Are you really working with Ubuntu??

[kilou]

I'd like to know if your really work with Ubuntu or if you just play with it (not games of course). I ask this because after 6-7 months of using Ubuntu I find it is quite unreliable. There are too many things that do not work at all or not properly, especially on a laptop like power management, cpu scaling etc. I mean things do work partially but they are still buggy. Moreover I can't see how OpenOffice can be said to be "compatible" with MSOffice documents. OK a simple Word document is likely to be readable but there's no way Calc can open Excel document reliably....and forget it if you use macros! So the only way to go is virtualization (even wine and crossover don't do a good job with Excel and VBA)....but then what's the purpose of Linux if you have to run XP inside it??? It is not just for MSOffice but many other programs simply don't run correctyl in Linux and must be launched in a XP virtual machine (want to call your friends in Skype with video, want to watch TV without TV card with Zattoo...). Also many people argue that Linux is far more stable than Windows. Well all I can say from my short experience is that I had much more freezing with Ubuntu in 6 months than I had with XP for years...and I'm speaking about bad freeze where the whole computer freezes and doesn't react anymore and your only choice is to hard reset the computer with the power button!! There are also inconsistencies when Ubuntu starts: sometimes CPU scaling is working, sometime it isn't and you have to reboot to make it work again.... Suspend and hibernation are just a headache and still don't work correctly now although I'm on the right track but all this is just way too boring!

Most of the 6 months spent with Edgy and now Feisty have just been about trying to fix things. I also breifly tried Dapper but my wireless network card wan't working properly wit it so I went to Edgy. Probably Linux is for developpers but I'm just a basic user that need a reliable system to work with.....and contrary to the common belief I really find that XP is much more reliable for me.

Am I really wrong, is there a way to really work with Ubuntu and have a working system or should I just give up with it? I kind of know your answer but I still ask...

[Bachstelze]

I think I tend to agree with you. Lately, Ubuntu has become far too unreliable, mostly because the devs want to indroduce too many new features without enough testing. If you still want to try Ubuntu and don't mind to have a bit of "outdated" software, I suggest you go with Dapper, which is really rock-solid. Also, there a many many many Linux distros out there, not only Ubuntu ;)

[blackened]

I've been "really working" with Ubuntu since Hoary. Granted I don't use a laptop, which is where a vast percentage of the problems tend to be.

I do agree with HymnToLife though, I tried Feisty for about a week or so and never could sort out all the problems I had (mainly hard freezes, but also seemingly random X failures), so now I'm back to Edgy and, honestly, the only thing I miss from Feisty is Sudoku.

Still I'll remain loyal because of the great community and philosophy. Personally I don't require any of the things you mentioned, kilou, so our perspectives are a tad different.

[Gaunty]

I use Ubuntu on my home computer, it's dual boot with XP, XP is very reliable but I hate the need for firewalls/anti spyware/anti virus software that takes ages to load and slows the computer to a crawl. To be honest I also like the chalenge of using Linux and fixing the problems when the occure. So I guess I just play with it.

The only locking I've had with Ubuntu is when I was messing with Compiz and my xorg.conf file, the OS didn't crash but Gnome did, not really much difference if all your apps are running on it.

[Kuoi]

I know what you mean , but I use Ubuntu in the first place for safety reasons.
I don't have to worry about viruses and spyware , ... or at least , I don't have the feeling I have to :)

I use it for about all my internet jobs , like surfing on the internet, é-mail , downloading (using wine + Utorrent ) , listening to webradio's (I didn't knew it was that simple before I used Ubuntu) .

If I find a program that can burn audio cd's with crossfade function ( for burning life-cd's from mp3's ) , I'll be very happy.
I hope nobody tells here that this is working without crossfade , because it isn't !

I use my Windoos only for my music needs , and more specific for all my minidisc needs.

The programs in Ubuntu are indeed mostly 'simple' , but that's because we are used to use "all in one" programs , and there aren't much aio in Ubuntu.

And I like this forum a lot , because I don't have to worry for errors and big problems ( even if you can't boot anymore ) , there's always a solution.
Just boot from life cd , and ask here.

The 2 main reasons that I still use Ubuntu is this forum and all his users , and the feeling it is very very safe !!!

I should recommend you to keep your system like it is , and just use windows if needed.

Greetings , Kuoi

[Anicka]

...and, honestly, the only thing I miss from Feisty is Sudoku.

Try gnome-sudoku from the repos...

[Bachstelze]

And to answer the question, sice I'm Linux-only, obviously I use Linux when I need to get something done. My OS of choice is Gentoo at the moment but Slack, Ubuntu and FBSD are all ready to go just in case I feel like using them :p

[meborc]

i work with ubuntu, if you take writing university reports or making economical calculations a work... of course i use OO and only OO... so i have no problem with MSoffice files :) ... i'm waiting for MSoffice to start to support .odt files so my work could be also read (in right formatting) in windows machines... i usually convert everything to PDF so it is readable to all... i am known to be as aggressive as to send .odt files to my lecturers and demanding that they use .odt viewers or that they install OO... not because i'm a hot tempered person, but because i want to spread the word that .doc is NOT a standard... it is just a file format... and there should be a standard file format that is not economically linked to any specific company (read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument)

of course, if it is not working for you, you might consider not using ubuntu... or paying for crossover office :)

[tommcd]

I do not own a laptop (yet), so I have no experience with that.
If you need windows for work or certain things then dual boot with windows. Nothing wrong with that. I still have windows on my machine, even though I rarely, if ever use it.

[DrQuincy]

I know what you mean; I've tried really, really hard to give Ubuntu the benefit of the doubt as I decided about 6 months ago to totally ditch Windows. I now run OS X on a Macbook Pro and Ubuntu Fiesty on a desktop.

I've been a little disappointed at times and were it not for my Mac I would have had to have gone back to Windows.

I experienced a major screw up in my Edgy to Feisty upgrade and even now none of my USB ports will work under the new kernel.

A lot of issues, such as OpenOffice, is down to software rather than the distro itself.

When you use OS X you get used to everything "just working" and for me I won't be 100% satisfied until I get the same out-of-the-box reliability I get from Apple.

[riminicat]

I understand the problems your having with Ubuntu. I think... To answer your question I am kind of just playing around. The only pc I have is a laptop I got from the University I attend and I'm supposed to keep Windows XP on it. The problem I had with Windows XP wasn't so much of a stability issue but that it wasn't challanging me enough if that makes sense at all. I recently decided to switch my major to a computer major and wanted something I could work with and mod without getting into legal trouble. I can't take DRM off of music in windows without the possibility of getting into trouble and I didin't want to make my desktop look really cool with the use of third party software like themexp or desktopx so I started dual booting windowsxp/ubuntu. I just got rid of windows all together when I decided I've done enough in it and now I'm learning linux.

From what I understand you need windows xp for your needs, you don't want to have to fix bugs and learn to program, am I right or did I miss understand you? From my point of view I love to make things work and spend hours on my pc trying to do new things and make new programs so I like having a semi-unstable program to work with, it keeps me from getting bored.

Have a good day and enjot whatever OS you choose, I have to get off my laptop and get ready for an exam(I'm going to fail the class but I want to leave on a good note with my prof because I'll have him for a class that does matter in the fall, computer programming!!)

[Bachstelze]

Funny, how tastes differ. The "out-of-the-box" thing is exactly what I hate about Apple stuff. When I install an OS, I consider I have the right to set it up the way I want, not the way some other bloke thousands of miles away eecided was right. Hurray to Gentoo !

[Tomosaur]

I use Ubuntu to work, sure - much more than I use XP. From document writing, to programming, to creating music, Ubuntu is far, far better than Windows ever was for me.

It sounds to me like you want a free version of Windows. We view compatibility with Microsoft formats as a 'nice thing', it's absolutely not essential to us. If you insist on using MS formats, then of course, the MS products are what you should be looking at. OpenOffice is not intended to be used to open MS Office documents, it's just a nice feature. It doesn't always work perfectly, but that's only because MS keep their formats closed. OpenDocument formats are much more sensible, and these work perfectly well. Blame Microsoft if nothing but MS Office can open MS documents correctly. In any case - using propietary document formats is just plain bad - in the past, there was absolutely ZERO .doc support on Linux - if you sent your document to somebody without MS Office, then they just didn't get to read it. At least now we can get at the content, even if the formatting is a little messed up (which is rare, for me anyway - only when people use terrible formatting in MS Office does OpenOffice get confused).

So anyway - the 'point' of Linux is that it's an operating system. It's different from Windows - and although some of your problems are unfortunate, yes - they are not the standard. I know I don't suffer these problems, and I find I have much more fun using Ubuntu than I do Windows. I find Windows far too limiting. If you want to use Linux, then it just makes sense to change how you do things. Forget about propietary formats like .doc, and use the OpenDocument formats. That way, people who don't have MS Office can read your documents.

[Steve H]

Although I am playing with Ubuntu a lot, ie fixing small glitches that arise as I try new things (but i did that with XP) I am also working with it. I have found that pretty much everything that i could do with XP i can do with Ubuntu, with out the need to resort to pirated software (not that i ever did, of course!). I still have to, begrudgingly, boot in to XP for a few small things. Mostly to do with my PocketPC. For example I have a flashcard software package called Stackz (for testing my Japanese), which works great under XP , but will not work under WINE, whatever I do!(I have raised it at WineHQ)
But pretty much everything else, (burning, surfing, music, email, downloading, chat client, some gaming) is taken care of. I just wish there was more music production software, like Reason or Cubase SX, out there for Linux.

:)

[Kobalt]

I couldn't work with anything else but Ubuntu now... In terms of flexibility, ease of use and security it has fulfilled all my needs in my daily work since two years.
It does seem reliability has suffered since Dapper though. I might consider sticking with Debian 4.0 a bit more if it's a continued trend in Gutsy...

[Anicka]

Most of the programs that I use for work are linux-based (and if there is a windows-version it's usually outdated). I use Ubuntu as a virtual guest in XP, but only because the computer came with windows pre-installed, but I could have lived without it. The biggest issue is that a lot of people use msoffice to write things that they expect me to read and correct and OO is not always a good solution. By the way, is there a way to make pdf-forms under linux?

