Vista to Ubuntu?

[gizbug]

Thinking about it. Curious as to who has and why.

 

[xtknight]

I can't say I used Vista for too long. It just didn't convince me it was that much better than XP. Performance was great but I still felt insecure while using it. Felt a bit bloated and I loathed the new interface.

I don't play many games. When I do need to game, I dual boot with XP (Vista doesn't have good enough driver support for me).

Ubuntu just feels so much more natural for me. It takes awhile to learn and you will have many tendencies to switch back to Windows in the beginning, but after you use it awhile you begin to love it. I can't imagine going back to Windows now. I feel like I'm in a different world when I boot XP (and not a good one, for that matter). I'm often worried about some spyware/virus that will get through even Firefox. Sure I could load antivirus and antispyware software but with Ubuntu I feel 100% secure and plus I don't get the performance hit I would while running active virus-scanning software.

If Windows crashes (and it does), I don't know where to begin to debug it (at least compared to Linux). Yet, I have been using XP for at least five years and have developed a lot of apps on it. In Ubuntu though all the logs are in one place, it's so easy. If something's wrong, you almost always have the chance to change it or make it better. All the logs are very verbose (or can be if you want) so I know everything that's going on. If programs crash, you can even debug them and upload a fix yourself for everybody to use. So far I have one patch in Ubuntu universe ("bip" package that didn't install properly).

Of course, Ubuntu has a few chinks in its armor like the difficulty of installing proprietary software (that I need). Overall, I feel it's a much better OS for my needs. It's more secure, more stable, more organized, and often snappier. You also get an infinite level of freedom with it in many cases (access to all the source code). I still use a Windows XP virtual machine to do my work in Excel and VBA.

The main pain for me in Ubuntu has been getting my printer working the way I want. The first problem was a bug in it detecting my DeskJet 722C and the second problem was that I chose A4 instead of Letter for US printing (that was the default by mistake I think). Word docs seem to print a bit different too from OpenOffice so I keep my virtual machine around for these cases.

My TV tuner isn't supported, either (ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0). What can I say, I'd rather use Ubuntu than use XP with a tuner. There are many tuners supported in Linux that are available to me at reasonable prices but I haven't seen the need anyway.

Everything is so easy to install. Gaim? It's in the repositories. Need to code for python? Grab that right out of there. Or Java, or any of the other 20,000 apps available. If it's not available then it gets more difficult than Windows to install but compiling apps isn't as hard as people make it out to be. You just need to have a good tutor there. Besides you can usually find debs (Debian installer pkgs) of the program.

It's not for everybody but it might take awhile to find out if it really is for you. I have tried and installed at least ten Linux distributions (RedHat, various Fedoras, Mandriva, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu) before making what I'd call a permanent switch. Then I came across Ubuntu "Dapper Drake" beta. I've been using it since. It's also great being in a free world once in awhile. Everything about it is free. You can attend Ubuntu dev conferences over the net for free. You can fix things for free on your own time and make suggestions for next versions of Ubuntu without being anyone special. For once it feels like not everybody is out to get you (this is the 5% of people that aren't). For me as a PC/OS dev enthusiast this is probably 30% of the reason I switched. It encourages you to give back and everybody benefits.

 

[drag]

For at Nvidia at least, and at least for the time being, benchmarks show that Linux is faster then Vista even with non-native games using Cedega or Wine. Of course this is not close being true for most games.

This is only so for Doom3 so far. And I think Quake4 I seen elsewere. Of course for both games they have native Linux versions, so it's really kinda stupid as it is interesting.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=681&num=3

 

[Shawn]

heck no

 

[Hyperblaze]

Enjoy your time in linux.

As for Vista. At this moment, couldn't care less about it myself

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[Brazen]

I tried to make the switch from Ubuntu to Vista. It didn't take; I'm happily back in Ubuntu.

 

[gizbug]

Interesting. Thanks

 

[hasu]

My experience with Ubuntu started when I assembled an old school computer (1GHz PIII with 512MB SDRAM) for my son to learn computers and play a few online flash based games from www.pbs.org. I was completely blown away by the easiness of installation. Whenever I tried Linux before I always ended up with some hardware not getting recognized and this time was not different as it failed to use my wireless network. I googled and learned about ndiswrapper, which was already packaged in the installation CD. In 15 minutes I got everything working perfect. That machine now is very much adequate for our day to day use.

For the latest story: Now it was time to move to 7.04. All I had to do was to run the command "update-manager -d" and answered couple of questions (as per the instructions from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FeistyUpgrades) before going to bed last night. This morning it was ready to remove some old packages and reboot into the new OS. Can OS upgrade be simpler than that? All my applications and data are intact. Only the OS changed! All I could say was "WOW".

Note:I have not tried printing yet.

 

[gizbug]

Is there a list of what will run on Ubuntu? Want to make sure some of my apps/games will work prior to switching from vista

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[hasu]

Originally posted by: gizbug
Is there a list of what will run on Ubuntu? Want to make sure some of my apps/games will work prior to switching from vista

Windows apps will not run on Linux, even though you can run a few of the Windows games and apps in Linux using the translation layer "WINE". I don't think Linux will replace Windows for that matter. Both will have its own market. I use Linux only for home use. For my professional use and other development activities I use Windows XP Pro. I am sure I will move to Vista business soon.

 

[Infohawk]

A show stopper for me is that iTunes won't run on linux.

And of course games. As fyleow suggested, if you have both partitions set up to do almost everything, except one can do games, there's little reason to log into the one that doesn't do games.

 

[Brazen]

I have found some of the coolest games just browsing around the Ubuntu repositories in Synaptic. My favorite right now is "Endgame: Singularity".

 

[tatteredpotato]

Originally posted by: Brazen
I have found some of the coolest games just browsing around the Ubuntu repositories in Synaptic. My favorite right now is "Endgame: Singularity".

I think Ubuntu (and OSX for that matter) make good laptop OS's, because typically you web-browse and type on a laptop and Linux and OSX do that fine. For what I do, theres just way too much incompatibility w/ anything but windows.