How did you use Ubuntu to show off to non-Linux users?

[PartisanEntity]

I would be interested to know how you impressed non-Linux users with Ubuntu? What was it that impressed them? What was the 'ahhh' effect? :)

[maagimies]

By showing them the package management. ;)
When I have Beryl or Compiz installed I also impress them with that :)
And the overall simplicity of Gnome (which I find a rather good thing)

...and by showing how you can download porn virus-free. (lol)

[Somenoob]

-The package manager

-The high security

-Beryl/Compiz and such window managers

[Anonii]

I would be interested to know how you impressed non-Linux users with Ubuntu? What was it that impressed them? What was the 'ahhh' effect? :)
Fire up Beryl. Pretend you are browsing with Firefox or something, and then suddenly while they look at the screen do a <Ctrl>+<Alt> and move your mouse, do not show amused or something, just continue using your PC like you are doing it all the time. They will surely shout "How the **** did you do that?" and when you show them, they will start tilting it all the time. Then show them moar Beryl effects like the water one, the snow, the zoom and the various animations.
I hope you dont have a buggy Beryl, like I do, for maximum effect.

[Xzallion]

I just play games, like Wolfenstein Enemy Territory with the True Combat Elite mod. They say its sweet, play a few games, then I exit it and they are like "Whoa, thats not windows. What is it?"
I just say its Ubuntu Linux, and load up Firefox, Gaim, and Amarok and do my normal stuff, using the multiple desktops. They seem to like the multiple desktops, especially my friends that do lots of research projects. (They also like the ability for firefox to bookmark all open tabs into a folder, wonderful for research.)

After seeing an awesome game, and the fact that I can do anything they can do, they think its a great OS and start asking more questions.

Oddly enough the Beryl and other eye candy stuff usually doesn't do it for the friends I hang with. Its more "Can I get stuff done on it and still have fun?"

[WiseElben]

I don't show off Beryl, because all my friends, even myself, think it is quite useless. I do have it installed though, just to play around with whenever I'm bored. I wow them with my leet desktop, the way icons can be resized (quite amazing actually), conky, and beautiful Murrina themes. As for functionality, I show them how easy it is to search and install software through apt. They also go "ZOMG LEET" whenever I use nano (no vim skills yet) to edit xorg and whatnot.

[raul_]

i didn't......but synaptic and beryl should do the trick

[~LoKe]

Beryl certainly kicked it's ***. Especially when I lowered the workspaces to two, slowed down the rotation speed and added transparency.

[raul_]

conky can also do the trick :) i have all of them! muhahaha

[firenurse4]

One of my students in fire school noticed I was using Linux on my laptop. What got him interested was the gKrell monitors I had running. A little eye candy never hurts.

[qalimas]

I show off Kubuntu.

The usual tech stuff for the people that can understand it.

For normal people:
"check and click install through Synaptic"
"wobbling windows and other special effects"
"tabbed file browsing and web surfing all in one"
"more than one desktop to hide things when people come in"
"you can download porn and music and not catch a single virus"
"the best music player around (Amarok)"


Usually, it works =) The typical guys fall for the porn excuse... but hey, it works.

[BoyOfDestiny]

Well seems like a lot has been covered.

No defragging. Ever...
I don't miss that one bit.

[Delvien]

Mine was.....


Running WoW in linux with better FPS than my laptop while i used to run windows and theirs running windows :P

[macogw]

I have Beryl running all the time, and keep chatting on one side, Firefox on another, music on another, and IRC on another, so I'm flipping the cube around all the time. That means anyone near me while I'm using it sees weird stuff happening on my screen (either the cube, or a window just burned). "Woah! How'd you make it do that?!" "I stopped using Windows." "You don't have Windows on there?　How do you use it then?" "I use Linux. Here, look..." and show them Synaptic and how you can get a whole lot of software for free by marking a few checkboxes. Yesterday a kid asked me how much it cost and when I told him free he did a :-O and wanted to know how to download it. I told him I had some install discs lying around.

[GameManK]

I haven't really been able to wow many people, something always goes wrong when other people are around my computer (youtube sound stops working, or this one time i tried to plug somebody's external hard drive in and it wouldn't work because it was ntfs (or at least i think that's why)).

But I did have a suitemate go wow when she saw the wobbly windows, and she has a Mac!

