I’m working part-time at a local PC repair shop, and I’m actually enjoying myself, it seems that Win XP and Win 7 aren’t as horrible and crappy as the hardcore fans and the Jobsian RDF would like you to believe, Vista still sucks though… (you are pointing out Vista’s flaws, Cancel or Allow)
anyway, many of my troubleshooting steps translate over to the PC/Windows pretty well, although there are more steps involved, that said, I’m beginning to see the potential of a decent tricked out PC with some performance mods, there’s a lot of cool toys I’ve missed out on by being such a hard-core Mac fanatic…
Anyway, i’m on my work PC (a mongrelized Dell minitower) when I find a Ubuntu install CD, so I figure “what the heck, I’ll try it”, I hook up another internal drive to the work machine, set it as a quarantine drive and install Ubuntu on it (9.10, Karmic Koala)
ME LIKEY!
Aside from the menus and such being in different locations, it feels remarkably Mac-like, which it should, as both OS’s are UNIX based, the thing that impresses me the most is that it’s fast, noticeably faster than the Win XP SP3 that’s running on my work machine, i’d hazard a guess that it’s at least twice as fast as XP, I haven’t run it long enough to determine how stable it is, but it should be rock solid, I’ve had no problems with OS X, so another UNIX based OS should be just as stable
I’m going to run Ubuntu for a while to see what happens when the newness wears off
Interesting - I wonder how much of this similarity in feeling is just imitation though - although they’re both *nix -based (well, as good as), as far as I know, that commonality has little to do with the GUI.
Or did you mean that you’re doing command-line stuff, or the feel of similarity is in things like the file system and user privileges model?
Mangetout, as far as the “Mac-ness” of Ubuntu goes, I’m referring to the “look and feel”, when I run Windows, it just feels “wrong”, somehow, I can’t really quantify it in words, Ubuntu just feels more “natural” to me
now bear in mind, I had no knowledge of Ubuntu beforehand besides knowing of it’s existence, I had no preconceptions of what the user experience would be like, wheras I haven’t really been happy with the Windows variants
Try putting Dolphin on to replace Nautilus. Aside from having a dockable terminal that follows your clicking through the directories, it also has the Miller Columns that OSX inherited from NexTStep.
And don’t get fooled by that pretender “Ubuntu Software Center”. Open System>>Administation>>Synaptic Package Manager. That’s where all the good stuff is hiding.
I’m just glad you can run both KDE and Gnome apps simultaneously. I’m running Kubuntu, which comes packaged with Dolphin. Not a bad file manager at all. But the apt front end is some crappy barely-functional app that replaced Adept, which I rather liked. You better believe I got Synaptic installed right quick.
A really nice thing about Linux (vs. both Mac and Windows) is the low number of times one has to reboot after software updates. It’s just not necessary (nor should it be). If I didn’t turn my computers (one Debian and one Ubuntu machine) off for the night, they’d easily have uptimes of months (even running Debian “testing”).
I’ll have to try dolphin – I don’t usually use a GUI file browser, but occasionally they prove useful. Generally, I use midnight commander for the split screen functionality – but one thing it’s lacking is the ability to have one panel be remote. From this article, it looks like dolphin can do it; however, last time I looked into a split-screen with remote functionality (I don’t recall whether I came across dolphin or not), there was very limited support (no ssh, which was a deal-breaker).
I’ve run Ubuntu for almost 4 months now on my main laptop, after my hard drive crashed and I lacked funds to purchase a new xp key to load windows on the spare drive.
I really love using it, my 4 year old machine runs much faster and efficiently than it used to! Only downside is that iTunes does not work with Ubuntu (if someone could correct me on that I would be much indebted.)
Note, this is from a 22 year old library student; I had no previous experience with linux or anything besides basic windows and mac before installing Ubuntu. Now I will only reluctantly return to the windows fold.
To be perfectly honest, however, there were several kernel upgrades in between that time which necessitated an upgrade, but with the server being in a different physical location, I wouldn’t be able to recover, should things go horribly wrong
Ubuntu’s made so much an impact on my daily computer usage, that I’ve given up Windows altogether. I’m only considering using Windows 7 on a new laptop in the future only because Ubuntu doesn’t run the Hybrid SLI engine in the Dell Studio XPS 13. Too bad…
I think I get what you mean - having used all three OSes at times, I’d say the Gnome desktop is OSX-ish more than it is Windows-y.
KDE (the other main choice of GUI) is said to be the other way - more like Windows.
I’ve generally been pretty impressed with Ubuntu and I think it has dragged some of the other desktop distributions up towards more general usability. Wireless networking (always a problem for the non-technical user on Linux in the past) is now pure delight to configure and use.
Software installation on Ubuntu (and other Debian-based distributions) has pretty much always been simpler and more consistent than on Windows.
Not having used it, I’m not sure. From the screenshots, it looks close – but I really only need/want a side-by-side file list. (I suspect one can configure it with just about any view one wants, though – does it work with SSH and not just FTP?)
See…way back when on DOS (pre-Win3.11), I got used to using…ummm…I think it was either LapLink or Lynx. Very handy for certain tasks. More recent, the WinSCP (builds on PuTTY for Windows) interface is also similar to what I’d like, if you’ve seen that.
As I said above, I usually use Midnight Commander (mc) when I need a (pseudo-)GUI file manager. The nice thing about mc is that it’s basically text-based (there is a gnome front-end that’s prettier, but I find it clumsier for actual use). Looking at their web site, they say:
Depending on how closely you read that, it can be a bit misleading; mc works over ssh connections (or other remote shells), but that’s not quite what I’m looking for. What I’d like is one pane showing a (possibly local, possibly remote) directory list, while the other pane shows a different (possibly local, possibly remote) directory list.
Then Filezilla might not be for you. One side is always the local host, AFAIK. The other can be remote or local, but you’ll have to connect to localhost on that side just as though it were a remote machine.