[blackened]

Try gnome-sudoku from the repos...

Once again everything is right with the universe.

[Tomosaur]

Most of the programs that I use for work are linux-based (and if there is a windows-version it's usually outdated). I use Ubuntu as a virtual guest in XP, but only because the computer came with windows pre-installed, but I could have lived without it. The biggest issue is that a lot of people use msoffice to write things that they expect me to read and correct and OO is not always a good solution. By the way, is there a way to make pdf-forms under linux?

Not sure about pdf-forms, but OpenOffice does have an Export As PDF option, so you can at least make PDF documents.

[darkrose]

I use Linux on all my computers (desktop, 2 laptops, and 6 servers), of which (K)Ubuntu is on all but one of the laptops and the nameserver. I need reliability that I just can't get from windows.

I do have a windows xp cd, I use it as a drink coaster.

[compwiz18]

I use it everyday, almost all the time. It never crashes on my laptop unless I'm screwing around with it, in which case I deserved it :D Suspend and (I think) hibernate work great.

The only time I use (my beta copy of) Vista is for playing Age of Empires :KS

[handaxe]

What strikes me about this and many other "frustration" threads is how own experience is extrapolated readily to a judgement of the overall fitness of a distro. This is understandable as being thwarted is no fun. However, linux works out of the box for many folks and with varying degress of tweaking, it can be made to do the job for perhaps most installs. And then there are those instances where it simply will not behave. It is difficult for someone caught this way to feel charitable about the distro. At this point, the apparent universal compatibility of ******* (yes, I know, an illusion but allow please...) makes linux' s apparent failure all that more damning.

I had a dose of this myself - my laptop is rock solid under the default Ubuntu but I had persistent issues with a 2nd party wireless manager. Just when I was starting to mutter about the programme it emerged that 99% of other users had no issue at all. The cause was some aspect of my hardware that was sufficiently different.. blah blah.. you get the picture.

Until manufacturers take the linux phenomenon seriously this state of affairs will persist but that IMO is not enough to condemn the enterprise.

As for the OO type of deficiencies, I concede that there can be issues. Finer points of formatting and complex excel macros come to mind... Dual booting is the solution. Why then bother with linux? For me the answer lies in the philosophical principle of supporting Open Source where and when one can.

my 0.000002 c worth..

HA

[Lord Illidan]

I finished my computer project (had to do a turbo pascal program on DOSbox - worked better than on XP) on Ubuntu. My only complaint is OpenOffice when printing. Cropped images were sometimes printed in full size, ruining the layout of the document. However, when I converted to a pdf and printed it from Adobe Reader, it worked like a charm.

My sisters use Ubuntu for everything, playing music, hw, etc.

I installed Ubuntu on my father's laptop and he is using it for his thesis.

Sometimes I boot up Windows for some games...like once in a month :)

[Lucifiel]

Warning: really long post ahead. Read if you dare to! Also, many of the statements are of my own opinions.

Hmmm, for me, it's pretty much a hit and miss in certain areas. In terms of keeping away spyware and antivirus, Linux does a fine job of that. Also, Ubuntu manages to allow me to run plenty of my tasks, just by installing some software and not having to spend days to even months trying to wrestle between 2 pissed-off little kittens which're bent on taking over your system.

In addition, I don't need to configure a lot of software just to get simple tasks done. For Windows, sure, quite a few titles worked after installing them but there were many more which required modification of .ini files, adjusting options in the installed software and other software, etc. Sometimes, to get a certain software to work, you'd also either need to uninstall or reinstall another software. If a certain software stopped working, tough luck. You could google for the issue but even then, it could be an ambigious problem caused by some issue not fixed by Microsoft.

Furthemore, I'm rather thankful for Comical being pre-installed and even the various choices being offered in Synaptic Manager. This means that the packages work 90% of the time and unlike Windows, it isn't a case of trial and error: loading various versions of a software and tough luck if it crashes or even locks up your computer or corrupts various .dll files in system32.

However, when it comes to other common issues like fonts, certain drivers stability, etc. I find it a little bothersome that a software like Fireffox could crash so often on Ubuntu. Thank gods, there's Swiftfox, though.

And with WinXP, when my fonts didn't work, they just didn't and I simply had to reinstall them. However, on Ubuntu, it's been over a week and I'm still struggling to fix the problem of having weird-looking fonts(the hinting seems to have gone entirely wrong). And if you look around the forum, you can see various posts regarding fonts looking really strange and corrupted or even fonts causing many various software to be unusable.

Also, Ubuntu has problems copying or moving very large files or folders(at least 1000 to 2000 over files or a folder which contains 3 gb or more of data). The entire operation would just stop and you'd need to copy sub-folder by sub-folder instead. Well, I'm not sure if this issue is related to Linux or just to Ubuntu alone, though, or if it's even an upstream issue like a Nautilus issue. But it definitely needs to get fixed as it also causes the operating system to slow down sometimes(even Swiftfox or even Comical choke up and take time to respond and the mouse is really slow too). Again, quite a few also have this issue too and it's high time the issue be fixed.

Note: In Windows XP, if I tried to copy a very large directory or file, it'd take a very long time but in the end, the folder or file would be copied. I understand that Linux tends to be a lot more aggressive in using system resources, yet, if it overdoes the issue, then it actually affects usability of the operating system.

Still, I'm not going back to Windows to manage my daily tasks. Yet, I desperately hope that Ubuntu GG will fix most of the critical issues the users face. There is a good thing with having new and interesting features but stability of an o/s should be a priority.

Right now, I'd rate Ubuntu as around Win XP level in terms of looks. Somewhere between Win 98 and Win XP(catching up rapidly though) in terms of stability and in terms of getting things to work, many issues are around Win XP level but certain issues are around Win 98 level.

Win98 is defined as : decent performance in running quite a number of programs but crashes once every few hours. Tends to run into many various problems if you're not too careful and requires a certain level of maintenance to keep it up and running. Also, system usually suffocates when you try to perform too many tasks(past 3 to 4 or maybe a few more) no matter how much memory you have or how good your hardware is.

Horrible user interface and various bugs that were never fixed by Microsoft which leave you crying. If you have spyware or even virus problem, etc., or some rather serious issue, usually maintenance might fix the problem but sometimes, that is a short-term measure and you might need to reformat the system. Tends to require constant reinstallation as things seem to go haywire before you can even stop the problems from occurring. For most people, an installation lasts beween 6 months to 2 years.

Win XP is defined as: pretty good performance in running most programs but behaves abnormally(crash/freezes, applications not running properly, etc.) sometimes if you have a spyware or virus or rootkit problem or a system conflict caused by various programs and hardware, or even certain system files, etc. Has certain bugs that're really annoying from time to time. But usually, there's a workaround or patch available for most of these issues.

Pretty good at handling multiple operations like copying files while playing music and browsing the internet, or even copying huge files while playing cpu and graphics intensive games, etc. Does not suffocate too much unless you're either running XP Home or have less than 512mb ram or less or have some hardware that chokes up in terms of bandwidth. Does not conk out so much with viruses and spyware but if you're not careful, again, you might cripple the system. Yet, with some care and regular maintenance, your install of Windows XP could last up to 2 years or more. For most, it's around 1 year.

In terms of user interface, the default interface is a little tacky but otherwise, there are themes and so on, which can be loaded.

[Lord Illidan]

I agree with the post above as regards stability. Although Linux itself doesn't crash for me...the apps do. Firefox, Amarok, OOffice and Gaim all crash quite regularly :(

[kilou]

For sure the problem of compatibility between OOffice and MSOffice is not related to Linux/Ubuntu but the fact is that 95% of people use Windows and MSOffice so even if OOffice was the best piece of software in the world, that wouldn't really change the problem. In my work I need to share documents, extensively run VBA macros that neither Crossover or Wine are able to deal with when running Excel and many programs I used are specifically made for Windows and have absolutely no Linux counterparts (like scientific programs etc). You know it's about the same when it comes to security of a system: many people argue Windows 's not safe...well that's not really Windows the problem, the problem is that 95% of people use it so hackers focus their "job" on this operating system! We saw exactly the same with IE vs firefox: when firefox got more and more popular we suddenly discovered more and more security flaws....

IMHO a system must be useable, I really don't mind having to fix a couple of things, we all have to do that with Windows as well but I hate having to spend days or weeks trying to fix stuff like CPU scaling or power management on a laptop. I like playing around with the OS and if stuff is not "out of the box" that's not a big deal if it can be fixed easily and quickly.

During these 6 months I really could feel the potential of Ubuntu/Linux. There are many things awesome like backuping with tar on a live system, the marvelous beryl that is not just eye candy but is really functional with the scale plugin or cube etc....and everything is free of course. I've really loved the fact that you can run Ubuntu without antivirus or even maybe firewall and there's no spyware or virus (not because it's that safe but simply because not enough people use it...). It really gives fresh air to a computing experience and I'd really like to go on but it seems just too frustrating. It's like a beautiful Porsche that looks awesome when you get it but then you start to discover that the headgasket is leaking, the brakes are loose and the clutch slips....and you have to fix all that to enjoy that car. The only difference is that Ubuntu is free, the Posrche isn't LOL Well I wouldn't mind messing with a broken Porsche if it's free but I wouldn't use it as my daily driver if you understand what I mean.

I'll probably try a little further with Feisty and probably try again Dapper to see if it really brings more stability but I think that I will have no choice but going back to XP in the near future....and trust me that doesn't makes me happy, XP is nice and works very well for me but it's just boring to look at the same things over years!

Do you think that Dapper is REALLY more stable than Feisty? I'm a little worried by the slow boot time on Dapper.... Otherwise is there another user friendly Linux distro that is known to be more reliable? Suse?

[Bachstelze]

That sounds more like a problem with Ubuntu than with the apps themselves. I have no problem with any of them on Gentoo...

[adwatkin19]

I have been using Ubuntu for about 3 months, at first it was just for odd bits here and there, nothing major, but i have gradually moved to Ubuntu from XP. I have still got XP on my laptop but i find the only thing i use it for is to sync my MDA compact II PDA for appointments and things and thats only because its not fully supported yet for my device in ubuntu.

