Anything Vista/Xp can do, Ubuntu 8 will do 1000 times better…Except msn. PART1.

Been dual booting officially for just over a day now.

Main booting OS is set as Vista Business edition (32-bit)

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardly Herron

And i must say..at first it was a bit hard to get used to, despite having done subjects like 005 (workin with linux), but after a while, i was sooo impressed with how much ubuntu pwns xp/vista visually AND performance wise. It pwns mac to. But mac is just shit to begin with so no surprises there

People who’ve grown up with just using XP/Vista, thus having minimal to no experience with the command line of windows will have at have trouble getting the hang of how to use ubuntu..or any linux distro for that matter. In fact this is one of the main reasons that ubuntu and linux distros are really yet to hit the market of the average user. The difficulty curve for the inexperienced on scale from 1-10 is about..6.

Luckily there are many guides and tutorials and an active community to support new and experienced users alike.

Lets get down to the main features:

Its free: OMFG HELL YEH! An OS that’s free and actively supported by a steadily growing community. Not to mention said OS comes in many flavours, you’re sure to find one that you’ll like

Easily customizable: Plenty of options available to the user, everything from the login splash screen to the menu bar to the wallpaper to sidebar and optional docks can be customized with skins and themes made by the ubuntu/linux community. If you were so inclined, you could even set out and make up your own themes and backgrounds with the included arts software. From what i hear they are incredibly capable programs that even rival retail programs such as Photoshop. Have yet to see how this claim holds up though.

Open source: AND FOREVER WILL BE. Ubuntu and its brothers and sisters, including all the programs you can install from the repositories are all open source. What does this mean? It means these things will always be free and it existing applications will be able to be edited and made even better. New programs are being developed everyday.

ITS PRETTY!: If you think vista’s aero theme kicked arse, then you’re going to be blown away by Ubuntu 8’s UI. Featuring kind of aero-ish menu bars and menus, Ubuntu also incorporates virtual desktops. At the moment Im only using 4 desktops, however, usually i tend to only use 1..force of habit from growing up on a diet of vista/xp <___< ” By simply pressing alt+ctrl+up ubuntu will scroll between the desktops as if you were spinning it on a cube. Dont get what i mean? Heres a youtube video to demonstrate.

If thats not cool. I dont know what is.

Gaming/applications: With the addition of a program called WINE, you’ll be able to play/use many windows games and other applications in ubuntu. Notably you’ll be able run games such as WoW using such a method. However there are a few things that just cant be run. full stop. The biggest of these is microsofts msn 8.5. Or any msn for the matter. Although, apparently it is possible to run older msn’s ..But THERE IS A SOLOUTION. I’ve tried about 4-5 IM programs on ubuntu so far, and by far, the one that comes up heads and shoulders above the rest is Emesene. Although you cant chat appear offline, users will find that it pretty much does the job of msn live.

In fact i spent the better part of today in ubuntu and had it not randomly crashed i would still be using it. Before you say anything, its a hardware fault. Nothing to do with the actual OS.

That pretty much wraps it up for todays sales pitch for ubuntu 8.

Come back next time for part 2