It’s time to tell you World about my experience using Linux and lately Ubuntu Edgy and, since begin of February, Ubuntu Feisty. I don’t want to pay 800 CHF to change to Vista, so maybe that’s why I’m trying to seduce you to avoid M$ Windows Vista and come to wonderland Ubuntu, for FREE. The latest version of Ubuntu is Feisty and is still a testing version. To anticipate a little bit, I had no serious problems using this version, as long as every 12 hours there are updates which destroyed any problems. Until now, I used Windows for my important tasks, like writing papers, mails, managing my finances and creating homepages. This will definitely come to an end now. I will stay with linux. I tested Linux for almost a year starting with Fedora Core 5, 6, OpenSuse 10.2 and in between always Ubuntu. I will stay with Ubuntu. Everything I need, it’s on my OS now. Maybe one day, I will kick the Win XP off my PC forever.
Lets start with the negative side of my Linux journey. The most of the problems I had had with Linux, was to make some hardware run on my HP dv5289ea notebook. I can say, it was just at the beginn with Fedora 5 with the driver for the WLAN module and the volume keys of the notebook. With Ubuntu these problems disappeard. And with Feisty, the NetworkManager Applet is installed by default and the WPA-PSK secured WLAN is found on first start. I wont miss it again.
The second hardware problem was my Brother network printer. But I know now, it was more an administration problem than an Linux issue. The rich Internet documentation and community heleped a lot to optimize my system.
Like i said already here, I can use Dreamweaver with Ubuntu for creating my webpages, which was my deepest concern about switching to Ubuntu. Well, it works. And it works fine.
I’m using OpenOffice in place of M$ Office. For me, it works as well as the commercial verison by M$. A consideration of using M$ Office could be the potential conditions of your employer. But IMHO, the knowledge of OpenOffice will be suficient for the most employers, because it’s quite similiar.
If you are missing the funny graphical gimmicks from Vista, you don’t need to. With Beryl, you will have a lot of fun too. Some of the tools, are really useful even for the daily work on your pc.
Are there other reasons why you will still stay with M$? My recommendation is just to give Linux a chance. Try it!