I like Ubuntu a lot, but this seems a hell of a strange way to introduce someone to it. “Hi Mom! I wiped your computer!”.
Did he really wipe the whole thing, or did he install it dual boot? (do you get a menu of choices when the computer first boots?") If the former, I would meekly and tentatively suggest he may not be the very best person to be assisting and advising you with your computer.
Do you need Ubuntu? Certainly not. Would I recommend it? Probably not, from what you’ve said. Now, I despise Windows as an operating system just slightly less than Microsoft as a corporation, but I’ve become rather pragmatic over time. As I posted recently in another thread – in general, what dictates whether an operating system is good or bad is exactly what the person using it is used to. Most everything else, assuming the system is working properly and is stable is secondary.
A bit off the specific topic of the choice between Windows and Ubuntu, but related anyway – if you want to devote the time to a kind of meta-level view of operating systems, I’d suggest reading Neal Stephenson’s extended essay In the Beginning was the Command Line (full text available online). While he writes of technical matters, he’s also very entertaining (perhaps my favorite excerpt concerns the Hole Hawg, which will give you a feel for his writing).
Like Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, every computer geek should read this. If your son hasn’t, maybe you can score some geek points by recommending it.
I agree with the OP about fonts. Haven’t tried the latest release of Ubuntu, but the screenshots do not look encouraging. I could never get the fonts to look as nice as they do in Windows however much I fiddled. Tried downloading the msfonts package which helped, but still on a LCD screen they looked rough. I concluded that (a) subpixel rendering in Linux is poor and (b) freely available fonts are free for a reason.
I’ve also found screen rendering to be noticeably slower on all Linux installations that I’ve tried (and the one time I tried PC-BSD). Menus, windows and widgets not being drawn quite as instantly as I’m used to. Maybe the X-Windows overhead?
No, you can’t. Netflix’s instant watch only works with Internet Explorer, which only works with Windows.
If I were you, I’d run screaming back to Vista asap. Despite what the 17-year-old thinks, Ubuntu and other flavors of Unix aren’t really meant for the average non-computer-geek person. Lots of stuff won’t work on it, or won’t work without you going through a lot of work to figure out how to get them to work.
It was an ill-conceived idea, but hey, he’s 17. That’s what 17-year-olds do. Just get him to put Vista back on and in ten years, you both can laugh about the whole episode.
Technically, I believe it’s possible to get IE (up to v6) installed in Linux - I even found some instructions that were quite simple (only made to look complex, in fact, by their unnecessary detail). I don’t fancy trying it though.
I am very impressed with Ubuntu as a free OS. But I am not a free ware convert.
As a software developer I have Ubuntu installed at home so that I may tinker on it, but for a non-tech person, I don’t see a need for it. If you wanted it, I would not discourage you, but did you *need *it? No.
I believe your son meant well, but was misguided. Is there a way for you to have him re-install your original OS without crushing his spirit?
Speaking as a techie who has had to deal with bringing his parents into the modern computing age, the operating system that is best is the one that you are comfortable with and lets you do what you want to do.
If you were happy with the way your pc was functioning, then your son, even if he had the best of intentions, had no business reformatting your pc and putting you on Ubuntu. If it were me I would make him put the old OS back and restore everything as best he can.
Linux? Good lord. It took me months to convince my mother to switch ISPs, simply because she didn’t want to stop using her AOL software.
Even with XP, I have to make periodic visits to resolve “a window keeps popping up and asking me to do stuff!” crises. Which I guess I should be doing anyway, she being my mother and all.
Yeah but for the Netflix on-demand thing you actually need WMP 11, too. I could just barely get that to work on my real Windows machine.
Your son should have let you test it out with a bootable Ubuntu CD first. The operating system runs completely off the CD and makes no changes to your computer. It’s great for test driving and getting a feel for it with no commitments.
I think Ubuntu is pretty spiffy but I still use XP on my main computer. Ubuntu is on my tinker box.
That was misstated. I should have begun that with “Unless” not “If”
I just installed Ubuntu as a dual boot with Windows a month ago. When I did so, almost nothing worked (video, sound, touchpad, wireless) so it has been a long struggle tinkering and tweaking.
I have had to do extensive forum-hunting and some console-command stuff so Linux still isn’t kind to the new kids if something doesn’t work.
That said, I now have my laptop configured and working, and love Ubuntu so much more than Windows. It is a very austere experience, and you have the freedom to add bells and whistles as you see fit, instead of having them inflicted upon you by default like Windows does.