I like that everything can be customised to YOUR liking, and not the way someone else likes it or thinks you should have it.

As soon as i can sync my PDA with evolution i will ditch XP for good. I think the school i work is also considering ditching XP to go with linux for the server and client, but we will see how that follows through.

adwatkin19

[handaxe]

For sure the problem of compatibility between OOffice and MSOffice is not related to Linux/Ubuntu but the fact is that 95% of people use Windows and MSOffice so even if OOffice was the best piece of software in the world, that wouldn't really change the problem.

Microsoft does not want open file standards precisely because they want the OS/Office suite user lock-in effect they enjoy at present. Perhaps the most important fight on at the moment is over open document standards.

For me Linux and open source is an evolutionary process and the fun is in the dynamism this brings as well as the challenges.

HA

[diskotek]

i'm really starting to use linux with dapper, before that linux was my playground (and also place to trying to learn things). i'm still using dual boot. i was first doing that with dapper/windows xp. dapper is really rock-solid as people mentioned here... but there was always problems with 3d acceleration (because i would like to try xgl/beryl with my ati radeon x200). recently i switched to feisty, and ati drivers worked great... unfortunately i realized that beryl is not my cup of coffee yet!
i'm still with gnome & i also realized that i'm not booting my windows xp for a week....

now i can say that i'm really working with ubuntu... the only things reamined that i should work out is using GIMP. ok, i still didn't spend much time with it to get used to; i think i'm only booting xp for using "adobe photoshop cs2" (not so often) & native "instruments traktor studio" (not so often).

may be i'll try wine for traktor studio or just wait to see ubuntustudio.... and i believe that i'll work on GIMP soon...

[diskotek]

i read a interview logs with mark shuttleworth (right spelling) after feisty relese (i clicked it through the link at forum). and he accapted that "we still need a strong word processing application like ms words,..." [this is not exact words he used, and also i misunderstood him as well].

[johnleonard]

I love Ubuntu and use it all the time, but I am a tinkerer by nature and don't mind having to sort out the odd glitch.

For the more prosaic user however, what Ubuntu and all versions of Linux lack is a decent fully functional office suite. MS office is streets ahead of OO, especially Calc and Base, which are so slow as to be practically unusable for large files.

If someone can produce a real Office equivalent, Linux is home and dry.

[Docter]

I find it to be more stable, reliable and efficient than *******. It's easier to fix, maintain and use. Best of all... you can really get into it, change it, recompile it and no-one will care.

It suits me much better.

[gpowell88]

I have to agree with Illidan, from a few posts ago. My main trouble (after I got Ubuntu configured) has been with the apps, rather than the operating system - I've had to do hard reboots perhaps twice, and that's including the one screwup that I made with x11 while I was setting some stuff up.
However, Firefox is a different story. It crashes about once a day. Makes me think about switching to Opera.

[kilou]

What do people working with laptops think about Ubuntu or Linux in general? Is this a good distro for laptop or are there any other better Linux distros for notebooks.....that supports CPU scaling and power management without hitch?

[chili555]

Ubuntu has been stable for my two laptops, two desktops and server. The only nagging problem we've had is Firefox crashes once in a while.

My wife and I get everything done we need to get done with Ubuntu exclusively. Perhaps you may complain that retirement is not really 'working' with Ubuntu. However, we both do banking and investing on line, shop on line, write and print business and personal letters, shop, instant message, share digital photos of the grandchildren and shop. Granted, we use no macros in our documents and spreadsheets, but we are happy with the capabilities OO.org.

Frankly, it comes down to this: if Windows and only Windows meets your needs, then your choice is clear. If Ubuntu fully meets your needs, then welcome to the club! Although I am a Linux absolutist, I fully recognize that not every body needs the same thing. A Mercedes convertible is not the best way to bring 100 2x4's home from Home Depot.

I am fascinated by the arguement, how do you expect Linux, and Ubuntu in particular, to replace Windows on the desktop if it doesn't do everything Windows does, just the way Windows does it. My answer is, I don't expect it, just as I don't expect all of you to buy Mercedes convertibles; some of you just have to have pickups!

I'm also fascinated with the argument that the virus writers just haven't focused on Linux yet because it's a small fraction of the market. I think that's true, however I also think the mandated root/user password structure makes Linux far more secure than Windows from the outset. I think the virus writers will have a big hurdle getting the root password to install software, spyware, etc. When I read on the forums or IRC, "how can I log in as root?' I just want to cry.

[GrueTamer]

What do people working with laptops think about Ubuntu or Linux in general? Is this a good distro for laptop or are there any other better Linux distros for notebooks.....that supports CPU scaling and power management without hitch?I'm currently on my laptop right now, which happens to be the main computer in the household. I've gone through many distributions, and I think that Ubuntu performs the best. I don't have problems with CPU scaling or power management, but laptop support for Linux in general is pretty weird sometimes. I've had problems with the 2.4 kernel series before, but that's not much of a problem.

[AndyCooll]

Got to agree with chili555.

Our house is Linux only. 2 laptops, a base unit, and a server. And Linux (of the Ubuntu flavour) does everything we need it to. I would consider us to have standard needs ...Internet, music, office, chat etc. And we have apps for everything. oOo for instance suits us fine too.

:cool:

[BaffledMollusc]

I use Ubuntu 7.04 at work exclusively on two workstations. Everything I need to do works perfectly. Coding, making presentations, Matlab, Mathematica, typesetting papers, moving data around to supercomputer clusters, all the usual productivity stuff like word processing, email, internet...

On the first workstation I built I initially made it dual boot with XP Pro / Mandrake linux, then switched to Ubuntu a year later, and six months later blew away the XP install to get more hard drive space.

I'm very satisfied with Ubuntu. It seems very stable for me, even though I'm currently running Beryl with an ATI card!

At home I dual boot XP home and Ubuntu. The only reason I log into Windows now is for the games.

[Alex N]

I'd like to know if your really work with Ubuntu or if you just play with it (not games of course). I ask this because after 6-7 months of using Ubuntu I find it is quite unreliable.


Yes, yes, yes ! It is really VERY unreliable. All those Linux stories worth nothing. I used many operating systems in my life, including ones you never even heard about, but... This is the
first case when programs change their state from working to non-working without any
interference from me. My intention was to make a system that will do everything (well, almost) that Windows can. Speaking about the software, it is possible. But it does not work.



Moreover I can't see how OpenOffice can be said to be "compatible" with MSOffice documents.


Here I disagree. OpenOffice is a very good product, I'm using it on Windows. It is much better than latest MS Office releases. I am ready to rewrite all macros I have for OO, just to be able not to use MSO.



sometimes CPU scaling is working, sometime it isn't and you have to reboot to make it work again....


Yes, yes, yes ! And it is not only about CPU scaling. It is about Opera, MySQL, Apache, Anjuta, etc.



Most of the 6 months spent with Edgy and now Feisty have just been about trying to fix things.


I have exactly the same experience.



Probably Linux is for developpers


Nope. I am a developer. There is no good development environment for Ubuntu. It does not exist.



Am I really wrong, is there a way to really work with Ubuntu and have a working system or should I just give up with it? I kind of know your answer but I still ask...

Good question. Since I am a developer and software architect, I think I know where is the problem. But strangely Linux people become deaf when they are being told about problems in their favorite OS. Most of troubles could be fixed relatively easy - nobody cares.

[kikapu]

I use Ubuntu on my home computer, it's dual boot with XP, XP is very reliable but I hate the need for firewalls/anti spyware/anti virus software that takes ages to load and slows the computer to a crawl.

Hi,

i am new to Linux and using Ubuntu for about 3 months (last week i upgraded to Feisty).
Most things are working ok (not all of course but most do), i mainly play with it but i also have set up an exactly identical developing environment with my Win XP installation (i am using dual boot too!) and coding mostly in Ubuntu.

I just want to help me understand (as i told that i am new to Linux) why in Ubuntu we do not have the need for firewalls/anti spyware/virus and all these ? (I also hate that these programs slow my system down and use a ton of memory resources to do their tasks.)
Is it because in Linux, the OS is coming with all ports closed or is it another reason that we do need them at all ?And what about attacks from trojans/malware and all these, howw are we protected by using Ubuntu ?

Thanks for any help!

[neufelry]

My system has yet to stand the test of time, since I only installed fiesty a week ago. But I am finding using windows makes my skin crawl (i'm dual boot). I find linux is more powerful in a number of ways, any problems I have had have been on account of having more power than I know how to deal with. Since I am still learning the ins and outs of linux I have the propensity to wreck things with fiddling. Also the community is far easier to get in contact with, instead of the very dispersed windows crowd.

Also, the only reason I am still dual boot is because I play world of warcraft and use ventrilo a few times a week and since I play so little I have had a hard time justifying putting hours into setting up wine when I only play 5-6 hours of WoW a week.

[rusty4r]

That sounds more like a problem with Ubuntu than with the apps themselves. I have no problem with any of them on Gentoo...

I've tried Gentoo and Sabayon but too me it was like starting over. The gentoo way is totally unique from debian.

I did however like PCLinuxOS It worked better out of the box than any other distro I tried (Dapper, Edgy, Sabayon, Gentoo, Fedora 6), but I returned to Edgy because of this forum. When I am stuck here people are helpful. On the forums of the other distros you might as well be in a chat room because there's no "be polite above all" mentality.

Learning to speak spanish in Spain is fun. You get to share your progress and joy. I found the other distros like learning to speak German in Mexico City. There was noone to share with up or down. Does that make sense?

And I still dual boot just for the sake of my printer as each of my computers have run out of antivirus subscription they have been switched to dual boot. Until I figure out how to get my printer running in Linux I keep one computer still running xp and disconnected from the internet so I can print using a usb stick to transfer the document.

[wirelessmonkey]

Alex N.....

Emacs or KDevelop are wonderful development 'environments', especially compared to "Visual Studio"(gag).


Firefox and Opera are super stable, Opera more so than Firefox. I have Apache, Tomcat, PHP, Anjunta, basically the whole set of web server utilities running, with absolutely no problems, on 2 desktops and 1 dedicated server. Beryl occasionally freaks out, but Beta == Beta

As for fixing problems with applications.... aren't you a developer? Submit a patch, or a detailed bug report with code segments.

