter is, most of the brokerages and most of their customers don't know any better, and so they only support WinDOHs, leaving me with only two choices of brokerages (good choices in general though, TDA and IB) and their in house platforms, unless I go with a web interface or a VM (no VM for me, thank you. I didn't upgrade to Ubuntu just so I could run WinDOH!s on it). My gut feeling is that the web interface will be slow and kludgy, maybe too much so for day trading. And that's what I am hoping to get clarified on. I would stick with Plan A and go with IB, but I will be starting with $10k or less so CMEG offers some additional flexibility such as higher margin and no PDT limit, being offshore. I dont use Windoze when I have to, because I don't have to. I would rather not trade at all than have to use it, anyway. I do have those two options, and I can settle for one or the other because by the end of the year I will have full PDT capitalization. Yeah I love the variety of Linux distros, even though sometimes it can be bewildering. Ubuntu, though, is very flexible and fully featured, and oddly enveloping and comforting somehow. Debian Stable, slightly more stable than already very stable Ubuntu, only with fewer apps having ready compiled install packages than the big U. Then there is Raspbian... how can you NOT like the Raspberry Pi? LOL. Kali. Crazy distro, that... great for troubleshooting. Mint, Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, Fedora, FreeBSD, (not Linux, but close enough) OpenSUSE, Xubuntu, Knoppix, ChromeOS, Puppy Linux, Android, OpenBSD, and a hundred variants of the above. I tried Red Hat back in the day, and it was frustrating. SuSE too. I remember trying OS/2 Warp and finding it astonishingly solid and powerful. I stuck with that for probably 4 years or so. After the abortive experiment with Red Hat, I still wasn't quite ready to jump back on the Windoze wagon. OS/2 cheerfully ran most DOS and Windoze apps (we called them programs back then) and did it amazingly fast. The file system was tremendously advanced, and long file names spoiled us ex Windoze users. Then there was BEOS, which I kind of never saw the point of. Windoze 95 was a clunker. When 98 came out I jumped back on the train. XP and W7 were bearable. W8 sent me running far and fast from the evil empire.
I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows, each with its own hard drive, without issue. Sort of. Occasionally Windows overwrites the MBR(?) so I have to boot directly from BIOS. I haven't yet figured out how to stop this, or what I'm doing wrong. This is a custom built machine. Also a happy Linux user, aside from the above. Cannot fathom going back to Windows, except to play games. As for trading, I created my own interface anyway so doesn't matter.
You definitely have put in some mileage with various distros. The first one I ever used was yggdrasil on a 3.5" floppy (I think) that I bought at a bookstore maybe in the early 90s (when there were still bookstores). I suspect that I have it around here somewhere (probably next to my K&R "The C Programming Language" ). Anyway, I've never really had any problems with Fedora, maybe the installation process has gotten better since the Red Hat days. Whatever suits you is one of the things that makes Linux great. From supercomputers to smartphones, there is a distro for you.