There is a wiggly-jello window border add-in that has replaced my habitual pencil twiddling. Now I can be lost for hours wiggling my windows back and forth. Heaven 
My recommendation is that, if you are patient and like to learn and tinker, give Ubuntu a try after you have had someone in the know do all of the setup and configuring for you. If you are fine with Windows and have no driving need for a change, stick with Windows.
Oh, yes. I couldn’t live with WMP11 on the Windows side of this machine - it screwed up video replay in other applications, and in flash players on web pages even.
I bet there’s someone out there working to get it running under Linux. personally, I think we should hunt him down and kill him before he succeeds.
I’ve installed Ubuntu on literally dozens of different computers - including a couple of laptops - since version 5 - it’s certainly become easier over the years, but my experience is that it was never really all that difficult. There was some tinkering involved - but not really any more in volume than the tinkering that is necessary in Windows - It’s just a different kind of tinkering - somehow it feels more serious - mostly because of the way system security works.
But I think by and large, people have a bit of a blind spot regarding the tinkering they always had to do in Windows and thus perceive Linux configuration as something over and above the normal level of system configuration, when in most cases, it probably just isn’t.
Very few people need one particular operating system. Either one will require configuring and tinkering. Both appear to have halfway decent plug-n-play. Both will probably frustrate you from time to time. Here’s the biggest difference:
Linux is free.
Windows costs a pile of money.
The odds are good that when the next version of Windows comes out, many of your programs will require expensive upgrades (as will Windows itself).
I just managed to get Ubuntu installed on my new laptop this week (I tried a few months ago before the new version came out, and it wasn’t detecting partitions).
There’s no way you can ever call Ubuntu ugly—it beats Windows hands down when it comes to bells and whistles (and I’m generally a fan of Windows). You need to go to System->Preferences->Appearance and turn the desktop settings all the way up (they’re off by default). Then, get your son to install the compiz-settings manager and turn everything on, as well as install kiba-dock (I think that’s what it’s called) and use the emerald window decorator instead of the standard compiz one (this isn’t as hard as it sounds :D)
Obligatory link (that’s nearly a few years old, now).
Next, change the fonts. There’s an MS fonts pack you can download from the repositories with all the common Windows fonts in it.
For the record, my parents use Ubuntu at home on our PC. They were completely computer illiterate for the most part and get along just fine. Once it’s set up, you don’t have to do anything special to keep it going.
Did you change settings to optimize font rendering for LCD’s? There’s a dialogue somewhere in System->Preferences that lets you optimize then for different monitor types.
Dunno about the fugly thng - I just updated this machine to the latest release of Ubuntu and something is weird about font rendering in Firefox - to start with, the fonts were too tiny, but even after checking the MS fonts, switching on subpixel rendering, changing the default fonts, etc, it’s still not beautiful. Everything else is fine, just not the rendering in Firefox, as far as I can tell.
Wasn’t like this in the previous version - although the default font always seemed a little chubby, it was not unpleasant to look at.
I notice Ubuntu 8.04 shipped with Firefox 3 beta as the default. That seems an unusual thing to do - not sure why they made that decision, as I thought they had a policy of only bundling full releases.
For the majority of cases, this is probably true. However, a personal anecdote that says differently: just recently, I had to configure a dual-monitor setup in Ubuntu (7.10). It took me 2/3 of a day; unbeknownst to me, the dual-monitor part of the GUI configuration tool was simply and flat-out non-functional. That is, there was no way to correctly configure the setup using it, even though it gave no indication of such. Yes, I got it working eventually by editing the xorg.conf file.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a Debian user who firmly believes that Windows is inferior and will eventually be supplanted by Linux. And again, I think that the common case won’t have issues like that (besides, one can just as easily find uncommon cases in Windows that cause similar suffering). But something like the above is an amateurish mistake – not the dual-monitor issue in particular, but the non-functioning configuration tool that gave no indication it didn’t work. It could have been easily short-circuited by disabling the GUI option. As much as I dislike Windows, I find it difficult to believe that it would have shipped with such a problem.
My understanding is that because 8.04 is a long term release (3 years vs. 6 months), they opted to include the almost-release-worthy version of Firefox. From an Ubuntu Wiki:
Or, as I saw on another Ubuntu forum: "The inclusion of FF3 was only done because Firefox ASKED them to do so. Being that it is an LTS version they were asked to include FF3 as they didn’t want to support FF2 for as long as Hardy will be getting updates.
Based on the thread, I’d say you’d probably be more comfortable with Windows. But there is a variant of Ubuntu called Kubuntu with a much more Windows-like environment. Sample picture here. Just FYI. If the graphics are the biggest thing against Ubuntu – and I agree, it’s very dull compared to Windows and Kubuntu – then you might check that out.
