Personally I do NOT Agree Pablo Richie in this Case. Most of the Time I do agree with him, But this time I don’t. Why? Because With Windows Vista having Spyware built directly into the OS, it makes having a private IM very difficult. Ubuntu Has Always been extremely easy to Work with, and I think that if he tried it for just one minute that he would love it as well. Infact Here is a Link to download the Newest Ubuntu Available, and I want everyone to try this out on there computer, you don’t have to install it, you can run the trial OS Directly off the CD. Try that With Windows, oh Yeah that’s right, YOU CAN’T!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD UBUNTU FOR WINDOWS.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD UBUNTU FOR MAC.

Monday, June 2nd, 2008
by Pablo Richie

So you want to get with the “cool” crowd, drop Uncle Bill’s operating system, and switch to the very free and completely open source alternative Ubuntu Linux.

Here’s five reasons why you should think very carefully before even attempting that installation:

1. Applications: Despite what your friends may have told you on IM or chat, compatibility with popular software applications is not great. Sure it is possible to get your copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 to boot up using Wine, albeit very slowly, but it’s far from perfect. Various options will not work properly - such as utilizing special effects, plugins, inputting text and color tools. You know, all those powerful tools you need to achieve professional results. The same applies to other productivity software like your expensive copies of Dreamweaver and Fireworks. And don’t get me started on Gimp. It’s a nice free toy for photo manipulation and editing graphics - but it’s about as comparable to Photoshop as is Microsoft Paint.

You also get to miss out on the joys of playing with the updated versions of your favorite software when new versions are released. These updated applications might work later of course using WINE, but you’ll need to wait until some hobbyist programmer has a chance to find a way to get the latest and greatest thing to simply boot up and take home the acclaim of the Open Source community. And working Windows software in Linux has a whole other meaning to the one you might be expecting (if it boots to the welcome screen, that’s enough for the application to receive “it works in Linux” classification).

Now it is possible to sidestep some of these issues using a Virtual Machine. But since it is claimed Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, not just uber-computing-geeks, virtualization is not a practical option. There’s also a good chance your copy of XP or Vista is OEM too, and that almost certainly won’t work in a virtualized environment (so you’ll need to buy another expensive license). So much for FREEdom.

2. The Command Line: Hard-core Linux users love the power of the command line. Tapping out commands such as “./configure –with-options and make and make install” are the essential ingredients to surviving in Linux land. Unfortunately, Mum and Dad have enough trouble just double clicking the installation icon. They are not going to love you very much when you start asking them to open up a command line terminal and tap out complicated lines of code to install that essential software driver or application. You won’t like it much either, once you’ve spent several hours at the command line trying to solve some mysterious dependency problems nobody else has apparently encountered before. And because there’s still no standard package management system supported across Linux platforms, chances are you will run into software that is not supplied in .deb (Debian) format (think of .deb as the Ubuntu equivalent to .exe installations in Windows). Without a Debian file, you’ll need to compile that wonderful software application from source using command line structures.

3. Hardware Support: Very few hardware companies provide certified drivers for Ubuntu or Linux in general. Even those that do provide something resembling Linux support will still serve up drivers containing pages of documented known bugs and flaws - issues that will never get addressed by the vendor. So getting your sound card, graphics card, or printer running close to perfectly in Linux is a game of chance and extreme good fortune. Dealing with driver issues in Linux almost always brings you back to reason #2 why switching to Ubuntu is dumb: you’ll need to solve these kinds of issues from the command line. It’s not pretty!

4. DRM or lackof: There are some people in the Open Source community that champion the lack of Digital Rights Management (DRM) support in Linux as one of the best things about their operating system. After all, these individuals believe strongly in the free exchange of ideas, content and software - nothing locked to any single proprietary device or platform. Those whose entire livelihoods depends on creating great content and monetizing that content usually have vastly different ideas how their material should be distributed. Why should you care? Well you’ll probably become more than a little frustrated when you visit a site offering up protected downloads of your favorite TV Shows, Movies, or Musicians, and you cannot access or playback the content you want. If you enjoy live streaming video or music you will also run into issues of this kind more than occasionally. You should also note your DVDs won’t play out of the box either. You’ll have to Google for instructions how to enable DVD playback in Ubuntu, and Google further for the instructions how to get the menus on your DVD to work correctly too. Constantly Googling for help is all part of the unique Ubuntu experience!

5. Ubuntu just works: Designed to entice the casual home computer user disappointed with his Windows Vista upgrade, to switch over to Ubuntu Linux, this marketing slogan is about as accurate as any of the marketing material you might run into from a large, multinational corporation. Things that don’t just work include wireless networking, graphics cards, printers, scanners, soundcards, embedded laptop hardware (networking, sound, graphics) and VOIP phones. Expect to return to the command line to try and solve these problems - when they are solvable. I still have functions on a Dell laptop that was originally shipped with Ubuntu that still do not work correctly - volume control, contrast and the wireless networking requires system reboots every several hours. On one older Samsung laptop, Ubuntu refuses to install at all.

You may also be interested in the following post if you’re thinking of running Ubuntu on your laptop. In short, running Ubuntu could seriously shorten the life of the hard drive in your expensive laptop.

So to summarise: Ubuntu is not an operating system for human beings. Ubuntu is an operating system for computer fanatics with a lot of spare time on their hands to troubleshoot, Google error messages, and post desperate pleas for help on the official Ubuntu support forums.

Editor note: I ran Ubuntu 7.04/7.10/8.04 on my home computers exclusively for almost a year. The issues I discuss in this article are the very frustrations that led me to return to Windows XP and Windows Vista on my primary Desktop and Laptop. I still love Linux - on my servers. But on the desktop, no thanks. Until software developers start porting their key productivity applications to Linux, Ubuntu will continue to live in the shadow of Microsoft Windows and MacOS.