you Ubuntu?

[maxd]

Hi everyone. I'm in the process of giving Ubuntu a try and was curious if there were any other folks out there who are happy Ubuntu users.

If yes maybe you can tell us when you changed over, why you did it, what you think. I'd be interested in other people's experience(s) with it.

(PS. for anyone wondering what the heck I'm talking about Ubuntu is a linux-based operating system, basically an alternative to Windows, etc.)

Okay, I'll get things started:

Q: When did you change over?
A: Actually I haven't fully committed to the change just yet, I'm giving it a serious test run to see if it will actually work for me.

Q: Why make the change?
A: I've been a WinXP guy for many years but (a) it's getting pretty old and I'm having more and more problems with it, and (b) the idea of Windows 7 or Vista or whatever makes me ill. My wife's new netbook came with Windows 7 Starter and it was absolutely beastly, totally unacceptable. So that was the final straw to prompt us into seriously looking at alternatives.

Q: What do you think?
A: The only Ubuntu I've actually seen and used at all is 11.10, which I understand is the latest. So far it's pretty darn good! My computer is many years old now and Ubuntu seems to be much more responsive and stable than WinXP has become.

One of the nice things is that the primary things I use in WinXP -- Firefox, Thunderbird, TotalCommander, etc -- are all here in Ubuntu, or have excellent equivalents. The only thing I'm a bit worried about is SnagIt which I use quite frequently in WinXP -- all those screengrabs and how-to's I do -- but I haven't thoroughly investigated the Ubuntu options so it's too early to say whether it'll actually be a problem or not. The other big "maybe" is the fact that I receive a lot of Microsoft Office documents in my PAB work and I'm not sure how well those will make the transition into Ubuntu ... TBD on that.

My wife is skeptical because she does a lot of Photoshop and Dreamweaver work for clients and it's not at all clear what the alternatives are in Ubuntu. It's hard to imagine that Photoshop has any real equivalent but who knows, I've been very pleasantly surprised so far.

A few things are a bit klunky in Ubuntu, but then some things are very slick and easy so it's a pretty fair trade-off, at least so far. And it seems to run very nicely on the new netbook too so ... so far so good.

 

[Mousey]

I'm no help as I've never tried Ubuntu. I tried the old Linux eons ago but found it too 'bare' and it didn't work very well with proggies I already used. I'm not geeky enough for the 'out of the norm' OS and programs and apps anymore. Now days, I want something I turn on and use. LOL

I have a netbook with win7 starter on it. I don't really do anything on it much - surf a bit, check emails, read books -- that sort of thing. It's great to toss in my purse for long days in doctors waiting rooms and such. Win 7 starter is a chopped up, bare bones Win7 ... and I really wish they could have come up with something better for netbooks. I upgraded ram in mine to 2g (the max) and that perked it up a bit.

My laptop has win 7 64 bit. I like it better than Vista now that I'm beginning to get used to it. It's faster, sleeker and doesn't seem to be as much a memory hog as Vista, nor does Win7 'mother me' as much as Vista. Vista seems a bit of a hysteric about installing things or running something. (I was able to install an RTG casino on Win7, no problem, but RTG will NOT install on this Vista computer.) There's a bit of an adjustment period, which I would already have had behind me had I used my laptop more. (I can't type worth a crap on a laptop.)

Having said all that, my husband is still using winxp and will not part with his clunky old computer because it will mean upgrading OS. Unfortunately though, we've gone as far as we can go with hardware upgrades and he may be dragged kicking and screaming into the win7 age next year. His old system is very marginal as to win7 compatibility, and really.... 8 years old... it's getting a bit long in tooth, upgrades or no.

From what I've seen of Win8, I don't want any part of it... not yet, anyway ... I think they have a long way to go before it's ready for my desktop.

I'd like to hear experiences with the Ubuntu. I'll be dragged into the touchy screen age kicking and screaming so a non-Windows OS may be the only alternative in future.