//Ubuntu! Slackware!!!!
//Slack for server stability, Ubuntu for ease of use.

[Alex N]

Emacs or KDevelop are wonderful development 'environments', especially compared to "Visual Studio"(gag).


Emacs is not an environment at all. It is just an overgrown text editor. The programming
environment should have :
1. context-sensitive help on language and libraries.
2. autocomplete
3. integrated debugger
4. syntax highlight



Firefox and Opera are super stable, Opera more so than Firefox.


On my computer it crashed. Should I believe you ?



I have Apache, Tomcat, PHP, Anjunta, basically the whole set of web server utilities running, with absolutely no problems, on 2 desktops and 1 dedicated server.


I can not install LAMP for several weeks already. I tried posting here, to MySQL forum,
to other forums. NOBODY answers.



As for fixing problems with applications.... aren't you a developer? Submit a patch, or a detailed bug report with code segments.


I tried. It does not help. Many problems are not just bugs, they are design flaws.
For example, Ubuntu upgrade system destroys my menu.lst every time it
updates the kernel. What should I do ? Fix Grub or fix installer ? I just want to work
with the system.

[tombott]

Yes, yes, yes ! It is really VERY unreliable. All those Linux stories worth nothing. I used many operating systems in my life, including ones you never even heard about, but... This is the
first case when programs change their state from working to non-working without any
interference from me. My intention was to make a system that will do everything (well, almost) that Windows can. Speaking about the software, it is possible. But it does not work.



Here I disagree. OpenOffice is a very good product, I'm using it on Windows. It is much better than latest MS Office releases. I am ready to rewrite all macros I have for OO, just to be able not to use MSO.



Yes, yes, yes ! And it is not only about CPU scaling. It is about Opera, MySQL, Apache, Anjuta, etc.



I have exactly the same experience.



Nope. I am a developer. There is no good development environment for Ubuntu. It does not exist.



Good question. Since I am a developer and software architect, I think I know where is the problem. But strangely Linux people become deaf when they are being told about problems in their favorite OS. Most of troubles could be fixed relatively easy - nobody cares.

Buhahahaha, It's been a while since I read so much crap in one post!

Are you seriously trying to tell us that the software you install under Ubuntu changes itself?

To say Ubuntu is not stable is crazy, I find it to be very stable. The only problems I have is if I have been fiddling etc and mess something up.

I never have problems with Firefox, in fact I find it runs a damn site better under Ubuntu than it does under Windows.

If you are a developer then why not try to help out and fix problems?

And by the way I use Ubuntu for work on My Acer laptop with a ATI x700 card and Desktop Effects running perfectly!

I don't have a Windows PC in the house or office anymore it's Ubuntu all the way!

[compmodder26]

Ubuntu is running rock solid for me since Dapper. Had a few niggles with Breezy and Hoary, but those are long gone. I work from home at times and I find my productivity is actually better on my Feisty laptop at home than on my XP workstation at work. I am a programmer/server admin. I don't deal with Office documents much so I can't comment on OO vs. MS Office. I can't recall the last time I've had to reboot my laptop for anything other than an update that required a reboot.

[kilou]

Well if you use OOffice and rewrite macros for it in Calc then there's absolutely no problem.....as long as you don't share documents with others that will most likely run MSOffice! Of course OOffice is a nice piece of software, so is MSOffice, but here the main point is compatibility. I understand that it's MS fault not to release source code of their software but in a world where 95% of people use Excel how can I use Calc if I want to share things that are slightly more challenging than a simple addition?

On the security features I still think that Linux is safer, probably not only but certainly mainly because it is far less used than Windows. It is true that the root system may be difficult to access for a hacker or a virus but in this respect I think Ubuntu has been criticised for it's use of sudo command to access root privilege from a user account. You don't need root password to get root privilege for most thing, if you know the user password that's enough and there are several ways to get it knowing that most people use the same password everywhere. The same applies for windows, in XP you have administrator privileges and other restricted accounts! Security is all a matter of how you install a system. If you just click "Next" in the installation process of Windows and start to use it immediately you're likely to be at risk but this is not windows fault really too.

Anyway this is not a Ubuntu vs Windows thread, every has its advantages and drawbacks. It's just that so far my experience with Ubuntu is quite frustrating as many things appear buggy and I still rely on XP to run some application like MSOffice since I need VBA support. Both systems are nice but I've been surprised that all the comments about stability of Linux were not true in my case (maybe I'm just unlucky). The last freeze I got was just before writing this post. I had to restart the computer because network manager wasn't working after resuming from suspend.......and at the shutoff screen (Ubuntu logo) the computer froze and I had to hard reset it :mad:

Well on in all I think Linux is great for sure but it's probably too early to call it a true alternative to windows for desktop and laptop computers IMHO. Anyway I'm still wanting to try a little bit more but I may consider other distros to see if there's anything better out there. I'm especially looking at OpenSuse, LinuxMint (Ubuntu derivated) and PCLinuxOS....

PS: when I spoke about Linux being more for developpers I meant people that know how to deal with bugs and people who contribute ie develop Linux. I'm just a user myself.

[regomodo]

aha, someone else with Amarok crashes. Everybody keeps reccomending it. Every time i try to scan for mp3s it eats up my computer. Even from a fresh Ubuntu install

[dolphin_oracle]

I have one ubuntu edgy desktop and one xubuntu edgy laptop. I got into the mix when i inherited an old laptop and XP just wouldn't work quite right on the system. Xubuntu worked great, and a new battery got me a nice working laptop for very little cash. I've traveled with it and us it mainly for internet access, but I've also used abiword and OO writer for proposal letters and weekly construction updates. I like the command line utilities for my wireless card (once you know your own hardware, the cli can do some neat things!). My only complaint was that the gui network utility did not like my RT61 wireless, but I've grown to love the CLI. I actually use the CLI rather than the gui whenever I can because its so much faster,espec. on a 900mhz 128mb ram laptop!

I liked xubuntu so much, I put ubuntu on my "server" desktop in the house. I've got file and printer sharing, and while it may be easier (or at least different) to setup up that kind of thing in xp, its not exactly hard in ubuntu.

One thing about Linux in general that makes life easier is to make sure you buy hardware that has good linux support, or at least has any problems sorted out by the user community. That's what I did/do, and it pays off in fewer headaches.

And one more thing I like about xubuntu, it installs fast. I recently reinstalled edgy on that old laptop, and I think including configuration of the wireless and printer setups, it took less than an hour. Pretty impressive.

I also run two winxp computers (one laptop, one desktop). I like them all, but I don't have to pay for the 'buntus! And I definitely don't want to reinstall their OS's.

[bobbob94]

I find 6.06 Dapper to be much more stable than Edgy was, I haven't been running Feisty long enough to really assess how stable it is but its looking good so far. If you're looking for stability above all, Debian has a deserved reputation for being reliable, at the price of usually using older versions of things. For hardware to just work though, you really need to check out if its compatible before buying stuff, there are laptops that work perfectly, and others that cause no end of problems. I've been lucky with my old toshiba, the only thing that doesn't work under linux is the card reader, which i don't use anyway. For my needs I find Linux to be fine for doing work on.

[mikewhatever]

Having first tried Ubuntu out of curiosity, I decided to give myself a week or two to try and make everything work on HP Pavilion 5269 laptop. If after two weeks I still have problems, I thought I'd remove it. Well, I was able to solve the wireless and microphone issues, the only ones I had, in five days, so kept using it as my primary OS for browsing, music and video, and documents. I am very happy with OO, and Firefox and Opera browsers. All programs as well as Ubuntu itself have been very stable. CPU scaling has always worked. About a week ago I replaced Edgy with Feisty, and had no issues whatsoever. The system is very robust and responsive, I like its look and the new features. I have to say, that XP, which is still on the first partition, gave me no problems too. Needless to say, I like Ubuntu better for its freedom.

My advice would be to use XP/Vista if those work better on your hardware, or try another distro. Do not fight it, and you might save yourself a lot of frustration.

[srt4play]

I use Ubuntu on my work laptop and I've found it enables me to work better. I can do things on the job that other technicians simply can't do because they run XP.

My testimonial thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=415572

[zetsumei]

Of course Windows programs won't work in Linux. That's why there are ALTERNATIVE programs that do the same if not better job than Windows. For example:

k3b for buring cd/dvds
amarok for listening to music
ampache for streamiing music
rhytmbox for ipod transferring, etc...
I could go on for ages.

For those of you who have had problems with Ubuntu Edgy or Fiesty, you must be doing something wrong because I haven't seen a single program or freeze on my system. But this may be biased as I've just upgraded to Fiesty. But from using Edgy for months nothing never happened and I'm still using everything that worked back in Edgy on Fietsy. Also, for those who said you've experienced for lockups than Windows, you obiviously kept your windows pc so clean and tons of antivirus/spyware firewall programs that it couldn't do anything. At least with Linux you don't have all that crap cluttering up your PC. And you may not know, you CAN run Windows w/o all that crap if you know how to keep your PC safe. And yes I believe there are like 90% of the problems here are due to laptops just because I've try installing Ubuntu and about 4 other distros on my laptop and none of them seem to work right -_-. (wasted 5 hours of my life trying to get xorg-x11 installed in gentoo -_-) but right now I've finally gotten a distro that works on my laptop, just gotta get my freaking wifi working :(

[NikoC]

I think I've been working with Ubuntu for a year now (dapper, edgy and feisty) and so far it has lived up to my standards. I admitt I had to look around for some basic scientific office functions like making a regression line in gnumeric and adding the equation and R square value or plotting good quality (vector) charts but that has been solved. Furthermore I use thunderbird mail, epiphany for surfing, inkscape, gimp, ooo writer and presentation for office applications, recently took up latex for creating pdf's as well as presentations (post script pdf presentations own!) and planning to read up on R for statistical analysis.

Ubuntu has been running fearly well on my sony-laptop with increasing functionality over the different releases (cpu frequency control, fan speed control, function keys, ...). Hibernate and suspend are still buggy but I never use them anyway... as soon I get into the office I remove my battery and keep the machine on net current all day (same as I did with XP). I'm also able to connect external displays and projectors on my nvidia 6200 go card via the propietary nvidia drivers so no problems with giving presentations.