[Frak]

I WoW kids every day, I am the Server Maintaner/Administrator, as well as the Technology Administrator, so I installed Ubuntu on all of the computers, with beryl installed, so kids love to come to school and start up their computer, plus its safer, and I can see everything going on, little program I made, run alongside of beryl's transparent cube, shows all computers in the school running beryl.

Per day, about 1,500 kids each day, 75 Teachers, which thanks to Edubuntu, can take over all of the desktops, and install everything at one time.

I need do nothing, to impress, I just let Ubuntu do it.

[PatrickMay16]

Here's the story of how I impressed my dad with ubuntu linux.

I wanted to record some sound from a VHS tape, into a format I could listen to on the computer. Unfortunately, my audio cables aren't long enough to reach to the TV in the living room.

To get around this, I took my spare computer and put it next to the TV, and plugged in nothing more than the power and an ethernet cable, and a male-to-male audio cable from the soundcard's line-in to the headphone jack of the TV. Then I logged in by ssh to the computer and controlled Audacity for recording from my dad's computer (which runs windows).

It was a lot easier than moving a keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc over to the TV just to record that 10 minutes of sound.

And it was impressive to my dad, because I could remotely control it through another computer. He said to me "my son, this linux is the future.".

[PartisanEntity]

Hehe nice stories, keep em coming please :)

[Lord Illidan]

Beryl, my leet terminal skillz :mrgreen:, and well, that's it I guess!

[seijuro]

I usually just post/show them the results of

~$ uptime

[Sammi]

I usually just post/show them the results of

~$ uptime
Nice :D

But mostly if you're running a server.

Not so impressive on laptops.

Anyway, I find WoW, Synaptic and Beryl to be the most impressive apps to show most people.

[Mimsy]

I don't. I have two reasons for this, the first one being that I've had, and still have, far too many frustrating hours trying to make Ubuntu do things that to me and my friends is very basic: Video chat. Skype. Movies in one window while voice-chatting in another. Painless and consistent wireless internet connections on a laptop. That's not the whole list, but the most obvious reasons that no one I know would be interested in switching to Ubuntu full-time.

The second reason, that to me is more important, is that anyone who is interested can go online and find out on their own. I show them my desktop set-up, let them play around with the laptop for a bit, then direct them to Ubuntu.com. If anything ever comes of that, that's up to them. :)

I don't see a reason to try to convert someone who is perfectly happy with the system they already have.

/Mimsy

[kuja]

I suppose who it is I'm trying to persuade. Amarok + K3b took my one friend hook line and sinker, package management took another, and the fact that they all got disks for free probably didn't hurt either ;)

[rolando2424]

I usually just use Beryl with either XGL or AIGLX...

And it's enough to impress my entire class (in xgl I used xwinwrap, but I don't know id it works in AIGLX)

[mysticrider92]

Beryl, my leet terminal skillz :mrgreen:, and well, that's it I guess!

Yep, sounds about right. How can you argue with a cube for all of your desktops and windows that act like springs?

[Skia_42]

The fact that I have never had a virus and I have never had a system crash impresses even Mac OSX Users.

[EdThaSlayer]

I guess you have to use major Eye-Candy to show off your Linux system.
KDE is pretty good, but if you have transperancy on the default GNOME that also looks nice.

[Andrew Smith]

by showing them: matrixview screen saver... :)
and also 3ddesk is pretty cool...
Audacity exports mp3 2 or 3 times faster than the M$ one...

[justinlb]

I show them Synaptic, the terrific community support, Beryl and alot of the ways Ubuntu can be customized.

[AusIV4]

I find myself constantly dropping hints like, "Oh, I don't have that problem anymore." Whether it's a computer bogged down by viruses, antiviruses, needs to be defragged, can't find a device driver, etc.

I also run beryl on my laptop. At first I thought it would just be something I'd use for showing off, but I've grown rather addicted to it. The thing I use more than any other is the "Puts" function, that lets me position windows around the screen using the Super Key + Num Pad. It's much faster than using the mouse. I also like the scale function, and the ease of use of the multiple desktops. The other features are fun, but Beryl has some features that are quite practical.

My last bit is MythTV. If I'm on the same network as my Desktop, I can pull my laptop out and start watching live TV, recorded TV, or whatever I want. My Dad's DVR hardware has far fewer features than MythTV, so I constantly find myself asking him "How do you sort by shows?" (or other questions of the sort) when trying to use his DVR.

