When I come home tonight, I will have a freshly installed version of Ubuntu as my operating system. I will have a clean drive that I can organize. I will have a functioning CD player.
But mostly, I hope, I shall be done with Windows.
It will be nice using an OS that assumes I have a brain again.
I haven’t reached a point where I’m giving up on Windows by any means, but after reading up on the recent report on Vista’s draconian DRM enforcement and system hobbling, there’s no way in hell I’m going to switch to Vista any time soon. It isn’t that I have anything it’ll catch, it’s that the protection itself practically hijacks the entire system and degrades audio and video quality and system performance.
I find it ironic that a product named “Vista” makes “premium content” (DVDs) slightly fuzzy-looking. I’ll keep my XP, thanks all the same Mr. Ballmer. Hope Vista tanks.
I just posted to say I love ubuntu! I still use XP, but pretty much only for gaming. When they port EQ2 to linux I’m done with Microsoft. I’ve got three boxes and a laptop using ubuntu, Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office. Well the laptop is dual boot, and it was a bitch to get (almost) everything working, it still doesn’t shut down properly.
Congrats and happy computing!
Well, I’m back. Hubby had some problems hardware wise, but I think it’s my system honestly. He is now severely disappointed that my first foray was here. But I wanted to let you know that I didn’t drop off the face of the earth.
So far so good. I like the email program and Firefox, which I adore, seems to run correctly. I do despise Windows monopolistic BS when it comes to browsers and well, everything.
Come on in, the water is fine…so far. 
I’ve been reading up on this Ubantu, and have been pondering giving it a shot. Tell me though, as I am mostly a gamer on my computer: Is there a simple way to make games work? I mean, if I’m going to have to set up a duel boot system, I don’t want to have to reboot every time I want to play a game. However, if there is some sort of ‘emulator’ that’s easy to use, that might be different.
WINE Is Not An Emulator.
Wine is, however, a reintepretation of the windows system calls.
Here’s a good guide for one game… and Nvidia drivers. You may have an ATI card, there’s ways to get them running too. Not too different.
http://www.gameamp.com/guide/viewGuides/330.php
My husband says that emulators typically don’t play games like that. There are games that are ported to linux, but that is by no means the standard.
Dual Boot is the way to go according to him. It does require a reboot, he says it’s cake. The advantage he says is that if you just use windows for the gaming, you can totally tweak the windows system to focus on playing your games. Turn off all the unneccessary crap/services/features.
I am not a gamer, he is and we are both learning about Ubuntu, but he does prefer the dual boot system for this reason.
I’ve been a long time supporter of Ubuntu. I’m a Windows user for now, but once I move away from my desktop and purchase a laptop, it will be quickly set to dual boot and allow me to exist in the Ubuntu realm. I’ve moved away from most things which require the Windows world so Linux is in the future…
– IG
Been Ubuntuing for a few months now (longer if you count dual-booting, before the HD crashed and burned) and I am more than happy with it.
A couple of minor problems remain.
Dapper (6.0.6) was fine with the camera but wouldn’t recognise my iRiver player which was purchased solely because it plays Ogg Vorbis. (Nothing much else recognises this player, it seems)
After installing Edgy (6.1.0) it recognises the iRiver but thinks it is a camera and doesn’t know what the camera is (just sees it as an “object”) although I can drag pictures from it onto the HD.
Also in Edgy the Unicode system is broken and I can’t generate the unicode special characters from the keyboard. Dapper was fine with this.
All of this I can live with and I’m confident that these minor glitches will be resolved in the fullness of time, the system is very quick and stable. I prefer the look and feel of it to Windows too - there are so many options for tailoring it to one’s own specific requirements I imagine no two installs look the same.
Messing around and pushing buttons to see what they did, I cleverly managed to completely trash the filesystem (twice) last week. Reinstalling was so quick and painless compared to Windows.
Has to be said that I don’t do games so couldn’t care less how it handles them, or not.
I installed Ubuntu onto my laptop several months ago. A week ago, I reinstalled Windows XP on it.
