EPTUbuntu Review
Let me just start out by saying, I love computers, simple and to the point. My life would never be the same if I had never had one, I'd probably be a movie star or something. Yet, the innocent days of yore no longer exist, you can't just have a computer anymore, you have to have a frikin' fortress of solitude. Long gone are the days of laid back web surfing and chatting, and upon us descends the threat of DRM and mass myspace phishing.
With the dawn of Windows Vista at hand many of us don't really care (many of us don't even know what I'm talking about). Those who think that you can stick with XP are just wrong, old OSs (Operating Systems) are like pencils, you sharpen it till it's done and you throw it away. XP is on it's last leg of sharpening. Now, you can say this is because it's being outdated and such, but really, it's because Microsoft wants you to buy Vista because, let's face it, they don't get paid to patch security holes.
Adding insult to injury Vista is a whole new ballgame. The minimal spec requirements are probably what turns me off the most, now you may be saying 1GB is nothing nowadays, it's pretty much industry standard. It requires 1GB of RAM as a MINIMUM just to run the pretty Aero interface. That's on top of (if you're unlucky enough) the price you paid for the OS in the first place.
A few months before Vista was officially released, I took it upon myself to try a Linux distribution. I did my research and came up with the conclusion that Ubuntu was the one for me. Hailed by many as the most user friendly distro and the one with the best community support.
You may be thinking to yourself "what's the difference?", well so was I. I began with Ubuntu 6.06, "Dapper Drake" it was called, it took about 3 months to totally get used to and it didn't really suit my daily needs very well (mostly because I had all my files on my Windows partition). So, I used it as my workstation instead, it performed well, nothing that I could tell that was different from Windows at all, but you know what they say "if you do something right, people won't know you did anything at all" or something similar. I was a bit disappointed I expect something huge and revolutionary, it didn't quite live up to my expectations. But then, I began hearing all this talk about Ubuntu 7.04 a knew release known as "Feisty Fawn", so I happily waited.
The day of release came April 18, 2007, Feisty Fawn was released, I downloaded it the first day it came out. It was magnificent, a chaotic meld of functionality and form like nothing I have ever seen before. To top it all off I could run the most graphic intensive features with my lowly Intel 950 GMA.
I would take a whole bunch of screen shots and post them, but that would take a lot of time and really wouldn't do the cube justice. Hopefully this video will suffice:
If you want to see more, simply search Beryl on youtube.
Beryl, the desktop graphics engine that makes all the stuff in the video possible, is available to any Linux Distro and has recently been made VERY easy to install on Ubuntu (via copy paste in terminal). All the window animations you could ever think of are made possible and are not strenuous to your graphics card (just ask my laptop). From wobbly windows to fading in and out for maximizing and minimizing to the extremely useful cube, it works great and makes things look pretty in the process.
Now, despite all the cool features and low spec requirements, an operating system must be functional above all. Let me tell you, it works. As I said before, you will hardly know the difference between Windows and Ubuntu, although the default desktop will be more similar to an Apple computer. Most of the difference lies beneath the skin:
1. Ubuntu, in fact, all Linux distros, are hailed as being extremely secure. Far more than Windows, in any case. Don't ask me why, I'm no software engineer yet. One of the reasons is because it is Open Source, which means the source code is available to anyone to read. Compare this to a book, the more people who read it, the more errors will be found and fixed as opposed to Windows, where the only people that get to read it are Microsoft developers.
2. Being an Open Source software means it's COMPLETELY free, and all the software that comes with it is free, such as the OpenOffice suite, quite a formidable competitor if not sucessor to Microsoft's Office package. Hell, they'll even ship you an Ubuntu CD for free if you're too lazy to download it, it comes with some cool little stickers too.
3. It is far more customizable than Windows, all you have to do is some kernel hacking (not the bad hacking), which I, myself, am in the process of learning. You can pretty much change every technical aspect of Ubuntu.
4. It's a hell of a lot easier than you think, Ubuntu is a fairly mature distro which means most hardware will be already support at install, no drivers needed. If your hardware is not supported however, simply go to ubuntuforums.org and ask, you will get an answer fairly quickly. The entire philosophy of Linux is that it was built for the people by the people, it's like FUBU, except it's for everyone.
5. The LiveCD enables you to run the OS off of a CD and try it out without modifying you own system at all. Setup is easy, it explains everything and takes 20-30 minutes at MOST, and a feature new to Feisty, it mounts your NTFS partition (aka your Windows files) so it's fully accessible through Ubuntu.
6. Installing almost anything is simple and easy simply type into the terminal: "sudo apt-get install [program]" and it takes care of the rest. Updating is the same. There's even a handy program called Automatix that helps you get most things you need such as music codecs (mp3 codecs are not included for some legal reasons that I don't care about), MPlayer (basically a substitute for Windows Media), and TONS more.
7. The terminal is your friend, ANYTHING can be fixed via terminal (the terminal is similar to cmd in Windows), most of the time a fix to even your biggest problems consists of copy / pasting terminal code and a simple ctrl + alt + backspace to restart the system. Don't fear the terminal, you are the terminal.
So, before you go out and buy Vista, I strongly encourage you to try Ubuntu or any other Linux distro (they are all built for different needs for a review of most visit: http://distrowatch.com/). The reason I suggest Ubuntu is because it is extremely user friendly and it's the only one I've tried so far (I can't recommend something I've never tried now can I?).
Don't try Ubuntu with Windows in mind comparing at each and every single point thinking to yourself "How come Windows can do this and Ubuntu can't?". Ubuntu CAN do it, you just don't know how because you've been stuck with Windows your entire life and know nothing different. Don't give up if you encounter a problem, that is not the Linux way, everything is fixable, very unlike in Windows. So, go forth, the dawn of the Open Source revolution is upon us, freedom of information at it's best.
www.ubuntu.com
), but aside from those random customizations, everything was 'just working' by default, including wifi and my ATI card (ati's have had a history of having problems w/ ubuntu)
