Despite using Ubuntu for the past 3.5 years, and fastidiously upgrading the the latest and greatest version when it came out (Ubuntu releases a new version every 6 months), I dropped the ball on linux usage a year or so ago. I still updated it on my system (Lenovo T61 dual boot with Windows XP) – I just did not use it regularly.
Finally got a chance to get back to Ubuntu (Hardy Heron, or Ubuntu 8.04 as it is known -> upgraded to Jaunty Jackalope, aka Ubuntu 9.04) – and boy, what an improvement ! Partially due to the better (than the T60 I was having) specs – more Processing power and RAM, maybe. But more importantly, I found the following things which make Ubuntu a much more powerful and serious candidate for being the OS for non-geeks too:
- Upgrade / Install Process – Very smooth, with a lot of hand-holding when required. A breeze to install !
- Run from within Windows, or as a Live CD (I found a Live USB much faster than a Live CD)
- Gnome – has improved a lot !
- Compiz – Extremely powerful graphics, with great window management capabilities. While it has been around for a while, it works pretty well out-of-the-box, starting with Hardy Heron.
- Good File sharing via dropbox, spideroak
- Nice apps for twitter (Tweetdeck, Twhirl)
- Some cool backup apps
- Picasa available via wine, and working like a charm !
- Thunderbird 3 (beta) with *much* better calendaring support (lightning nightly) – freedom from Outlook Web Exchange, and Evolution !
What’s missing :
- Google Chrome ! Firefox gets too slow sometimes due to the addons and stuff. The only thing about Windoze I miss is the ultra fast experience by chrome.
- For the large part, Openoffice is fine – but some docs at work have macros and vba code that does not work – Office is required.
3 Comments
Have you recently upgraded to Lucid (10.04)? I hope you will find that Ubuntu is now finally becoming an OS that can be seriously considered for mainstream use by non-geeks – and Google Chrome can now be easily installed. If you insist on using Microsoft Office (which unfortunately, in some areas, is still ahead of OpenOffice for the moment) then you can install it using Crossover Office.
Good luck and spread the word
@Jonathan Yeah. Upgraded to 9.10 and hten 10.04 since then. Also installed it from scratch on a couple of laptops and PC. It is great, for most part – despite some controversial decisions to remove pidgin as the default IM client, change the windows buttons to the Apple Mac style, etc – nothing which can’t be modified easily. That is the beauty of Linux, and especially Ubuntu
@Jonathan :
Crossover Office does not work as well as the original, for various reasons. Frequent crashes, etc. I try to run MS under Virtualbox on systems with 4 Gig Ram. No issues there.
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Agree reg Google chrome has become pretty solid, and is a very good lightweight browser to use along with firefox (which tends to get bloated as I install a lot of extensions
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