DISQUS

Another Url, Another Planet: Spotlight On Ubuntu: Why I Love Karmic Koala

  • Andy C · 2 months ago
    I always like to hear people's personal experiences of how, what, why and when they chose Linux (or any software for that reason) or maybe why they didn't.

    On Windows, I also got sucked into shelling out good money for commercial anti-virus packages (and subsequent annual updates) by the fear, uncertainty and doubt and eventually ditched Norton Internet Security after I realised it was killing my machine.

    I have to say after a couple of weeks running Mint 7 (but longer using Linux servers), the first thing that struck me was that everything worked - out of the box. My Wireless card, my printer, my wireless mouse, my scanner - everything. No need to hunt down for that driver CD. No need to find the Canon driver from the Web site. It just worked.

    Secondly, the sheer wealth of high quality free software available on Linux is genuinely staggering.

    Also, it is so easy to find and install the software compared to Windows. It literally is a one-lcik operation. That is a much underrated feature IMHO.

    The only (very slight) disappointment is the boot time (and I know Karmic has supposed to have attacked this area so I await Mint 8 with interest). My 5 year old PC starts up and renders the desktop in about the same time as Windows XP. In fact, when I recently re-installed XP clean, Windows was probably quicker. That surprised me.
  • David Marsden · 2 months ago
    Boot time isn't much of an issue for me as I leave my home PC on all the time unless I'm away, of course.

    At work my Ubuntu system boots up pretty quickly, but so do the Windows machines. The iMac we have is easily the quickest, though!
  • Andy C · 2 months ago
    Oh yeah and another thing. I am a great one for checking out the competition. Unless you do I don't see how you can assert X is better than Y but I genuinely surprised to see you running Windows 7 in a VM.

    Did you shell out good money for that ? Did you acquire it from a dubious source (just for evaluation purposes you understand) Do you have other Windows dependent folk in your household ? What ?
  • David Marsden · 2 months ago
    Not sure I understand the X is better than Y bit.

    Yes, my copy of 7 is for, er, evaluation purposes only (crap, now I have to blog about that, too? Actually, it's a big improvement on Vista, lol). I do have a Vista Home Premium license that came with my new PC when I got that a couple of years ago. Vista HP, as I think is pretty well documented all over teh interwebz is a dog, though. Don't see why I should shell out again. (If you want an invite to http://www.xtremespeeds.net/ DM me). My wife uses Ubuntu on her laptop and even though she has the dual-boot option of Vista, she is literally too terrified of it to use it.

    As I'm able to work from home one or two weekdays (not to mention evenings and weekends) I do need to use Windows as our accountant uses VT (http://www.vtsoftware.co.uk/tranplus/index.htm) - doesn't work under WINE. Also, I wanted to use the Picasa Movie Maker feature to make my old band's YouTube video (which didn't work - the audio kept stuttering), so I made it without sound and then edited it and added the music track using the fantastic, free and open source software that is LiVES (http://lives.sourceforge.net/).

    The great advantages of running any Windows OS in a VM is that you don't need any firewall, etc, so you do get amazing speed, plus, of course, you don't need to reboot. And it looks pretty, cool, too :-)