 

[maxd]

... my husband is still using winxp and will not part with his clunky old computer because it will mean upgrading OS.

Sounds like your hubby and I are in pretty much exactly the same situation. I know I'm going to have to update my desktop soonish -- it is P4 hardware and almost a decade old now -- but I'm having a pretty hard time swallowing the idea of life with the new Windows architectures. I guess I'm a bit of a privacy freak and M$ has gotten WAY too invasive IMHO. When we booted up my wife's new netbook and started firing up the apps in Win 7 Starter everything was being tracked and queuing up reports to send "home". Play some music, that's reported. Play a DVD, also reported. No thank you! This is what finally gave me a kick in the pants in terms of finding something, anything!, to turn to as an alternative.

I'd like to hear experiences with the Ubuntu. I'll be dragged into the touchy screen age kicking and screaming so a non-Windows OS may be the only alternative in future.

After three or four days of pretty intense testing I can say this: the only compelling reason to stick with Windows is because you (the generic "you", not you personally) want to. AFAIC the ubuntu/linux crowd has more than enough to offer a die-hard old XP user like me and I'm pretty sure I'm going to take the final leap away from Windows in the next week or two.

So far I've given Ubuntu 11.10 a pretty serious test drive and ... it's okay. It's stable as hell and very easy to get into but frankly the GUI seems like it's geared for tablets and smartphones -- in fact some people "in the know" are saying exactly that -- and it's not particularly user friendly in terms of the interface configurability. Things like that tend to annoy me -- I'm a bit of power tweaker I guess -- and after pissing around for almost 24 hours and not being able to change the size of the overly fat Launcher icons, for example, I'm now looking at alternatives. In fact right now I'm running Linux Mint and it looks a little more like my kind of OS. Next I'm going to try Lubuntu which apparently is Ubuntu with a better -- read "user configurable" -- GUI so I guess we'll see what we see.

One thing to keep in mind about all these Ubuntu/Linux variants is that it's dead easy to give them a test drive: pick an Ubuntu/Linux variant that suits you, download the "live disc" ISO for your particular hardware (basically 32 or 64 bit system), burn the ISO, reboot off of that disk and in minutes you're up and running in the new OS. Your home machine -- in other words your Windows environment -- is untouched and unharmed. When you are done remove the disc and reboot and you're back to Windows as it ever was. Pretty sweet for geekazoids like me who want to mess around with this kind of thing. FWIW

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has a nifty little "what do you want? what do you need?" quiz that helps you zero in on a short list of Linux variants that might be suitable.

Anyway, there it is: not sure if it'll be Ubuntu or Mint or whatever but I'm pretty sure my Windoz days are numbered, as in 5 - 4 - 3 ... you get the idea.

 

[Silencio]

screen capture program for ubuntu = shutter

I switched over to ubuntu about the same time I started to work on my site. So almost a year ago, I think.
I decided to start using it mostly for security reasons.
And yes if you have an old computer or even a new one, ubuntu is much faster. It has something to do with calculation speed. Which blows windows away.

I updated to a new version a while back, and now it seems I have to reinstall all my programs. Cause they all act like they have been installed fresh. Every time I start them up.
Which is kinda annoying.
Also I can't seem to find a way to get the 1920 resolution working.
And some programs are still not to my liking, like the audio player, not sure which one I use right now. But it doesnt play songs when I open the program directly. I have to open them from the harddrive, and then remove the other ones in the list or it will jump to a totally different song. Even though shuffle is off.
So small things are annoying the shit out of me, I guess I need to invest some time to customize it all a bit more.
Everything else it great though
Do you play casino games in ubuntu? I have a dual boot installation, so I do everything work related in ubuntu and the rest in windows.

 

[maxd]

Do you play casino games in ubuntu? I have a dual boot installation, so I do everything work related in ubuntu and the rest in windows.

Yeah, the dual boot thing is the way I'm doing it now, will probably keep that since there's no reason not to.

