Seriously thoughtful Should I switch to Ubuntu, or stay with Windows XP?

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

What about Vista did you not like? Windows 7 is really just Vista SP2 with a fresh coat of paint. On the 4 computers I have run Windows 7 on it is less stable than Vista (still much more stable than XP, but Vista SP1 is basically impossible to crash unless you try very hard to do so).

Windows 7 isn't more than a fraction faster than Vista according to my usage and some recent online benchmarks (i.e. all benchmarks fall below the threshold deemed noticable by users).

All the love Windows 7 is getting confuses me...because it really is just Vista with some tweaks. Reminds me of the Microsoft ads of people who didn't like Vista using Vista without being told it's Vista and loving it...

The new taskbar is odd...I'm still not sure if I like it. It may depend on how 3rd party developers code their programs to use it. At the moment any app with multiple windows just plain sucks for me.

Well, let's see, about Vista, here's a rundown of stuff that I didn't like and that irked me:

Heavy ram usage (Win7 uses a fraction of ram to do the very same thing on the same machine)

Menu's were all over the place, took twice as long to get anywhere as with XP (Win7 has jumplists on applications, which are very useful)

Slow, very slow, running on 2gb ram and it still felt like I was wading through chocolate to do anything (Win7 feels fast, it reacts much more quickly, my test of this is to run PS CS3 which was a dog on Vista, and now is very comfortable on Win7)

Annoying UAC, yes I could turn it off, but it still annoyed the hell out of me (Win7's iteration of UAC is far more friendly and interrupts you less)

Crashes (I know you say it's damn near impossible, so I must be the exception to the rule, but I had frequent hard lock-ups on Vista and non-responsive applications. Again, I was using exactly the same machine as I'm using with Win7. Although I must say I have a friend who has no problems at all with Vista, works flawless for him)

The new dock/taskbar I like. It's got the same level of functionality as the OS X variant, but it's far less annoying or distracting.

Yes, Win7 is not much more than Vista Mark 2, or whatever you'd like to call it, but in my experience with it, it's a whole lot better than Vista. I think of it as Win2000 to the previous Windows ME. For me, and I'm no MS lover, Microsoft have corrected a lot of the mistakes they've made in the past couple of years and brought out the operating system that Vista could have been.

Actually I have more of a beef with OS X 10.5 Leopard than I do Vista. I do't know what Apple have done since Tiger, but my machine doesn't seem to like it very much (my ex-machine now, I gave it away).

And Ubuntu continually improves and gets better, apart from wireless, which I've always had a problem with on Linux. That's why I'm dual booting at the moment, apart from Photoshop and Office 2007, there's nothing else I miss from windows when I'm in Linux.

[Greg Anos]

I guess I'm so old school, I'm pre-school. I first started playing with these beasties on a Conmmodore Pet in Dec. 1977. The current level of Microsoft software had reached the "good enough" stage with Windows 2000. But you aren't allowed to get off the upgrade treadmill.

I'd still be with Win 2000, except for some typical whacked-out, Microsoft money-grabbing reason, you can't format your boot pack greater that 137GB. Any other pack in the system is 2TB (the NTFS limit). And, oh yes, virus protection is starting to be dropped by vendors for 2000.

I run all my disk packs in removable cartridges, so I can swap an OS quicker that I can boot. I have packs for ME, 2000, XP Home and XP Pro. I also run Virtual PC 2004 emulator on 2000 and XP Pro, so I can run Win 3.1 and ME on those OSes. But it won't run on XP Home, so Microsoft could sell an upgrade...

I recently started adding up the cost, out of my pocket, to stay on the upgrade treadmill. $50 a year for Anti-virus upgrade, $150 every three years or so for a new OS (another $50 a year average), typically $99 dollars for a major package upgrade every 3 years (times how many major packages you have - say 3 = $300 or a $100 a year), plus the cost of new hardware, because the old hardware can't handle the new software. 2 Gig RAM? 10 years ago, you couldn't get a 2 gig hard drive! So add it up. $200 a year plus hardware.

