It’s been more than a year since I switched to Ubuntu, and so far I’m happy. Apart from some small details, the experience has been very good.
I didn’t yet get a chance to use Openoffice. A few months ago I found myself needing to create a small table for some homework, and thought, hey, I could use Excel, Openoffice Spreadsheet. Well, that didn’t quite work out. At first I just wanted to write some simple equation so I clicked the fx button… but it crashed. A lot. Getting burned, I decided that I’ll try it again only after the next release.
The only big document I’ve written so far was with Kile and Latex, and I’ve been very pleased with the result.
Another thing: some games crash. I’m not talking about games with Wine, but your regular Linux games, like Nexuiz. I don’t mind the games crashing that much though, it happens rarely enough. What I do mind is that after crashing, X doesn’t restore the original resolution, and there is no ‘easy gui’ way to do so apart from ctrl-alt-backspace. However, this combination which restarts X, also kills my running applications, which isn’t very nice.
After some Googling I came up with the solution, the nice little command xrandr. Worked like a hack charm.
Another annoying bit is the clipboard. It works quite fine – I can copy from the Firefox address bar, and paste in gedit. However, after I close Firefox, the text copied is no longer available! Took me a couple of times to figure out what happened, and that it wasn’t just me ‘pressing the wrong keys’…
All in all, these aren’t that troublesome. As I said, I’m quite happy with Ubuntu, and I’m not going back to Windows any time soon.
Well, I think that working under Linux is fine when your needs are surfing the net, writing some documents and mabye programming a bit (scripting languages are preferred).
But problems begin to appear when you want to run games and other applications that are designed for Windows. I don’t think that wine works THAT well. In that case, using Leopard is great because you can run Windows in a dual-boot mode (bootcamp) or run a Windows application in a seamless window inside leopard using VMWare Fusion.
So, although the gaps between operating systems are getting smaller because most of our work / entertainment depends on the web which is generic and portable because it works on the application level, I still think that Windows takes the lead.
StatusReport: You can also run in dual boot or use the seamless integration with VirtualBox on Linux, too. I strongly encourage everybody to try it. Scripting languages preferred? Why just that, any lang works great and better than on Windows, phew! Greetings from Ubuntu.
So it seems that for me working under Linux is indeed fine… but why ‘scripting languages are preferred’? I agree that writing GUI for Windows on Linux ain’t easy (with C/C++/.NET) but C/C++/Java/… programming is just fine…
Regarding Wine.. I agree it’s still not as good as it can be – it didn’t even run that qx interpreter from my compilation course. However, I did manage to run free IDA with it without any tweaking. The latest version is also supposed to run photoshop without problem (Although I got used to the Gimp.)
I can’t argue much about games. I guess if I was a heavy gamer, I’d fight much more with Wine, or just use dual boot (which is still available for me).