I think over the short period of time Ubuntu has been around it has made great leaps forward (with regular ups and downs)... but considering its young age it is quite an amazing OS. Of course this is my personal experience and when reading these forums I see a lot of people having troubles with all sorts of things and I can imagine that there is a certain threshold at which frustration takes over!

[Seisen]

What does everybody expect from Ubuntu total perfection? I used to dualboot Windows and Ubuntu then one day I said screw and completely deleted Windows.

Instead of complaining on the forum about why your laptop doesn't work, contact the maker of the laptop or any other hardware that you have that doens't work. How do you think we got flash on linux. People kept getting all over Adobe and they finally budged.

Then the gamers that need to continue to play WoW or any other games. Contact the developers and tell them that you want it ported to LInux. Maybe if enough people say something it might happen. Your other option is to quit complaining about it and dual boot Windows.

[Alex N]

For those of you who have had problems with Ubuntu Edgy or Fiesty, you must be doing something wrong because I haven't seen a single program or freeze on my system.


Sure we do. But WHAT ? Can you explain me this fact :

I've installed PHP+MySQL framework many times under Windows. I am using it for several years already.
I even installed Apache under Windows. I had several problems, but they were solved in a maximum ONE
DAY. I asked ppl in a forum, they pointed me to right URL. Done.
On Linux I can not setup the damn thing for a MONTH already. FOR A MONTH! Synaptic does not remove
all files it placed on my HDD, so fresh install conflicts with what is left from the previous. Sometimes MySQL starts, sometimes it does not. Do you call it stable ? First installation of Apache+PHP had PHP mod code,
but PHP did not work. Reinstallation had no mod code, but when I placed it where it belongs, everything
worked.

Now GNOME does not even start. The system is trashed. I am thinking about what to do now.

Please, do not tell me tales. I will not beleive unless I see it myself.

[aysiu]

I can relate only my experience:

Hoary - Rock solid. That's what roped me into using Ubuntu
Breezy - Kind of buggy. Not that great.
Dapper - Also kind of buggy, at least in the first few months of release, despite being LTS and "stable."
Edgy - Pretty stable. I didn't really see many "edgy" improvements from Dapper. To me, Edgy is Dapper... but refined.
Feisty - Awesome, and the smoothest upgrade I've ever had. I upgraded from Edgy on three computers with absolutely no problems. And while Dapper and Edgy couldn't figure out resume-from-suspend on my laptop, Feisty did it straightaway without extra futzing about with config files.

[Tomosaur]

Sure we do. But WHAT ? Can you explain me this fact :

I've installed PHP+MySQL framework many times under Windows. I am using it for several years already.
I even installed Apache under Windows. I had several problems, but they were solved in a maximum ONE
DAY. I asked ppl in a forum, they pointed me to right URL. Done.
On Linux I can not setup the damn thing for a MONTH already. FOR A MONTH! Synaptic does not remove
all files it placed on my HDD, so fresh install conflicts with what is left from the previous. Sometimes MySQL starts, sometimes it does not. Do you call it stable ? First installation of Apache+PHP had PHP mod code,
but PHP did not work. Reinstallation had no mod code, but when I placed it where it belongs, everything
worked.

Now GNOME does not even start. The system is trashed. I am thinking about what to do now.

Please, do not tell me tales. I will not beleive unless I see it myself.

Apache should just work as soon as it's installed from the repositories. Which version of apache did you install (apache or apache2)? Whichever package you installed, do the following to get rid of it:


sudo aptitude purge <package-name>

This will remove everything the package installed on your system.

Then just reinstall said package from the repositories. The various modules for apache(2) are also available in the repos. They should require no extra setup, except the basic stuff which you would do regardless of the platform. For example, if you want apache to run php pages instead of serving them, then you need to do this explicitly.

I have personally ran apache2 and various modules on my machine. The only thing you need to do after letting aptitude install the packages, is to configure apache to run, or serve, the pages, and any other configuration you need to do. Anything else, frankly, indicates that the problem is based somewhere between the screen and the chair.

[NikoC]

I think we should not be blind/deaf to the problems that people are having by just stating that they are doing things wrong! Because let's face it, a lot of people still have serious problem while making all the efforts they can to get things working! It's up to the more experienced users and devs to get these annoyances fixed and/or solved! We have to take criticism if it is founded!

[jerrylamos]

I'm no developer, but I get on early levels of whatever release and look for bugs to post in Launchpad. In some cases that has given Ubuntu Development some lead time on working on fixes; sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Their choice.

Since I get experience with some bugs, then I can post fixes to people who post questions & problems. That's community help. Example I've got a post "Workarounds" on "Installation & Upgrades".

I don't imagine doing either of these on Vista. Vista, Microsoft Office, take it or leave it, you choice. I've largely left it.

Cheers, Jerry:)

[Seisen]

I'm no developer, but I get on early levels of whatever release and look for bugs to post in Launchpad. In some cases that has given Ubuntu Development some lead time on working on fixes; sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Their choice.

Since I get experience with some bugs, then I can post fixes to people who post questions & problems. That's community help. Example I've got a post "Workarounds" on "Installation & Upgrades".

I don't imagine doing either of these on Vista. Vista, Microsoft Office, take it or leave it, you choice. I've largely left it.

Cheers, Jerry:)

Thats what people need to do if they can. The developers can only do so much, as some of them volunteer their free time to do these things. they rely on people to help find the bugs so they can squash them. The first time somebody rights perfect code the whole world will probably blow up.

[gnomeuser]

I've been on Linux fulltime for some 8-9 years now, it is working just fine for me and has done so for ages.

Now I don't use Ubuntu right now since it does not like installing on my existing mdraid+lvm solution, I was able to making it install using a copy of Feisty from a few days before the release, but I copied that over with the final release DVD and found that the hack no longer worked (as can be seen I ****** up my system a tad and needed to reinstall.. bigger mistake than I anticipated). Interrim solution, use something else, namely SLED10 SP1 since I had been meaning to test this anyways.

[reyfer]

I run my Travel business from my home, and I have been Windows free for one year now, so yes, I use Kubuntu for work. And I've had no problems whatsoever. People have problem reading something I sent them that I made in OOo , saving it to .doc format? I just send it back saved as PDF, and with a note that says "get OOo" and explains what OOo is and can do.
And I have to still experience a freeze in Feisty :)

[kelvin spratt]

i think a lot of peoples problems are themselves i use fiesty it runs 18-24 hrs aday continuos for the last week
no lockups no slowing down

[aysiu]

I think we should not be blind/deaf to the problems that people are having by just stating that they are doing things wrong! Because let's face it, a lot of people still have serious problem while making all the efforts they can to get things working! I agree with you. We shouldn't try to invalidate other people's experiences. All experiences are valid, but generalizations based on personal experience are not necessarily valid. That's why I don't bash Swiftfox just because it's not fast for me. I know other people feel a difference or have benchmarked differences between Firefox and Swiftfox. KDE and Gnome seem the same speed to me, but some people think KDE is faster than Gnome, and others feel Gnome is faster than KDE. Some people think Windows is stabler than Ubuntu; others, vice versa.

The other danger, though, is to not recognize that it does go both ways. Some people think "I've got no problems on Ubuntu. Other people must be doing something wrong." But other people think "I've had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. Everybody must be having these problems."

Both sides need to recognize there's a diversity of experiences out there.


It's up to the more experienced users and devs to get these annoyances fixed and/or solved! We have to take criticism if it is founded! No, "we" don't have to "take criticism." "We" (or, more specifically, the developers) have to take bug reports, blueprints, and specs. But "criticism" doesn't often end up productive. This is a community. You change the product by becoming a part of the community and contributing to the community, not by criticizing. Donate money, file bug reports, contribute code, create artwork, write documentation, engage in good marketing. Criticize? Why? You may be "right," but you're probably not doing anything productive.

[goodtimetribe]

I agree with the post above as regards stability. Although Linux itself doesn't crash for me...the apps do. Firefox, Amarok, OOffice and Gaim all crash quite regularly :(

I don't use OO all that much, nor Amarok. Firefox would kind of seem flaky when I used it. When I click to open it, it would act like it was going to, but would wait for me to do it again. That was annoying.

I've had better luck with Opera.

Amarok.... try RhythmBox or XMMS instead.

Gaim never crashes for me, but there's others like Kopete. Which distro?

I've been pretty happy with reliability on one desktop. After the semester's over, I'll try to get it squared away on my laptop too. I bet that's going to be where the frustration comes in.

[mech7]

I only play with it now.. it is not ready for me yet to do all my work on it, hope one day it will be :)

[NikoC]

Both sides need to recognize there's a diversity of experiences out there.

No, "we" don't have to "take criticism." "We" (or, more specifically, the developers) have to take bug reports, blueprints, and specs. But "criticism" doesn't often end up productive. This is a community. You change the product by becoming a part of the community and contributing to the community, not by criticizing. Donate money, file bug reports, contribute code, create artwork, write documentation, engage in good marketing. Criticize? Why? You may be "right," but you're probably not doing anything productive.

I fully agree with you, I just wasn't able to formulate it that well (not having English as a native tongue :) )

[Alex N]

Apache should just work as soon as it's installed from the repositories. Which version of apache did you install (apache or apache2)?


I made a mistake installing apache (not 2). It started without additional tuning, but refused to
understand PHP (offered to download the file instead). Looking at ubuntuguide.org I noticed
it says apache2. I thought that PHP module is for apache2 and this is a problem. I removed apache
using synaptic and installed apache2 as it is described at ubuntuguide.org. I found out that I have
many places with TWO directories apache and apache2. And apache2 refused to start. I manually
removed all that apache things, using find and looking at the file list in synaptic. Then apt-get
informed me that I have some unused software and recommended to run autoremove. OK.
After this I installed apache2 and PHP again, it started, but there was no /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php4.conf. I copied it from somewhere (can not remember)
and everything worked.



Anything else, frankly, indicates that the problem is based somewhere between the screen and the chair.

Yeah, I know, since I started using Linux I heared people calling me lamer, dumbass, idiot, whatever,
probably more times than in my whole life. I think it is called "open-source culture".