That's why I'm looking at Ubuntu Linux. To stay on the Microsoft (and Apple is just as bad) upgrade treadmill costs me about a netbook computer a year, and I no longer feel I getting any value for my money. Word 97 works just as well for my uses, (I don't do massively complex documents) as Office 2007's Word, so why pay for the upgrade? And no more of this call-home-activation nonsense. I keep a sterile pack (no internet connection) for most of my packs, Why do I have to break sterility just to make my software work? AARGH!

Sorry to sound crabby, and I can see that for bleeding edge applications the latest and greatest software is necessary, but that's no longer me. So I'm going to try to install Ubuntu in a few days, and see if I can make it work. I need to get off this golden treadmill....

[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:

1. The first thing it wanted to do was download 65 patches and updates. Where have I seen THAT before?
   
2. My printer doesn’t work. That includes the scanner/digital sender function.
   
3. The best resolution I can get it to give me is 600X800X8bits
   
4. Most of my mouse functions don’t work. With 600X800 resolution, the scroll wheel would REALLY be nice.
   
5. 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.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Yes, Win7 is not much more than Vista Mark 2, or whatever you'd like to call it, but in my experience with it, it's a whole lot better than Vista. I think of it as Win2000 to the previous Windows ME. For me, and I'm no MS lover, Microsoft have corrected a lot of the mistakes they've made in the past couple of years and brought out the operating system that Vista could have been.

It's a conspiracy! M$ has to put out a dog every few years, and follow it up with a thoroughbred just so we think we're getting the best available. It's all part of Ralph's upgrade treadmill!

Let's see; there was MS-DOS 4.0, quickly followed by MS-DOS 5.0, then there was MS Bob, then Windows 3.0 followed by 3.11, 95-98, ME, NT, Vista.

Why, it looks like Windows 7 is scheduled to be a winner!

[YGG-]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

[...]One of the reasons I didn't stay with Linux is because I didn't have the luxury of having the time to find Linux equivalents for software that I use a lot. [...]

do you know Alternativeto ? It's a great resource!

[netseeker]

Originally Posted by wodin

1. The first thing it wanted to do was download 65 patches and updates. Where have I seen THAT before?

Sounds like you downloaded Msubuntu.

[Moejoe]

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:

1. The first thing it wanted to do was download 65 patches and updates. Where have I seen THAT before?
   
2. My printer doesn’t work. That includes the scanner/digital sender function.
   
3. The best resolution I can get it to give me is 600X800X8bits
   
4. Most of my mouse functions don’t work. With 600X800 resolution, the scroll wheel would REALLY be nice.
   
5. 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.

[Gideon]

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.

Be sure to install VirtualTools.... it makes everything much better. It's an app that comes from VirtualBox. Instructions are in the manual.

[wodin]

I do have to admit that, not counting the N800, it is much more friendly than the last time I fiddled with Linux. The screen resolution problem is a deal breaker though, In order to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar in Firefox I had to zoom out twice. Now my old eyeballs can barely read what I'm typing!

The Evolution PIM looks like a pretty good alternative to Outlook, but I haven't figured out how to use more than one email account. Maybe multiple instances of Evolution?

[Gideon]

VirtualTools should fix that resolution issue. It's called "Guest Additions" under devices.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by djgreedo

If you stay with Windows, upgrade to Windows Vista. Don't believe the nonsense some people spread about Vista.

I have Vista on my laptop. It's fine--at least as good as XP from what I've seen--but it, and Win7, don't address my core annoyance with MS's policies and the "upgrade treadmill", as Ralph so aptly put it.

Still, I'm going to stick with Vista on my laptop for now since I don't have enough hard drive space to dual boot there.

As far as dual booting goes (someone suggested it), I really recommend against it. What's the point of running two separate operating systems. Just use 1 OS that does everything you need. And if the OS you're running doesn't do everything you need, you're not running Windows, so install Windows.

