After reading this thread through I felt I needed to post a reply. I have been in computers since back in the Commodore 64 and TRS-80 days, i'm not a stranger to PC's at all, messed with DOS a bit but never Linux, I would consider myself a Windows power user.
I got interested in mining back a few months ago. After playing with a couple ASIC miners for a bit and getting comfortable with SSH and basic Linux commands I stumbled across Ethereum and decided I wanted to build a GPU rig and try my hand at GPU mining. I bought a used Sapphire R9 280x card off Ebay (lesson learned, never buy someones "lightly used" wore out junk) and built a small one GPU rig. After doing alot of research it seems that Linux is the more efficient stable way to go when GPU mining.
After fighting with Ubuntu for days and wasting hours and hours following guides that were either incomplete or outdated, I finally got it working, well somewhat, had freezing errors and artifacting, i'm sure it was probably a driver or something, but I had enough. I finally went back to my comfort zone with Win 7 and set it up that way, everything is working well now. But with the price increase in Ethereum I am expanding my little rig with a couple more GPU cards and still really want to try Linux mining to compare against Windows. I for one am glad someone came out with a plug and play version for mining Ethereum, I will gladly pay $39 for something that works, I lost much than $39 in wasted time just screwing around trying to piece together a version that worked. It's funny how people will pay thousands of dollars for hardware but whine about 39 bucks for a ready to go piece of software, baffles me...
Anyway I wish I stumbled across the GPU shack before I bought my last card on Ebay and wasted all that time trying to learn a ton of Linux commands and scripts. Also as for Ether going POS and mining drying up, there is already a Dagger clone coin called Expanse that's out you can mine, Dwarf already has a pool setup for it, and i'm sure there will be a few more to follow so I don't see this software or these cards being totally out of date and not usable anytime in the near future...
Rather than bitch and complain, give back to the mining community with a GOOD UPDATED WORKING step by step guide to setup mining on a Linux system for those of us who aren't Linux power users, till then i'm glad Alex and company put EthOS together. Just my 2 cents
Thanks Alex, looking forward to trying out those cards and software....
Hytechminer