Ubuntu!

By Shetland
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Grand Master

Shetland

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After a week with Ubuntu, I present my views, good and bad on using it as a primary operating system.

Background

I have always been a Windows user, not because I am some Microsoft zealot but simply because it was always 'there'.

Recently my installation of Vista was damaged and I was forced to use an Ubuntu Live CD to gain access to my files as I had no Vista installation disc at hand and Windows XP doesn't support my SATA hard-drive natively.

I had always wondered about Linux, It seemed like a nice idea, with its open-source attitude but I always looked at it as hard and fairly useless due to incompatibility.

As a user I do not have many needs, my general usage involves web-browsing, photoshopping, recording audio and instant-messaging.

Introduction

So in went the disc, and up came a menu with boot options. A few minutes later I was sat looking at what felt like the love child of Windows and OSX, Within minutes I had found my way around the user-interface which felt very intuitive and looked pretty nice but I then hit my first hurdle:

Mounting Problems!

I had problems mounting my hard-dic.. I mean disk with the system.

Sexual puns aside, this whole idea of mounting baffled me for a little while, I had to mess around with the terminal with help from Google in order to get it working but this was all solved within ten minutes.

Back to the OS...

This brings me onto something I felt Ubuntu did very well with, setting up and installing everything I needed. After I had sorted out my files and ordered them properly I went to play a music file to relax for a bit, but I was presented with a codec error. Unlike windows though, within seconds it downloaded the codec for me and had installed it without any fuss. Impressed, this stirred me to have a look at what else there was to install, so I popped into the add/remove programs area and found thousands of great applications which all went in with ease and within a few minutes I had practically everything I ever had on windows (with the help of some community alternatives)

Not so ugly after all...

Now, it's not all about mounting – she'll need a nice face too!

If I planned to use this operating system for any period of time I wasn't going to stand for Windows 9X style visuals. Don't get me wrong, I hate visual bloat but things need to be smooth.

A quick Google threw Compiz-Fusion my way, this thing is everything Vista should have been.

In a nutshell it lets me do pretty much anything with my UI visually, I think it controls it in 3D too so you're not limited in any way, I can have windows sway when I pull them or whatever, but as I said earlier that isn't really my cup of tea. I enabled a few bits-and-bobs and everything was great.

The next issue...

It wasn't long until I ran into a big issue again. I am a musician and I need the ability to record music whenever I get the inspiration. Ubuntu handles audio input in a very alien way to me, there is a central application that controls all input and sorts it out for the other applications, it's called Jack. Jack however did not like me, or my on-board soundcard and refused to work. I tried to get help online but nothing seemed to fix this, I am sure with time and effort this would be solved but Windows simply worked out of the box for me. This issue is the only thing making me question the switch-over to Ubuntu perminantly, there are a few little other nit-picky problems that I will come onto in a minute but this is a biggie for me.

Nibbling issues...

Aside from myself and Jack having mutual hate for each other, there are a few small things that annoy me about Ubuntu, these are all to do with compatibility:

1.It doesn't play nice with my ipod, I have all the iPod management programs installed and they can read off of my ipod but whenever I plug it in they do something to it that causes it to not see its own files upon ejecting it. I cannot use it at all because of this and need to find a Windows machine to re-install the firmware and put songs on from that computer.

2.My webcam is also not supported.

3.I wish I had my sweet, sweet Photoshop back. The Gimp is honestly not the same.

Not to dwell on small issues, Ubuntu is great apart from this, It is suitable for day to day use.

Back to some pro's...

I decided, for the purpose of this review, to max-out all the visual effects and see how my average system (Pentium-D 2.8ghz, 1gb ram, some old bog standard nVidia graphics card) fared.

In short, amazing. not any slow-down at all, coming from Vista this is a huge suprise and I hope Microsoft are taking note!

I also very much liked the idea of multiple workspaces, I know there are third-party applications for this on Windows (as there are for most things,) this really is integrated into the system and works fantastically. Along side that is OSX style searching is interesting and it gets better when I installed the reccomended Beagle application.

In conclusion...

In conclusion Ubuntu is very much already matured and ready for the mainstream, with some slight compatibility issues fixed I'd definitely use it on it's own but right now I am going to be dualbooting for those applications I still need. I will probably be spending the most time in Ubuntu though.

To close, here are some quick pro's and cons of Ubuntu:

Pros:

Extremely fast! no sluggishness ever and it starts up quickly.

Many, many free quality applications available.

Great community and a huge amount of support documentation.

Easy to use and most things are ready out of the box.

Cons:

Incompatibility.

Some confusion to be experienced by switchers from Windows.

