For a few years now, I've always been a bit skeptic about Linux. I always knew that they were open source, free and all that stuff, but there were always a few things that made me not wanting to install one distribution, like the eight hundred gazillion versions you have to choose from and that it will take me a hell of a lot of time to get used to it (also that I hate partitions so...)
Finally, a few months later I formated (to install windows 7) and while managing the HDD, I found this 15GB partition for recovery. Given that I have never, ever in my life used that (in any of my 2 computers) and that I am NOT gonna install vista in Spanish (hell no, the translation hurts as much as listening to a chinese saying “Me gustan los burritos”) I decided to also format that and Install the distribution I heard was most widely extended: Ubuntu 8.10
So got my laptop and prepared my body to suffer an entire 24 hours of formatting, installing (2 OS I had never installed before) and configuring. To my surprise this took like a fourth of the time I expected.
Installation was smooth, dual booting was OK. I had my brand new open source OS in my laptop. What to do now? Check the forums!
I think that thats the thing I like the most about Linux, the overwhelming amount of help you can get online. No problem I've had in Ubuntu that didn't get solved as soon as I Googled it.
Oh, another thing I'm really enjoy is the level of customization allowed, you can change every single tiny little button, image or menu to what you think is best. Windows, a little copy-pasting won't be a bad idea this time.
Overall I think Linux is great but it took me lots of hours to configure, from which I reached the conclusion that they are not made for non geeks. Really. I can't leave my home's PC with Ubuntu because I'll have to go back every 3 days to help my mum out, while any Windows version is easy to work with and installation is as simple as double-clicking a file. Linux, you have a long way to go.
UPDATE:
Ubuntu 9.04 is out, lets see the improvements!
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ReplyDeleteFunny cos i also recently tried ubuntu and some linux distros and in the end i just had to go back to windows. the hassle of installing one small programm or to get stuff to work under WINE was one of the factors making me go back to windows. i mean damn, to install tar.gz or cab or whatever there are all kinds of different procedures required. its very annoying. i appreciate setup.exe a lot more now :D
ReplyDeleteI know, it takes way too long to do stuff that takes seconds in Windows...
ReplyDelete