I'd agree if I didn't have plenty of harddrive space. On my work computer, and my home desktop, I'm currently only using 1/4th of my harddrive, so having two systems on there is completely harmless. And that's the only cost of having two systems.

I could not run a computer without MS Word or that didn't enable me to run all my games.

I agree that overall that MS Word 2007 is better than Open Office Writer, though not in every way. E.g., ever try to customize the context menus in Word? Open Office also has a nice equation editor for those that use it, and Regular Expressions for Find/Replace. Still, I don't use Word much, except for reading/printing things others send me, or lightweight processing like letters. For these, Open Office is fine. Otherwise, I use LaTeX, and while TeXnicCenter is good, Kile is better, so there Linux has an advantage for me.

I also like Calc at least as much if not more than Excel 2007 -- I liked older versions of Excel better.

But the real issue is this: if I wanted (legal) copies of these on my home computer, I'd have to pay for them anyway.

Call me crazy, but I almost consider imcompatibility games a feature of Linux, since I'll be less tempted to spend time playing games rather than being productive. Obviously, I understand why you might feel differently.

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.

It does sound like most of your issues were because of the VirutalBox. I did have to install a few updates right away, but it took less than two minutes. Didn't have the other problems. I did have a little trouble connecting to my network printer on Ubuntu, but the problem was with Canon's proprietary driver. I got it working though. Still, it's true that Canon couldn't get away with putting out a crappy driver for Windows, since there would be too much backlash. But that's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: "Let's all not use Linux because not enough people use Linux." I'd rather try to defeat the prophecy.

Anyway, playing around with Linux is fun. Plus, now I understand the joke behind this cartoon:

[Polyglot27]

Here is my experience with Linux. Last summer my desktop running Windows XP suddenly refused to see out home network and stopped me from using the Internet altogether. Early this year I decided to put Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on it as a dual boot system.
As soon as it booted into Linux it recognised the network and I could use my broadband connection again. A few weeks ago I bought a netbook because that was the only way to buy a computer with Windows XP. After all I have read about Vista from the press and heard from people using it around me, I had no wish to go near it.
Now, my conclusions: Yes, it is user friendly. Plus, it boots up really fast and I use it all the time now to do my cloud computing through Firefox and Google.
I still use XP because there are two pieces of software that I really like and which has no Linux equivalents yet. Free Commander for handling files and FastStone Viewer for digital photos. I used to use Irfan Viewer and XnView which are both very good.
By the way I am over 65 and not a computer expert. If you are wondering, I used an old laptop running Windows 98 to connect to the net until I installed Ubuntu on the desktop.

[Greg Anos]

Just went two rounds with Mint Linux Gloria RC1. It won with a straight K.O.

Spend a hour downloading an iso image. Doc says I have to burn an ISO CD and boot from it.

I don't have any CD burning software. I haven't burned a music CD in two years, and never burned a data CD. (Remember my comment about removable packs? My backups are mirror packs...) When I need simple removable storage, I use a SD-HC card. Load ISO to a SD-HC.

Besides, this is going on a EEE PC (901-HA, to be precise, XP and a 160 hard drive.) It doesn't have an optical drive!

Boot the system with the RAR software on it. Unpack onto the chip. Try booting off chip. No dice. Try running the install software. It installed one piece of software and then hollers for the internet. I deliberately don't have the internet enabled on that machine, for any OS. Won;t go any further. Drop back 10 and punt.

Unix is a real friendly operating system. It's just real picky who it's friendly with...

Now maybe if I ever got it installed, I might like it. But so far, I haven't got it high enough to crash....

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Just went two rounds with Mint Linux Gloria RC1. It won with a straight K.O.

Spend a hour downloading an iso image. Doc says I have to burn an ISO CD and boot from it.

I don't have any CD burning software.

So use an USB stick installation method then. Or something else that is suitable for your hardware.

[Patricia]

All of which seems to demonstrate that there is no single solution that will suit everybody. Time to let a thousand flowers bloom...