But this still does not explain ONE SMALL BUT ANNOYING FACT : all said software works for me on the
same computer under Windows for years...

[aysiu]

Yeah, I know, since I started using Linux I heared people calling me lamer, dumbass, idiot, whatever,
probably more times than in my whole life. I think it is called "open-source culture". It probably has more to do with what forums you're hanging out in.

Very seldom on the Ubuntu Forums is someone called an idiot or some other pejorative name. If it happens, the name-caller usually gets an infraction.

[Seisen]

Unfortunately people are like that and I wouldn't what people say literally. I wouldn't call it "open-source" culture I would call it ignorance on their part. Open source software is driven by the community, as with all communities they are not perfect.

[Alex N]

No, "we" don't have to "take criticism." "We" (or, more specifically, the developers) have to take bug reports, blueprints, and specs. But "criticism" doesn't often end up productive. This is a community. You change the product by becoming a part of the community and contributing to the community, not by criticizing. Donate money, file bug reports, contribute code, create artwork, write documentation, engage in good marketing. Criticize? Why? You may be "right," but you're probably not doing anything productive.

I'm sorry, but this is complete misconception. I am contributing to open source software already,
for years. It happens in Windows world, however. But I can not contribute to each and every
program where I see problems. It is technically impossible. Moreover, it is incorrect. While developing
a program, you as a developer work out several habits of using it in tests. Like entering assumed values,
follow certain sequences etc.
Just an example - in a software that I am making now. It is a commercial soft, but it does not matter for the
case. There is an input box where user can enter variable identifiers. First my tester was a professional
programmer. He used only 'proper' identifiers as we know them [A-z][A-z0-9]+ The second tester was a
novice, and he immediately found that I forgot to place a necessary check. Entering things like IN>OUT
etc.

A novice (an idiot) can be more useful for finding software issues. You want better software, don't you ?

[aysiu]

A novice (an idiot) can be more useful for finding software issues. You want better software, don't you ? And a novice with a valid complaint should file a bug report.

And I don't know why you're going on a tangent about novices anyway. Did I ever say novices' experiences were invalid in any way? No. I said you can do something about it--make Ubuntu better... or you can just complain about things in a thread. I gave practical suggestions for improving Ubuntu, and those suggestions can be taken up by anyone. You can be a novice, an intermediate, or an expert.


But I can not contribute to each and every program where I see problems. It is technically impossible. And developers cannot find every single reference on the web to their programs and find all the criticism, filter out the duplicates, determine which criticisms are valid or not, and then gather the information together... and then have time to fix all the bugs.

Criticizing Ubuntu in a forum thread isn't the way to improve software. It isn't the job of Ubuntu developers to wade through piles of crap (which is what most "criticism" of Ubuntu is) to find helpful suggestions. It's their job to fix bugs people report.

[OffHand]

Yeah, I know, since I started using Linux I heared people calling me lamer, dumbass, idiot, whatever,
probably more times than in my whole life. I think it is called "open-source culture".
I think it's called "an attitude problem"

[Alex N]

I said you can do something about it--make Ubuntu better... or you can just complain about things in a thread.

You're right, but being a novice I do not know what's going wrong. I seldom can identify the source
of a problem, I usually can not reproduce a bug. In my above example I received about 20 or 30
false bug reports for one real. It's life.

OK, let's take another case. Since I started using Ubuntu I'm having troubles with Grub - installer cooperation.
Grub itself has problem - it reads config file only from the drive it has been started from. This causes
problems when first bootable partition is Windows - which is natural and most often used setup.
This problem has several workarounds, that are recommended in this forum. But software upgrade
program and the installer are unaware about these workarounds. Thus, MBR usually gets broken.
Not so many people know how to fix it. Also I have root(0,1) in menu.lst but upgrade manager
keeps changing it to root(1,1) which is plain stupid. If there is a certain line in menu.lst and OS is running
this logically means that it somehow managed to boot up with these settings. Why touch them ?

Now a question. Where to file a bug ? To Grub development or to Ubuntu ? Each side can fix the problem.
Each side can say that their program has no bug (and it's true!)

What I want to tell you - maybe developers do not have time to browse this forum for bugs,
but users definitely have time to browse it for solutions...

[DarkOx]

I work regularly in Ubuntu, and for the most part I only boot up Windows in a VM to use Microsoft Office. I'll use Ubuntu for:

- Written reports that others are not going to collaborate on OR are simple enough that formatting won't be an issue (still, I check to see how it looks on a Windows machine first).
- Taking notes (I like basKet). Also, I found Open Office easier to make graphs in my Economics notes (in Word the formatting tended to be thrown off whenever I made edits)
- Spreadsheets for personal use
- Modifying or viewing Powerpoint presentations
- Slowly teaching myself Web programing (Quanta Plus)

However, I still use Windows (i.e. Microsoft Office) for:

- Word documents that are complex enough for formatting to be an issue. Sorry guys, but convincing classmates who only know me casually to use a different program or even download the ODF plug-in for Word just ain't gonna happen.
- Excel is definitely needed for my schoolwork. The solver in Open Office couldn't specify all the constraints specified in our Management Studies assignments, and it couldn't use the forecasting software we were using in the course (Crystal Ball, which is designed for Excel). So I had to work in Windows.
- Creating presentations from scratch. Powerpoint for Windows has more templates.

[seetho]

Criticizing Ubuntu in a forum thread isn't the way to improve software. It isn't the job of Ubuntu developers to wade through piles of crap (which is what most "criticism" of Ubuntu is) to find helpful suggestions. It's their job to fix bugs people report.


You don't have to develop code or write documentation or beta test software or even give money to contribute to the open source effort. Just simply choosing to use it already helps tremendously. I used to be a developer a long time ago and I can say that I feel really good when somebody enjoys and benefits from using software I wrote.

You must remember that everyone doing this is doing it purely for the sake of doing it for fun. They are under no obligations to listen or react on your demands that this be fixed or that be modified. Unfortunately people make demands as though they paid a fortune for Ubuntu or whatever distribution that they are using. When was the last time you wrote in to the developer in Microsoft demanding that they make Windows boot (and shutdown) faster; and did you ever write in to Adobe demanding a filter that does some new effects be added immediately?

I started experimenting Linux with Slackware 1.0.x a long time ago. Along the way I've used Debian, NetBSD, OpenBSD and now Ubuntu. I'm sticking with Ubuntu because of this forum. I know I can almost always get some help here if I have any problems. I also feel that this is a good place to contribute by helping others new to it.

To answer the original question of this thread: YES I use it for work. Right now I'm sitting in my hotel room in Taiwan (on a business trip) reading this forum on Firefox, doing my e-mails with Thuderbird and I just spoke to my wife back home with Skype (ok it's not OSS but it works). Incidently it's a Dapper. It started off as Edgy - it was fine; then I changed to Feisty but then had problems with hibernate and suspend on my Thinkpad X31, so I decided to go back to a more stable release with LTS. Everything seems to work for me (everything I care for anyway). I resist the temptation to upgrade to the latest and greatest or use anything beta or unstable, so I've had any trouble so far.

Of course I can't do some things on it, so I still have another ACER notebook at home with dual boot XP and Edubuntu (Edgy) on it. I find that I use XP less and less now - probably 98% linux and only about 2% XP.

Use what works for you. If you think Windows does it for you then no one is stoping you. Variety is important to life on earth.

[bloodniece]

I use Ubuntu Server 6.06 as a SAMBA NAS daily. I used Warty, then Dapper, then Edgy, and now Feisty as my desktop at work. I still rdesktop into the WIN2K3 servers for admin. But we use a variety of *NIX flavours here; QNX, CENTOS, FreeBSD, and Damn Small Linux. Granted, out of 60 users only 2 are using Linux as a desktop. The rest are using Windows Terminal Server 2003 and Office 2007. If Linux had a decent non-profit fundraising app that is not web-based,, we could make the switch. Though, there really is not an enterprise or SMB-level accounting app like Sage MIP or MAS90. If there is please let me know.

-D

[Tomosaur]

Grub itself has problem - it reads config file only from the drive it has been started from.
.......
Now a question. Where to file a bug ?

If grub itself is the problem, then you report it to the grub developers. If there is a problem in how grub works, regardless of whether it is a bug (ie, unwanted behaviour brought about through sloppy coding, a user's environment, or some other factor), or a design factor (which is what this problem is, this behaviour is intentionally coded by the grub devs), then it is obvious that grub is the problem, and that you need to talk to the grub devs.

Alternatively, you can use a different bootloader, or you can wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything in a way that works. It's true that the issue with grub is not a 'bug', because it is intentional behaviour. However, it is bad design, and it's only through bugging the grub devs that it will change. The Ubuntu devs COULD, I suppose, write the fix and then submit it to the grub developers, but they have bigger fish to fry at the moment.

Yes, in a world where the corporation assumes responsibility for their software, you can get frustrated at these problems, but with open-source, the idea is that there is shared responsibility. You take a risk, however small, by using someone's software - and if you find a problem, you're supposed to either fix it and submit your patch, or simply tell the development team, and they can fix it when they get around to it. Neither approach is perfect, but what are you going to do? I'm not excusing developers for leaving bugs in their software - I'm just saying that open-source is a two way street. Whining about problems doesn't get them fixed - only fixing them does.

[kilou]

What does everybody expect from Ubuntu total perfection? I used to dualboot Windows and Ubuntu then one day I said screw and completely deleted Windows.

Instead of complaining on the forum about why your laptop doesn't work, contact the maker of the laptop or any other hardware that you have that doens't work. How do you think we got flash on linux. People kept getting all over Adobe and they finally budged.

Then the gamers that need to continue to play WoW or any other games. Contact the developers and tell them that you want it ported to LInux. Maybe if enough people say something it might happen. Your other option is to quit complaining about it and dual boot Windows.