For more experienced users (my CS friends), I tell them about file permissions, users, etc. and how that makes for better security. I also like to show off the package management software.

I've got more to say, but I've got to be getting to work, so it will have to wait.

[rolando2424]

I forgot to tell... The Rain Efect in Beryl is always a nice card to play :D

[maddog39]

Well I am showing all my friends Beryl and some games (e.g. Wolfenstein) that run on linux.

[FuturePilot]

Synaptic to disprove the myth that programs are hard to install in Linux.

Beryl to disprove the myth that Linux is ugly

[Gerard Barberi]

Show them all the programs, desktop effects, and other things I can do with linux. Then I tell them how much it cost, how I never have to reinstall the OS or clean garbage (malware) out of it like windows.

[BOBSONATOR]

Beryl, Speed of ubuntu, and just the way everything works, its beautiful.

Beryl and Kiba-Dock, reallly stun the class!

[zedmaster]

Beryl, definitely Beryl. I showed it to my mother yesterday, and even she is considering a switchover, and that's saying something! The multiple desktop feature in Gnome, XFCE, etc, had her thinking about it already, but Beryl has got her a lot more interested...

[PartisanEntity]

I actually recently installed Beryl and then showed it to some friends who were quite impressed and ask the usual questions such as "will the following software work on linux?" (in contemplation of trying it out).

Unfortunately I deinstalled Beryl very soon because it is quite buggy on Dapper.

[MoxJet]

My ubuntu actually froze "a little" for some reason using Firefox when my friends were there and they all started laughing and said stuff like "Haha, your ultimate OS isn't as stable as you claim it is", so well there were nothing else to it than to restart, so I did a ctrl+alt+backspace restart and I got everthing up and running in about 15 seconds, and well, that made them take back what they just said. Hoho.

I remeber the days when you had to restart windows about every hour, taking up to five minutes. My poor friends are still there.

Oh yeah, my friend has a really buggy windows computer, every so often his internet won't work, and right now he can't use internet explorer to surf wikipedia, hotmail or other sites he uses for no apparent reason. I gave him an Ubuntu live CD and told him to boot from that, hehe he was surprised that his internet was automatically found and happy that he could finally check his email.

Yeah, dropping that you basically can't get any viruses or spyware is a good trick, and also showing how you can configure your window manager to look exactly as you want, and gdesklets, gkrellm or conky usually impress a bit too. Great programs ^^

[Sammi]

Most of the time it isn't actually Firefox that crashes. Most of the time it's either Flash or Java. But now that Flash has been upated to version 9, it's almost always Java that's the culprit.

[jvc26]

Package manager, beryl/compiz, and the livecd
Il

[Sunnz]

For my 'leet' friends, I ask them to try hack my computer. :D

I then fire up VMware, boot into Windows, and clicking on the virus that they sent me.

When doing a presentation on a projector, I had the slide show on one desktop, and switch to the other desktop(cube effect) to I need to show a demo - it is a demo in a demo lol.

[Choad]

beryl usually gets a few gasps.

and my desktop looks the balls, it really does. such a nice beryl theme/icon theme/background etc.

and i have just set up the "reflection" thing in beryl to look like rays of light coming down and it looks really cool

[demonhunter]

Beryl makes the job most of the time. Cedega helps a lot too.

:guitar:

[lyceum]

I was working on a project with a friend and did not have the software installed we needed. He wanted to go to the store and see what we could get. I just went to synaptic package manager and pulled up what we needed. We got the work done, I took the program off my laptop to save room. He left with an Ubuntu CD.

:guitar:

[macogw]

My ubuntu actually froze "a little" for some reason using Firefox when my friends were there and they all started laughing and said stuff like "Haha, your ultimate OS isn't as stable as you claim it is", so well there were nothing else to it than to restart, so I did a ctrl+alt+backspace restart and I got everthing up and running in about 15 seconds, and well, that made them take back what they just said. Hoho.

I remeber the days when you had to restart windows about every hour, taking up to five minutes. My poor friends are still there.

Oh yeah, my friend has a really buggy windows computer, every so often his internet won't work, and right now he can't use internet explorer to surf wikipedia, hotmail or other sites he uses for no apparent reason. I gave him an Ubuntu live CD and told him to boot from that, hehe he was surprised that his internet was automatically found and happy that he could finally check his email.

