Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
After being soundly spanked by Columbus and others, I spent an evening, that could have been better used by reading, installing Ubuntu in a VirtualBox.
My experience so far:
- The first thing it wanted to do was download 65 patches and updates. Where have I seen THAT before?
- My printer doesn’t work. That includes the scanner/digital sender function.
- The best resolution I can get it to give me is 600X800X8bits
- Most of my mouse functions don’t work. With 600X800 resolution, the scroll wheel would REALLY be nice.
- Open Office ain’t as good as MS Office 2007. But I already knew that ‘cause I have both loaded in Vista.
That was playing with it for only a couple of hours, I’m pretty sure I’ll find more issues before I get bored and move on to Windows 7. |
All of those problems sound like limitations of Virtualbox rather than Ubuntu itself. 800x600 resolution, flaky usb (can result in your pinter not being detected at all), the 'patches' aren't just patches, they update the whole system, including any software you might have installed (which is a far better way than hunting down individual packages on MS and Mac).
I agree that OpenOffice isn't as good as Office 2007, but then again, OpenOffice costs absolutely nothing and supports out of the box print-to-PDF and the ODF standard. You win some, you lose some whether propeitry or open source.
My metric for the suitability of any OS is the 'Dad Test'. If my 67 year old father can use it for his basic daily tasks then it's good enough. He had zero problems with Ubuntu, same for Win7 and Mac. There's a lot of 'hoo-ha' talked about Linux being hard and fiddly, but it's no more fiddly for a 'casual' computer user than MS or Mac, they all have their quirks and annoyances.
There's one thing that raises Ubuntu above all the rest, even though I'm loving Win7, and it's the cost. You don't need an expensive rig, you don't need to be paying the MS or Mac tax everytime you want to upgrade.