Screenshots to come.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Srsly

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  Shetland said:
After a week with Ubuntu, I present my views, good and bad on using it as a primary operating system.

Background

I have always been a Windows user, not because I am some Microsoft zealot but simply because it was always 'there'.

Recently my installation of Vista was damaged and I was forced to use an Ubuntu Live CD to gain access to my files as I had no Vista installation disc at hand and Windows XP doesn't support my SATA hard-drive natively.

I had always wondered about Linux, It seemed like a nice idea, with its open-source attitude but I always looked at it as hard and fairly useless due to incompatibility.

Lol couple of days ago i had exactly the same problem!

It was sunday and the stores were closed so i couldnt buy a floppy drive for sata drivers lol. I had backed up everything so i decided to just install it, version 7.04 btw.

Everything worked out the box, except for my video card drivers, i went on irc for help, asked on the forum but the generic driver application said i didnt need drivers, but they really werent installed, so i tried to figure out how to install but did not managed to do it yet.

Maybe 7.10 is much better but i find the install process of applications quite annoying, im not a fan of the terminal, but i think that if i spent a couple of months with it everything becomes natural.

Will i ever make the switch to Linux? Well its free, it has most of the basic applications you need and more. I dont really game that much, so actually i can do almost everything Linux(video editing is dead on linux). Its more stable and invurenable to viruses/etc. But for daily use, i prefer graphical installers, im sure after a while the commands will be a piece of cake but you need really take time to learn it, and i know better ways to spent my spare time :) Windows is not perfect, but a lot more time saving to get around with for daily use then Linux, but thats just my opinion. Plus that my favorite software is all for Windows, im not making the switch yet.

But if in the future the terminal is going to be easier to use or graphical installers will become a standard, im sure i will switch :D

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Grand Master

TruckWEB

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The one HUGE thing missing for Linux is something like Apple iLife. A package of application that seamlessly work together for Photos/Music/Movie manipulation, editing and iDVD for burning.

The Gimp is FAR from Adobe Photoshop. No real alternative here but "try" to run it under Wine. They got CS2 to work with Wine but with some problems.

OpenOffice is a nice replacement for MS Office, but it feels dated, almost like running Office 95.... But it does the job.

FireFox and Thunderbird, well, I use them in Windows, they are available for Linux.

The other huge problem I have with Linux is driver support. We are still in a Windows dominated world and you can't find everything for Linux.

You should maybe take a look at Kubuntu, it uses KDE for the GUI. It's a mater of opinion but I find it better than Gnome. But it's only a GUI change, you will still be stuck with the same problems you had with Ubuntu.

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Grand Master

Denis W. Veteran

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Just a few comments:

  Shetland said:

Back to the OS...

This brings me onto something I felt Ubuntu did very well with, setting up and installing everything I needed. After I had sorted out my files and ordered them properly I went to play a music file to relax for a bit, but I was presented with a codec error. Unlike windows though, within seconds it downloaded the codec for me and had installed it without any fuss. Impressed, this stirred me to have a look at what else there was to install, so I popped into the add/remove programs area and found thousands of great applications which all went in with ease and within a few minutes I had practically everything I ever had on windows (with the help of some community alternatives)

This surprised me the first time I tried Ubuntu. Back in openSuSE I remember having to hunt down the right server to add to my list of repositories. Despite Ubuntu's stance on free software they make it pretty damn simple to get support for the most common proprietary formats with a software item labelled "Ubuntu restricted extras." Java, flash, MP3/WMV/etc, DVD playback in one click.

A centralized repository of software is, in my opinion, one of the strengths of these distributions with a healthy community. On Windows it's doable but given the amount of software and the mess that might ensue when commerical developers try to knock each other off a Windows software repository - not possible for now. People seem pretty content with "fair" and "objective" or rather, filled with bribes software review sites.

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A quick Google threw Compiz-Fusion my way, this thing is everything Vista should have been.

In a nutshell it lets me do pretty much anything with my UI visually, I think it controls it in 3D too so you're not limited in any way, I can have windows sway when I pull them or whatever, but as I said earlier that isn't really my cup of tea. I enabled a few bits-and-bobs and everything was great.

If I recall correctly Compiz Fusion comes bundled with Ubuntu 7.10. Best thing is it works just by a simple click in the Appearance panel. If it doesn't work, simple: it spits out an error message and keeps Compiz Fusion disabled. I could count the amount of times Compiz Fusion fell apart on openSuSE where the window decorations refused to show.

Oh and there's a cool Compiz Fusion settings manager... search for something like "Compiz Config" or something. Gives you a buttload of options to play around with.

As for your sound issues, I'm not sure about Jack but I thought ALSA was the default for handling audio?

Anyways, good review.

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