Play in Ubuntu? Actually I never find the time these days. Work + life + personal projects = not enough hours in the day.

 

[Markus]

In my opinion the most important criteria for choosing a Linux distribution is the package management system. It has to be easy to use and must provide hassle-free software- and system-updates. Because Ubuntu is based on Debian it has its very good package manager APT, so in my opinion Ubuntu is always a good choice, not only for Linux beginners, but for advanced Linux users as well. I don't like RPM-based Linux distributions, because I think RPM is just awful.

Personally, I'm a big Gentoo Linux fan. I use Gentoo since 2004 and I'm very, very happy with it. I love its flexibility and configurability and the great package manager Portage. However Gentoo is not a distribution that can be quickly tried out, it needs a lot of time to learn and understand it. But in my opinion it's worth it, you'll learn a lot about Linux in general and you'll experience Linux in a completely new way. Gentoo has changed me from someone who likes Linux to someone who loves Linux.

For playing in online casinos I use the virtualization software VirtualBox in which I have installed Windows XP. VirtualBox has become very good, in my opinion it is as good as the proprietary virtualization software "VMware".

 

[maxd]

I don't like RPM-based Linux distributions, because I think RPM is just awful.

You'll have to excuse my ignorance Markus, never heard of RPM, don't know what it means to be RPM-based. I'm assuming Mint is such?

 

[Markus]

You'll have to excuse my ignorance Markus, never heard of RPM, don't know what it means to be RPM-based. I'm assuming Mint is such?

RPM is a package management system which is used by some distributions, popular examples are: Novell/SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva. I have bad experience with RPM, installing and especially updating software can be very time-consuming and troublesome with RPM.

I have never tried Mint, I have just looked it up, it seems to be based on Debian/Ubuntu, therefore it uses APT, which is in my opinion much better than RPM.

 

[maxd]

RPM is a package management system which is used by some distributions ....

Ah, now I get it. Thanks for the explanation. I can see what you mean, no one wants to be fighting with their software just to keep it up to date and running well. That's no better than the Windows scenario AFAIC, what with it being so riddled with holes and security leaks that it needs constant updates, patches, etc so that at best you have a shaky house-of-cards thing going.

Back in my Uni days I was a hard-core Unix geek, and I loved it! It was powerful, stable as a rock and you could do anything you wanted as long as you knew what you were about. Of course that was before Windows and Apple and GUIs and all that but the experience really shaped what I expected from my computer working environment.

After all these years of struggling with Windows -- I think I started with Windows 2.1 or somesuch -- I have to say that I'm pretty sick of it. Sure, the potential is enormous and it _could_ be a beautiful thing but unfortunately it isn't a beautiful thing, never was, and life was only pretty okay with something like XP. But as the sun sets on XP and the future of Windows -- or rather the "now" of Windows -- being Vista (a turkey) and Windows 7/8/whatever (a glossy subscription to the Microsoft mother ship) I'm done. Windows has seen it's day AFAIC and I think it's clearly time to move on.

As it happens the whole Linux scene is something of a return home for me because it's all derived from Unix. Of course that's reaching many generations back but still, the Unix genes seem to have been handed down and I think I'm about ready to see how being back in that saddle feels in the 21st Century.

Funny thing is the look won't be much different for me because I abandoned the Windows desktop a couple years ago. Since then I've been running the Emerge desktop (

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) and have been far more comfortable with that. So maybe as an "adious" to Windows here's what my system last looked like before I moved on to other things:

 

[Silencio]

wow that version looks amazing.. max
damn, really need to invest a little time myself into it. cause mine looks nothing like that one.

yeah I don't gamble much either, but I have to install software every now and then to check the information. sucks to have to do this in windows.
so will give the virtualbox thing a try, thanks markus!

and about windows.. yeah vista sucked big time. windows 7 is great though. And the latest internet explorer 9 finally has some sort of decent javascript engine. So it's not holding the progress of internet hostage any longer.