Yeah, dropping that you basically can't get any viruses or spyware is a good trick, and also showing how you can configure your window manager to look exactly as you want, and gdesklets, gkrellm or conky usually impress a bit too. Great programs ^^
ctrl alt backspace just restarts X, not the whole comp. Essentially, you logged out and logged back in. Anyway, though, you can alt-f2, type in xkill, and click on firefox to kill just firefox

[IYY]

The Buuf icons did it, and the fire effect in Beryl (which I don't even use). Now my brother asked me to set up an account for him where the fire effect applies to almost every operation, including opening and closing menus.

[Sunnz]

A possibly evil idea:

1, Use a classic Windows 95 theme
2, Start your Beryl thing!!!

And I wonder how Windows fanboy will respond, "Are you using Aero?? But..."

[macogw]

One of the guys I work with saw my "Windows Vista is SPYWARE" background, which is a modified real Vista background along with Beryl. He asked if I was using Vista, and I told him to read the background. He said "Vista can do that." "No it can't." "I've seen it" "No, you've seen the Expose thing on a Mac, and the multiple desktops on the Macs that aren't out yet. The cube thing isn't on a Mac, and Vista can't do ANY of this." When I told him I've never touched virtual memory, even with a DVD and a few other apps and Beryl, he was very impressed.

[Sunnz]

Wow have you got a screen shot of it?

[adza]

i keep reading all this stuff about how funky beryl is going to make my desktop, even saw some screenshots today surfing around that looked.... well sweeeeeeeeeeeet... so, no probs i thought, i'll get me some of that beryl goodness as well!! Unfortunately, i'm having some issues, i followed the wiki intall of the berylproject.org, i think it's installed? how do i use this? I want to setup that funky transparency stuff i've seen everywhere....I think it works because the ALT + [TAB] key works.....

[Sunnz]

adza, you might want to start a new thread in the desktop support forum, you'll get quicker and better response there.

[Next.Step]

speed, security, beryl
mostly response speed impressed them

[mr.farenheit]

where i live most of the people who use linux are past the age of 40. most of the time when someone sees me runnin my laptop i'll usually try the old 3d desktop, followed by playin with the terminal and some other random stuff. it usually leaves them amazed yet its still kinda sad to see that linux hasn't reached "every" corner of the world yet.

[superman]

No anti-virus software need and you can browse windows directories from linux with ease... The system isn't bogged down like windows tends to get. Never had a system crash or blue screen of death...

[Sunnz]

Find someone have similar laptop specs, and starts a OOo loading competition - it makes the other guy think he should get Linux.

[cowlip]

Video chat. Skype.

Doesn't Kopete do video chat well now?

[JAPrufrock]

No anti-virus software.
no defrag
flawless networking
compiz/beryl

[SZF2001]

Porn sites won't infest the computer with crap.





Seriously, that's the only reason one of my friends decided to go Linux. I think if we reach more men with the premise of "porn won't break your computer", higher numbers will be reached...

[macogw]

Porn sites won't infest the computer with crap.





Seriously, that's the only reason one of my friends decided to go Linux. I think if we reach more men with the premise of "porn won't break your computer", higher numbers will be reached...
yeah i did that when a guy was complaining about how he cant get rid of all the viruses on his computer

[macogw]

i keep reading all this stuff about how funky beryl is going to make my desktop, even saw some screenshots today surfing around that looked.... well sweeeeeeeeeeeet... so, no probs i thought, i'll get me some of that beryl goodness as well!! Unfortunately, i'm having some issues, i followed the wiki intall of the berylproject.org, i think it's installed? how do i use this? I want to setup that funky transparency stuff i've seen everywhere....I think it works because the ALT + [TAB] key works.....

alt-tab has always worked. Is there a red gem in your "notification area" of your panel? If not, type "beryl-manager &" into a terminal to start it up (the & makes it so you can close the terminal afterward)

[PartisanEntity]

hmm.. not sure I can show off Ubuntu anymore, ever since the kernel update I can no longer get the latest nvidia drivers (v.9746) to install in dapper, I have tried envy and repo's etc...

Not something one can brag about :(

[argie]

I use the old computer (which has enlightenment on it) to show fading, transparencies and stuff like that if need be. The new one I just login and leave them to have a go, they think they're using a heavily modded Windows, it's funny.