Thursday, August 02, 2007

Linux Ubuntu successfull

I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop for a while now and this post has been a long time in coming. I much prefer it to Windows.
Now which part of Ubuntu's amazingness should I start with...
Perhaps with what came first.
It was free to download the .iso which I burnt to CD.
The live CD checked itself, could check my RAM and booted up with a fully working OS running from the CD. Now I know it is possible to get a version of windows running from a CD using ubcd4win, which is useful for fixing windows. But Linux does it beautifully, you can install programs etc. and apart from the slowness caused by the fact you are running off CD it works perfectly.
After seeing that it worked I installed it so that it dual booted with Windows.
Ubuntu does screenshots better than windows it lets you save them to files much more easily, without having to copy and paste them into paint.
Ubuntu does installing software better than windows the great Add/Remove programs interface actually adds programs which are downloaded from the repositories and so checked to make sure they are safe, the downloads are securely verified. There is also Synaptic Package manager for admin type program managing, and apt-get or aptitude for people who like the CLI.
Of course you don't have to use the repositories you can download .deb or .bin files and install them.
Ubuntu does updating software better than Windows, all software you install from the repositories can be updated through the same interface so no silly background processes like qtask on windows periodically checking to see if there are any updates for one program. Instead one unified secure system, with different user interfaces to suit tastes. And no silly automatically rebooting the computer when you leave it for 5 minutes, I hate that so much in Windows I have lost work from that. instead there is a little icon on the panel that just sits there quietly until you are ready. And it is very rare that you need to reboot anyway.
Ubuntu does file browsing better than windows with easy searching inside the current folder just by starting typing - like with webpages in firefox. nice GUI where am I and navigation which is much easier and useful than just having back and forwards, which it also has. Oh and bookmarks are cool.
There are so many other things that are cool in Ubuntu like the great software it comes with like the Disk usage analyzer and Open office and Firefox and lots of games and a better interface for finding programs than the stupid messy all programs list on Windows.
Ubuntu is just great.
:-)
And there is a new version every 6 months each better than the one that went before.

Now I was going to write this: 19/12/06, so I have been using Ubuntu for almost a year.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't know about the comment "each better than the one that went before".

I've used Ubuntu since 2005 and that used to be true. 7.04 (Feisty) was a buggy, unstable and totally unreliable POS. That's my humble opinion. I've since switched to two different distro's. Mepis for my server and Zenwalk for my older, crappy PC.

I'm looking forward to the new Gutsy, due out in October '07. I love Ubuntu in general, but that last one really blew. 6.10 was a good one as was 6.06 LTS.

Looking at the roadmap for Gutsy, it looks like it's going to be a lot of "nothing new here" and "wait at the bar" though.

-Strixy