Linux has come a hell of a long way, but I don’t think even Ubuntu is quite ready for the desktop world yet. After having some problems, I visited their forums. What they claimed was a simple walkthrough consisted of several cryptic commands on the command line, usually involved compiling something, always involved editing some configuration file, and often didn’t work. Also, the interface seems oddly sluggish. On the same hardware, Windows XP seems noticably snappier.
I definitely like how easily Ubuntu installed. I loved how quickly it recognized my hardware. Sure, it wasn’t as slick in its hardware detection as Windows, but it’s not bad at all in that department. For browsing the web, sending email, and writing the occassional document, it’s great.
For anything else, you’ll be visiting the command line constantly, and editing configuration files, and almost certainly compiling things. At the very least, you’ll have to quest for a way to get video and audio to work properly. (This is not a technical issue so much as a legal issue, but of course it becomes a technical issue for the user when they attempt to remedy the gaping hole in system functionality.)
I also attempted to get World of Warcraft to work through WINE. I was assured by countless forum posts and tutorials and help guides scattered around the Internet that this was easy to do, if you only followed the simple steps. After spending what probably amounts to a total of 10+ hours fiddling with crap to get it to work, I gave up. Not only did none of the guaranteed-to-work guides actually work, attepting to run WoW.exe through WINE crashed my system. I had to log in again after each attempt, which slowed things down considerably. (The truly sad thing is, I don’t even play WoW anymore. I just wanted to prove to my friends how great Ubuntu was by showing off how it could run Windows programs as well as Linux programs. sigh)
In short, if you don’t ever want to tinker with your system and just want to browse the web and such, Ubuntu is just fine. If you want to tinker with your system occassionally, do not get Ubuntu (or probably any other Linux). If you want to tinker with your system constantly and, in fact, rarely do anything else, get Ubuntu (or probably any other Linux).
I think this is a bit unfair. Linux is built so that those who want to really tinker with the software for their system can do so. Your issue is that it requires a bit more know how than Windows.
– IG
I installed some highly touted flavor of Linux called Knoppix about 2 years ago, and my experience was that it was wildly overrated. In graphical desktop mode it was just as big a resource hog as windows, and ran just about as sluggishly. I left my “Golly isn’t it fun to tinker with the OS” days behind in the late 80’s & early 90’s. XP has it’s annoying aspects, but it’s highly stable in most circumstances and most things work with it. These days 90% of my PC work is net based and XP is “good enough” for that.
I’m certain the reason my husband is such a big fan is because of the customization fiddly bits. His windows dissolve into flames, when you move a window it “couches” as it lands (like the window is falling into a comfy sofa) and god knows what else.
Typically I avoid his system like the plague because he is colorblind so he usually has a dramatically painful color scheme for folks who enjoy a normal spectrum and he has so many widgets, passwords, monitors and systems that who knows what I might encounter when I wiggle his mouse.
I was looking to fix my system as it had become horridly unstable, a complete wreck and a pain in my ass, so I started backing up my system (stop crashing when I try to create a folder Windows) and had to use his to back it up to. Ohh, wow. Even with all his fiddly bits I really liked how the OS worked.
I used to run an Internet Service Provider and we had several Linux boxes that handled the bulk of the ISP’s functionality and we did default to linux-based hosting over Windows unless the customer could give us a really compelling reason to put it on an NT box. We tended to use Windows systems on our desktops but we had terminal windows open all over the damn place to access the systems. While back then, some things were so much harder to do in linux systems, anything really useful was done on them.
I am the type of person that likes to mindlessly browse the web (no offense intended, as this is my default window that opens) and play solitaire, but I do like my system to work. When I want to do something, I want it to work. I don’t like having to put up with stupid crap when doing it. An example: Every time I open excel, it has this stupid window on the right side, so my file isn’t as big as it should be, I’m sure I could figure out where I unselect that, but IMHO, I shouldn’t have to tell my computer not to be a pain in my ass.