Well one thing to consider is that Ubuntu is "marketed" as a true desktop alternative to Windows and is someone referred as the best Linux distro for newbie. Seeing all the troubles I and some people have getting things working correctly I just thing it's not really fair to advertise Ubuntu like this! I still dualboot XP and I'm really not ready to trash it because there just too many stuff that run in XP and that I cannot use (or could use maybe after weeks of tweaks) in Linux. I'm not that much complaining about that because yes Linux is Linux and Windows is Windows so they cannot be 100% compatible. But take my troubles with suspend/hibernation (solved tonight...after 6 months), the weird behaviour of cpu scaling and the random freezes with my Ubuntu "clean" install......I cannot complain to Adobe, Windows or game manufacturer about that! It's Ubuntu and plain Ubuntu. Now I don't know if it is Ubuntu or Linux as a whole but as a newbie I don't really care. I have problems, I'm ready to search for fixes etc but I just cannot do that all the time.

Well the solved problem of suspend/hibernate makes me think I should try a little further with Ubuntu though....

For me the real problem is that advertising Ubuntu as a real desktop alternative to Windows especially frindly for newbie is quite misleading and not appropriate for now. If you just want to read email, surf the web, write a small letter and do other basic things Ubuntu is FAR better than XP because it's free and all this works almost out of the box. But when you have a little specific needs, run a laptop and need good battery power and when you have to share files and run macros with other computers (windows) Ubuntu as any Linux distro probably will be much more challenging and nowhere near as "user friendly" than simply using XP IMHO. It's just a matter of being honest with potential new Linux users.

[insane_alien]

i've been really working with ubuntu since late breezy/early dapper. so far i have wrote

16 essays, 25 lab reports complete with statisical analyses, compiled 40 seperate small programs made 4 presentations (slides and all that jazz) made up a personal budget and done some light image editing and movie editing. this is more than i ever got done on XP and i never had any compatability problems with windows, mac or linux.

linux works, really.

[Tomosaur]

For me the real problem is that advertising Ubuntu as a real desktop alternative to Windows especially frindly for newbie is quite misleading and not appropriate for now. If you just want to read email, surf the web, write a small letter and do other basic things Ubuntu is FAR better than XP because it's free and all this works almost out of the box. But when you have a little specific needs, run a laptop and need good battery power and when you have to share files and run macros with other computers (windows) Ubuntu as any Linux distro probably will be much more challenging and nowhere near as "user friendly" than simply using XP IMHO. It's just a matter of being honest with potential new Linux users.

Yes but don't you see? We've heard all of this before, and what it comes down to is this:
You are having problems. I didn't have any problems. Many, many, many people don't have problems. Believe it or not, the people who have problems are in the minority. That is why it really grates when people come here, and act as if they're the authority on operating systems or whatever. You are a minority, ok? We don't mind you reporting bugs, asking for support, etc etc, but when people come here and blanket dismiss Linux or Ubuntu as garbage, then it does annoy people. For most of us, Linux is more than an alternative to Windows - it is superior in many ways. For others, it's not. That's just life. The developers can't test every possible combination of hardware and software, nor can they sit behind you and analyse everything you're doing in order to work out bugs. The price you pay for everything in Windows 'just working', is a pretty hefty price tag, and severe limitations on what you can and can't do. Linux is free, and your oppurtunities are effectively limitless. Do you want to delete everything in /usr/bin? Fine. Linux won't magically restore all of these files for the sake of system stability, but you can do it, if you want to. Do you want to dissect the operating system, and code in a feature which causes your screen to flash pink and blue? Nobody's stopping you. What's the price you pay for this freedom, in both senses of the word? A little respect for the people who code everything for you, and a bit of co-operation in making it the best it can be. Yes, as a newbie, we can't expect you to fix everything yourself - but it doesn't help anybody when you just complain on a forum which, for the most part, has nothing to do with the development of Ubuntu, Linux, or any of the software you use. You either pay through the nose for something, and take the risk of it not working, or you use something for free, and actually be productive and help fix it when it goes wrong. Those are your choices, all you have to do is pick one. For most of us, it's a no brainer. Pick the free one, and actually see a fix to a problem come to fruition, at no cost.

So yes, problems are, well, problematic, but you have to understand that these problems are not typical. Most of us don't ever suffer from them. All you can do is submit a bug report, or fix it yourself. Alternatively, only use hardware which you know will work. Such is life. When you buy a new computer, it usually comes with Windows. This is pretty much a guarantee that your life will be more or less problem free, because they wouldn't put Windows on hardware which caused problems. When you install Ubuntu yourself, you don't have this guarantee. Hopefully, Dell pre-installing Ubuntu will go some way to removing this problem. The same problems occur when you install Windows XP yourself on hardware it was never tested on. That's just the name of the game, I'm afraid.

[aysiu]

The price you pay for everything in Windows 'just working', is a pretty hefty price tag, and severe limitations on what you can and can't do. Windows has its problems, too. That hefty price tag doesn't get you perfection.

[Buffalo Soldier]

Everyone's experience with Ubuntu or any other alternative OS varies according to many factors (knowledge, hardware, OS of choice, luck and etc). Some will experience bumps along the road and some will have big roadblocks.

So far, Ubuntu since Warty/4.10 (October 2004) has been treating me nicely. There a few hiccups, but none were caused by Ubuntu but by incompetence (typing error and etc). This 2 years of using Ubuntu for surfing, music, and learning (degree in IT) has been a smooth sailing for me.

[ian.leckey]

I've been using Kubuntu solidly now for about 3-4 weeks. The only things I've looked back to windows for, have been Flash, and Java. Both tend to be buggy on the AMD64 architechture of Feisty.

[Jose Catre-Vandis]

To answer the OP (things seem to have drifted back and forth a bit, but interestingly :-))

I spent a year with Breezy and Dapper on my own personal conversion course from Windows, and now have Edgy on my main desktop (with Fiesty on a separate partition for testing before upgrade). There is an XP on VMware for compatibility purposes and helping Windows users. I also have Vista on the disk, but I haven't been there to do anything for a couple of months now. So, i have stopped playing now and just work the thing! We have a home built media center dual booting dapper and geexbox, and Edubuntu runs my everlasting server in the garage (and boy do I work that to the edge of reason)

At work I run a Dell laptop (desktop replacement size!) We have no network and no domain, just broadband, so last week I took the plunge and installed Fiesty. I needed to dual boot so as not to fall foul of company rules. Followed a good howto on setting up the wireless as we have WPA-PSK encryption in place. Set up Thunderbird (and Lightning) with a shared profile, installed ext3 read /write access on XP, and ntfs-3g on Fiesty. I have not had to boot into Windows all week. Main tasks are mail, web, written documents, spreadsheets, presentations, some drawing (kids stuff!). My only two real issues are MS Project compatibility and because I use Thunderbird I can't sync with my PPC. I added all "necessary" stuff using Automatix2.

It works. Fiesty is rock solid. Suspend and Hibernate work, after a fashion. Boot up and shut downs are over twice as fast, and then i don't have to wait around for 5 mintues for Mcafee to finish mucking about.

Back to my year's conversion course. That made everything I did on my laptop easy. check my sig! :-)

[regomodo]

have you tried automatix 2 to install java and flash plugins?

Granted, im not using 64bit but i thought i'd try and help as it was easy to sort out for me.

[Alex N]

You are having problems. I didn't have any problems. Many, many, many people don't have problems. Believe it or not, the people who have problems are in the minority.

This is exactly what this topic was about. WHAT is majority doing with Ubuntu ? If it is only OpenOffice
and Evolution, then I understand that I'll maybe try another distro. If not - maybe Ubuntu does not work
on my hardware. Or something else.

[matthew]

I can relate only my experience:

Hoary - Rock solid. That's what roped me into using Ubuntu
Breezy - Kind of buggy. Not that great.
Dapper - Also kind of buggy, at least in the first few months of release, despite being LTS and "stable."
Edgy - Pretty stable. I didn't really see many "edgy" improvements from Dapper. To me, Edgy is Dapper... but refined.
Feisty - Awesome, and the smoothest upgrade I've ever had. I upgraded from Edgy on three computers with absolutely no problems. And while Dapper and Edgy couldn't figure out resume-from-suspend on my laptop, Feisty did it straightaway without extra futzing about with config files.This mirrors my experience.

For what it's worth, I use Ubuntu on 4 computers between my home and office, including two laptops--one of which has an ATI video card. I currently do not use any other OS on any of my machines, although I've been known to install others just to test them out, either in a virtual environment or on a separate partition. For what I do, Ubuntu is more than adequate and more than stable enough. It's not perfect, but I've never seen anything that is.

I wrote my book (http://www.amazon.com/Humor-Moroccan-Culture-Matthew-Helmke/dp/0615142842/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-7964369-5565431?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1178131854&sr=8-1), designed the cover, created the print masters, and got everything ready for the printer using nothing but Ubuntu as my OS and software from the official repos. For me, then, Ubuntu is definitely stable enough to be used for work. I am "really working" with Ubuntu.

[Tomosaur]

This is exactly what this topic was about. WHAT is majority doing with Ubuntu ? If it is only OpenOffice
and Evolution, then I understand that I'll maybe try another distro. If not - maybe Ubuntu does not work
on my hardware. Or something else.

There is no answer to this question - everyone uses their machine differently. I do the following things regularly:

Create documents / read documents.
Develop software.
Listen to music.
Watch movies.
Surf the internet (mostly using Firefox, occasionally I use Opera - not for any real reason, I just haven't decided which I like best). I have a wireless net connection.
Talk to friends / family using Gaim or Skype (I have a usb phone for Skype).
I've used Evolution in the past, but now I just check mail online, because I can just use the gmail notifier in Firefox.
Fold@Home
I have done Seti@Home, but I think Folding@Home is a more worthy cause at the moment.
Play games - although not as much as I used to. Me and my housemate take turns on Wolfenstein every now and then.
Create music, using various different software packages. I find Linux much better for this than Windows - because although Windows has the big commercial apps, I tend to only record and mix (I use Hydrogen for drum beats, but mostly I actually play the instruments). Linux handles everything faster for me than Windows, and I have about a jillion different tools available to me.

Everyone's answers are going to be different, there's will be common denominators, such as web browsing etc, but everyone does different stuff.

[aysiu]

Since my day job requires me to use Windows (our main database software is Windows-only and also interfaces directly with Microsoft Word (not OpenOffice--I tried), I need Windows at work in order to do my job.