 

[maxd]

I'm sure the Ubuntu fans out there are desperate to know the latest news of my attempts to leave Windows and join the happy Linus converted.

Ok, so I finally settled on Xubuntu because I understood it to be an Ubuntu varietal with slimmer resource requirements and (important for me) _not_ using Unity, which I pretty much detest.

"Unity"? That's the default desktop that ships with Ubuntu. "Desktop" is a bit of a misnomer though because what it really is is a smartphone/tablet style interface. I suppose this would be okay for touchscreens and cramped netbooks but as a real desktop interface, especially for tweakers and "power users", it is pretty much DOA. And the worst of it is it's DOA by design: the user is assumed to not want to mess about with their environment so many such functions are disabled.

Well a "disabled" interface is not what I had in mind, so I poked around at the Ubuntu varietals -- Xubuntu uses an XFCE-based interface, Kubuntu uses KDE, and Lubuntu uses ... something else, can't remember at the moment. In other words there's the Ubuntu base and then there's the desktop you put on top of it. The more features and glitz your chosen desktop package offers the higher the resource demands, generally speaking.

As it happens I'm not alone in wanting to avoid Unity. The Ubuntu forums are clogged with other folks having more or less the same complaints and looking for alternatives. Blah blah blah, so I decided on Xubuntu as a compromise: fairly feature-rich yet moderate in resource requirements, as far as I knew being the total Linus noob that I am.

The short story is that I've tried and am now abandoning Xubuntu. It's too difficult to tweak, as in adding widgets and pimping out the interface with things like wallpaper changers, etc. It seems that when they stripped away Unity from the Ubuntu base a thing called GNOME more or less went with it and a goodly chunk of the Linus world is GNOME-facing. In other words I kept running into XFCE limitations which means you have to drop down to the command line interface to fix and patch things and that's not really what I'm into these days.

So yeah, I decided to bail on Xubuntu. It's kind of a shame really because I almost had my Xubuntu installation set up as a rough equivalent of my old WinXP workspace. Firefox -- and the 30-odd addons I use -- was dead easy to get up and running in Xubuntu, Thunderbird not much harder since it could share the same message folders as T-bird on XP was using, etc. There were a few glaring holes though, at least for me. No real equivalent of SnagIt, my beloved screenshot proggy with wonderful annotation tools, nor an obvious AHK replacement, that being the scripting app I'd used to great effect in XP. Also lacking (as far as I could tell) was a replacement for MediaMonkey which I used in XP to manage hundreds of gig of music. Strangely the last straw for me though was the inability to (easily) get an automated wallpaper changer up and running. That and some good desktop widgets like a clock and calendar and resource meters. Sure, there were Linus-based apps that purported to do these things but you often had to resort to command-line installations and patches and fix-ups and ... well that's just a big fat time suck if you're not a system guru which I ain't.

Voila! Adious Xubuntu.

And next? I'm going to try Ubuntu -- which really is remarkably user friendly and stable -- but with a tweaked interface: ditch Unity and use something else. Not sure what yet but at least the basic environmental tweaks should be less problematic because the GNOME thing is all there. In theory.

In case anyone asks yes I did look at Linux Mint. Very promising! But even after several tries it wouldn't install on my old XP box, so no joy there. Bummer that because Mint looked great running off the live disk.

The moral of the story: when you go looking the greener pasture of a new OS be prepared to end a goodly number of days scraping cow pats off your shoes. You may eventually find what you're looking for and can be happy with but it's almost certainly not going to be a doddle.

 

[pmutts]

I tried it a while back . . .

For me, it was just out of curiosity. I was using XP on a Pentium 4 2.6 machine with 2.5 Gigs RAM and an upgraded ATI video card. Drivers were just too much of a hassle, i.e. sound card to make it worth fooling with.

I'm pretty much a Windows person for good or for bad.