Hello Ubuntu! I’m going easy on Vista

Today I had an interesting conversation with colleagues and friends about Vista and who all amongst us wanted to upgrade our home computers to Vista.

All of them said they were going to hold off upgrading their home machines.

There seemed to be a few valid reasons:

  • There are still a lot of “unknowns” about Vista.
  • It might have all the oomph but the home computers need to match the oomph.
  • Price. No one wanted to pay 400 bucks (NZ) for only an upgrade. And that too upgrade to the home edition.

All my temptation to upgrade to Vista was tempered after this conversation. And rightly so. That was all it was — a temptation.

However, I’ve been meaning to make my machine dual-boot — Windows and Linux. So that is the project that I am going to undertake this weekend.

I’m going to be installing Ubuntu alongside Windows XP.

In case you haven’t heard about it, “Ubuntu is a free, open source Linux-based operating system that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should “Just Work”, TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release (and with 6.06 LTS you get 3 years on the desktop and 5 on the server!).” You can read more on the Ubuntu site.”

From what I’ve read and seen of it, I am very impressed. I downloaded the Ubuntu CD image file and have burnt it on a CD. (If you want you can ask them to snail-mail the CDs to you — and they do it free of any cost to you!)

Rebooted my computer with the CD and it loads up Ubuntu from the CD! Yes, the complete OS runs from the CD! Very impressive. Once logged in, the user interface was really nice and clean. All applications — video, audio, word processor, spreadsheet — were preloaded and all ran without needing to do anything. (Ubuntu ships with Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Gaim, and a whole lot of other free stuff).

It was a wonderful experience! Very different (almost opposite) from what I had when I installed Red Hat on my laptop a few years back.

Now the weekend is going to be spent in partitioning my home computer, installing Ubuntu properly and dual-booting.

I don’t think I’ll be in any hurry to switch to Vista at home in the near future.

3 thoughts on “Hello Ubuntu! I’m going easy on Vista”

  1. I tried Ubuntu for about a week, then went to Vista. I got tired of tinkering to get things to work in Ubuntu. Seems everything required a search on the forums.

    Installed Vista in about the same amount of time as I did Ubuntu.

    For my home computer, I don’t know why I would install anything other than Home Basic.

  2. You are quite right Dillon. I got tired of tinkering as well and have reverted to XP.

    The big turn-off for me was that I couldn’t Adobe Flexbuilder going on Ubuntu. It is not supported on Linux and I’m doing some Flex development at the moment. So that was it.

    But I’m quite happy with XP for now. I don’t seem to have a compelling reason at the moment to upgrade to Vista, except to pleasure the OS junkie in me.

  3. Last weekend I finally ended up installing Vista Ultimate on my computer and upgraded it to the SP1 which Microsoft FINALLY released. Not too shabby! Nothing compared to XP or Ubuntu but quite a few of the bugs are gone.

    I found Ubuntu to be a nice change from XP when I had used it early last year but didn’t really give it much of a chance to sink in.

    Using the beta version and then comparing it to the current SP1 build of Vista is quite the change but getting drivers for a lot of hardware and finding compatible versions of software is still a pain in the rear end but what can you do?

    I still think Leopard runs best on a PC 😉 w00t x86!!

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