What's the big deal with Ubuntu?

[Knuckles 904]

Speaking purely out of ignorance here but can someone tell me why Ubuntu is sooo much better than XP? Is it better all around or better for for certain applications? I see everyone raving about it but really don't much if anything about it. So just pretend I'm an XP user and never heard of Ubuntu (not far from the truth) and you are trying to 'sell' me on switching over. What would you say?

[Schot 407]

Number one reason is that it is open source "made by the people for the people". I love the whole open source movement and the fact that it empowers those who haven't the money to afford pay-for softwares. For me it's largely to do with supporting the cause so to speak. More to that is it would be nice to finally break the monopoly that Microsoft has. Microsoft could use a bit of competition to keep them on their toes I think.

 

It would be pretty hard to sell Ubuntu though. Ubuntu and the rest of the Linux family is not quite so user friendly in the way that Windows is. Mostly because practically everything is built for Windows/Microsoft. So while having an alternative is nice it can be a bit of a burden at the start in order to get Ubuntu the way you want it. With Ubuntu there is quite a lot of configuring to do and the way it is done is a fair bit different from windows. Probably equally time consuming in terms of setting up the OS for both XP and Ubuntu but with Ubuntu it's just very different.

 

What I can say that is a real plus for Ubuntu is that it exposes you to all the open source softwares out there. Read as free, haha. I recall while Silearth was venturing through the Ubuntu world that certain softwares he wanted to use would not work in the Ubuntu and because of that he found alternative open source versions.

 

Of course the biggest negative is the fact that Ubuntu can not run all games. It has advanced quite a bit with supporting new games but it is still a bit of a chore to get a game to run on Ubuntu.

 

 

Totally worth a try though. Just to see what it is and know that there is an alternative. And it gets better and better with each new release.

[Silearth 6]

I planned on answering but just couldn't find the words.

 

Yes, there are open source versions of many popular programs. In my Linux experiment I was able to find everything needed to get my work done.

 

But there is more to life than work.

 

That is not to say that I couldn't play games at all; there are some really cool 1st person shooters written for Linux and boy do they run smoothly.

 

That brings up another problem. In order to have cool desktop effects you need to run Compiz Fusion. But in order to run some of the better games You need to use direct-mode drivers. It was said that you could have both but I was never able to get this running on my ASUS V2100.

 

Video seemed smoother on Windows, but Open Office ran a bit faster on Ubuntu than Windows on my system. There was a strange issue with Openoffice Write. When working on my stories, I would be on chapter 4 and then it would keep jumping back up to the start. But what can you say about a program(Free) that exports to PDF? And there is a opensource PDF editor

[gogoblender 3,071]

I was watching as Schot was getting this attempted...I think the biggest draw for me was that it's a competing OS that's not microsoft and open source.

 

A different way of making products, and inspiring to see it it can work... lol, specially as Microsoft says it will bring about the end of the world

 

 

gogo