I do not like the stranglehold that Microsoft enjoys. I understand that they made an OS that virtually anyone could use, more power to them. I also understand that any company having the kind of power over what information we get to see is a bit unnerving at least and pathologically unhealthy at worst.
So, to sum it up. I’m trying it for several reasons. I hope I’ve shed some light on the why, so maybe someone else will take a moment and give something else a shot.
*Disclaimer: My husband installed it, I probably would have been lost, or taken much longer. He also wants me to let you know that if you have an existing windows system, you can install Ubuntu right over it and it will very easily create a dual boot system.
Happy New Year
Actually, you probably would have done just fine. Installation is one area where Ubuntu is top notch. When I installed it on my laptop, I used a LiveCD. You just pop the CD in the drive, reboot, and boot up from the CD instead of the harddrive. If you decide you like what you see, you can just click an icon on the desktop and it installs on the harddrive. It’s arguably even easier than installing WindowsXP.
Knoppix’s strength isn’t really in that it it’s a “highly touted flavour of Linux,” but rather that it can be put on CD and run “live” – that is, you can run Linux right from the CD without ever having to install it. It was in most other respects just your average KDE-desktopped Linux. Run live from CD, it’s pretty slow because it doesn’t have the benefit of your hard drive’s speed to work from.
I installed Mandrake 9 in a virtual machine some time ago. It was interesting to play around with, but I’d have to agree that if there’s some hardware that’s not recognized, installing the proper drivers can indeed be pretty confusing and cryptic if you aren’t familiar with a Linux command shell or working with Linux from an admin’s side. I was fortunate in being pretty familiar with TCSH and working from a shell, but I’d never been on the admin side of Linux, so it was a bit of an education installing the daemon and stuff. I could probably get used to having to compile certain programs and work at the admin level from the shell, but it would take some and would rely pretty significantly on my techie/programmy background before I could tool around like a pro.
Plus, there are way too many programs I run under Windows that you can’t get on Linux (at least, not of the same caliber) so it’s unlikely that Linux is in my immediate future. Perhaps Vista and its heavy-handed, system-crippling DRM will convince enough people to flee the platform such that Linux will begin getting much more of the higher level support that it needs to begin its journey down the road to becoming a competitive OS. That would be a day I’d really like to see.
So far so good. The only problem so far is that I had a call screening program and I can’t find an equivalent. My daughter will still be on windows, so I’ll hook it to hers.
I did an update yesterday that broke me until I restarted, but overall, it has been a very pleasant experience.
I’m a dual-booter, spending about an equal time on either side and drifting gently in the direction of linux. I don’t think I will be upgrading to Vista on any machine that I actually own or will purchase in the future.
I have been experiencing a little trouble getting the applications I want to all cohabit on ubuntu, even though they are all Linux native apps and are all in the default repositories, but I haven’t really tried all that hard - the same apps have Windows versions, so a couple of tasks still get done there.
Within the last few days I installed Debian “etch” onto another partition on my hard drive. After a little bit of tinkering, web searching, and asking around I got this install to the point where I can do everything I can do on Windows, except games (which is why I still have windows install. The only reason really)
If anyone is interested I could write up a post-install guide for Debian. I’m sure it could make someone’s day much easier.
Have you tried the forums for help with a call-screening program?
They are usually quite helpful and quick.
I used to think that way - it seems so nice, so clean, so free of encumberances. And Ubuntu itself is easy to install. (Actually, I’ve never had problems installing any flavor of Linux - but then, I’ve also never had problems installing Windows, either.)
Then, I’ll need to install some piece of software onto it … and I find that among the “encumberances” that I was now free of were minor things like “lists of dependencies,” “testing,” and “documentation.” “Human Computer Interaction”?ha.
So, after spending days tracking down error after error after error and still not getting something running - I’d switch back to the system that thinks I was an idiot but manages to install and run in under 5 minutes and all I have to do is click “yes” a lot. Sad enough on Windows programs - but this also happens equally as frequently with programs originally designed for and intended to be run on Linux.