Tech - From clunky to elegant

Here is my review of the latest versions of the free Ubuntu operating system.

I have been playing around with open source operating systems like Ubuntu, SUSE for the past few years. The latest release of Ubuntu is amazing.

I have a Acer 5738Z laptop at home. It had a Windows Vista originally which was horribly slow. I have now configured it as a dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. The Ubuntu installed far more smoothly than even Windows!

  • Ubuntu picked up all the drivers. All the hardware from bluetooth, wifi, graphic cards. On the other hand, with Windows 7 the DVD drive stopped working. I had to dig various Microsoft KB articles to finally fix the issue.
  • With Ubuntu, one gets all the standard software for home use like - Open Office, Firefox, Music and Video players, Thunderbird etc. The Spreadsheet tool in Open Office can go upto a million rows. I created a spreadsheet with 1 million rows x 40 columns and system kept going on!
  • Adding new software is easy using the Update manager.
  • On both the GNOME and KDE, there are multiple desktops available (standard feature).
  • There is even a free anti virus (Clam AV) available for the security concious.
  • I was able to load a 100 MB KDD sample data file into R and perform statistics functions (On both Windows 7 32 and 64 bit with corresponding 32 and 64 bit JVM, Weka just crashes, maybe a Weka issue.)
  • Needless to say, other development software like Java, Eclipse, Python, Apache etc are available for Ubuntu and easy to install.

I have been a Mac user for the past 6 years. Except for certain features like Spotlight and perhaps the "cool" factor, there's not much a Ubuntu cannot do. I am finally tempted to sell my Mac and convert to Ubuntu.

Anyone interested in a 6 year old Mac iBook?


 Update (30-Aug-2012): Nice to see my view is validated - Goobuntu.
Location: Bangalore, Karnataka, India

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