But to get "work" done at home, Ubuntu suits me just fine. I do some volunteer web stuff for a non-profit and a church. I do my own personal website, listen to music, organize photos of family and friends, email, and web browse. I haven't run into problems using Ubuntu for these tasks.

[karellen]

yes, I am.
(honestly speaking I feel no need to explain more...)

[stig]

If you are talking about using Ubuntu for business then don't play about with versions under development. You wouldn't do that in a business with Windows development versions. Use Dapper like I do - I almost never have my PCs crash now.

I know very little about computers and software although I have had to use them in my publishing business for about 15 years. But I decided to migrate to Linux about 2 years ago. I did it slowly because Linux is very different to Windows. It frightened me at first. I gradually learnt more. My first experiences were not good - using Mandriva. Then I found Ubuntu and began to look for open source equivalents of Windows software. Now I've been on Ubuntu for about 18 months and on Dapper for most of that time. Crash, freeze? What's that!

Some things on Ubuntu are, for me, worse than on Windows - but 95% is far, far better. Don't expect things to be the same as on Windows, otherwise you will always think Ubuntu is "not right". Look for different ways of working - you might be surprised to find that the way you have been doing things on Windows is not the only way - and possibly not the best way. I live and work in a more relaxed way now that I use Ubuntu. With Windows it was all crashes, viruses, spyware threats. Now I concentrate on my work instead of worrying if the machine will last the day without a crash :)

[dca]

Ubuntu 606LTS is solid as a rock. I use it for everything (period). I toy around w/ the newer vers when they come out to see what's new but I truly look at the LTS releases (I know so far there's only one) as enterprise-ready or whatever. On a headless server I see no reason what-so-ever to run anything other than the LTS server ed release versus Feisty & Edgy.

[justin whitaker]

I'm doing web development at home on Feisty, and I do some actual work with Open Office in between side trips to Azeroth.

[deanlinkous]

I use Debian not ubuntu.

As I have said before - if windows works for you then why bother with linux. I switched to linux because I liked it - not because I disliked windows.

[Turin Turambar]

I do everything except one thing....

unfortunately Adobe programs are absent on linux, so anything that deals with graphic & photo, I have to go back to Win. It sucks, but that's the way it is.
Other than that I never had any major problems with Ubuntu.There's a way to fix it right! I like that.

[gashcr]

Yep, I do.

[Nonno Bassotto]

Yes, I am. But I have to say I don't use any office suite, so I don't have this problem. I don't care for Skype video, I prefer to have a phone call or a chat. I have problems with the TV tuner, and this is the most frequent reason I switch to windows. But I wouldn't call this work...

[soulfly7x]

I don't spend much time at all fixing things, except to the degree I want to in order to learn more. I can browse the web, play dvds, listen to music, edit images, watch videos. Pretty much everything I need to do.

That said, most people who use Ubuntu, or Linux in general made the switch for a reason. In my case it was to save an old computer from the graveyard. The PC needed to have a clean install. That much wasn't debatable. It wasn't worth buying a copy of Win and I couldn't afford a new PC. The only other option was to try a free OS, like Ubuntu.

It now runs better than it ever did, and ALL my computers run Kubuntu now. 2 of them dual boot with Win XP, but I barely ever use it anymore.

Others have other reasons, up to and including simple curiosity, or an affinity for seeing how things work. Some actually LIKE when things don't work and figuring out how to MAKE it work. Some like the customizability. I like the fact that I didn't need to buy a new copy of Windows, or a new computer, when I had a blank hard drive on an old PC.

If you like Windows, and it suits your needs, then by all means, use it. If you don't like Ubuntu then try another distro or stick with Windows.

To answer the initial question again - Yes. It works.

[euler_fan]

I don't use mine as a business production machine or anything like that, but I do use it as my primary (90+%) production machine for school. I find edgy quite reliable and I have rarely have issues. Then again I could just be blessed with a machine that came with only minor problems with existing, well tested fixes (ndiswrapper for my wireless card).

I do understand the frustration with going between MS Office and OO.org. That is frustrating but a fact of life when MS will not either comply with the open ISO standards that OO.org uses nor open their formats. I wish they would do either and let the battle be between more functional suites as opposed to format compatibility ](*,)

[macogw]

If you want VBA with Excel, use Gnumeric, not Calc.

ACPI/CPU works perfectly for me with Feisty. On Dapper/Edgy I couldn't suspend or hibernate. Everything works perfectly. I had to install drivers for my card reader on Feisty. That's it.

I use this computer for everything for school. It's where I do my coding, and paper-writing and researching and take all of my notes in class.

[bobbybobington]

I just recently finally switched to feisty from xp, and so far has met all my needs. I mostly work with basic word processing, internet, and graphics (starting to get a grip on gimp). My Windows games don't work, but I'm okay with that. I needed to ween myself of gaming a bit, and I am enjoying some games in the repos (netpanzer FTW!). Compiz is also an endless source of easy entertainment. All my peripherals work now, compared to my first foray into linux 2 years ago, and a lot of that has to do with getting better support for hardware.

As far as stability goes, I think Ubuntu is only a little bit better than xp. In XP I got a sense of gradual and inevitable decay of stability, and I was more comfortable with it because I had experience. Whereas Ubuntu has given be random freezes (although I haven't had it recently), which can be nerve racking as I don't feel like I have as much control over it, but other than that everything has worked beautifully.

[TH3_D0ct0R]

i've been using ubuntu for about 2 months and have loved every minute, i switched over cuz my 4 year old machine was really slow w/ XP

i spose you can call me a tinkerer becuz i'm just a high schooler and have no real job other than homework, and for papers i use OO and it works fine if i save it as .doc and i actualy have a 100 slide power point due in a week and hav about 30 slides kinda almost done and the OO Impress loaded all of the formats and animations that i had saved on the windose machine at school

i havent had any problems that I havent caused :) mainly messing with xorg.conf file(installing video drivers and beryl) and frankly I enjoy staying up til all hours of the night (on a school nights none the less :shock: ) and fixing the problem i created becuz it leads to screams of joy at 2 in the morning and screams of "SHUT UP" from my dad.. :) and the screams of joy are a great feeling and again these problems are ones that i have caused so they arent "out-of-the-box" problems

i dont have any of the firefox crashes or having to hard restart (when i mess up i mainly do the ole CTRL ATL BACKSPACE maneuver:) )

im using feisty fawn and have convinced a couple kids in my school to switch over (+1 for me ???)becuz of the stability

I think the main problem with people who think Linux sucks is.....(suspenseful moment of pauseiness)......patience

they see that it doesnt work and say "oh.... well this sucks", "i hate this", "it should work", "this is stupid", or "Windose doesnt do this"

and they just give up without trying to fix it...and well were all grown up (well mostly) we can fix things ourselves...and if we cant theres this amazing thing called the internet and a place on the internet called a forum where you can search for topics related to your problem...becuz 9 out of 10 times sum one else has had the problem and if you cant find it then you can post sumthin on here about it...and if it doesnt get answered right away...you can wait....have patience...if its a major problem there WILL be a post on the forums somewhere about it


P.S. yes pauseiness is a word or at least it is now

[kilou]

If you want VBA with Excel, use Gnumeric, not Calc.


??? Gnumeric doesn't appear to support VBA at all ???

[50words]

I am using Ubuntu as much as possible for work (I am a laywer) on my ThinkPad. The only real problem I am running into is the lack of good Linux support from Fujitsu for running my document scanner. The scanner works, but not as well as I would like. I am paperless, so scanner support is crucial. If I could get that to work, I can deal with the rest.

The rest being only these:
- timekeeping & billing
- PDF editing

Setting up VMWare will probably allow me to work around these problems; I just haven't gotten around to it, yet.

I much prefer Ubuntu for a number of reasons. Some are unrelated to the OS, though. I feel strongly about FOSS. Ubuntu has also forced/encouraged me to find new ways to "free" my data files so I can get to them from anywhere, and has me thinking about different ways of setting up my own server.

I just feel like I can do more with Ubuntu, and I think I am going to search out some classes in developing so that I can contribute software of my own.

[use a name]

I'd like to know if your really work with Ubuntu or if you just play with it (not games of course). I ask this because after 6-7 months of using Ubuntu I find it is quite unreliable. There are too many things that do not work at all or not properly, especially on a laptop like power management, cpu scaling etc. I mean things do work partially but they are still buggy.

This might be the reason: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17689/Bill-Gates-on-Making-ACPI-Not-Work-with-Linux
I've had some lock-ups with my laptop as well. Turning off acpi fixed that.

[PhilB]

Not exactly working, as its on my home computer and has been for two years now. Prior to that it was Mandrake/Mandriva for a couple of years which i found to be ok, but a bit unreliable particularly with updates and RPM problems.
Then I was dual booting with XP and being a keen photographer most of my work was done on the Windows drive. The problem for me was a decent RAW converter and a more than 8 bit photo package which was solved with the Linux version of Bibble.

Have hardly booted the Windows drive since I installed breezy (only once so far this year and only for about 1/2 hour), and I dont miss it at all. Yes I have had the occasional program crash, and now and again odd things have happened, but no OS is entirely stable (well maybe Etch and some of the BSD's).
Basically everything I want to do with a computer I can do with Ubuntu and I diont see any need to use anything else now.
Phil

[ArtificialSynapse]

I don't really know what any of you guys are talking about, sure I've had a few problems with Ubuntu, I upgraded to Edgy the second day it was out and ran into a few little snags, but other then that it's been running flawlessly. I use OpenOffice for school, I play games all the time (graphically intensive like wow or some native linux FPS like), I produce music, do things online, e-mail, work with gimp and it runs perfect, Ubuntu hasn't once frozen on me for no reason. X server crashed a bit, but I edited my xorg.conf and it worked perfect. You guys are crazyyy.

[noneofthem]

I made the switch from MS Windows XP to Ubuntu in October 2005 and I have never looked back since. Ok. There were some problems every now and again but nothing major and normally it was my own fault as I was still learning. I am still learning and I am using Ubuntu on both my desktop and my laptop computer now. Today I cannot even say what I liked about Windows anymore. Probably I just didn´t know better. Everything I did with Windows is running better with Ubuntu. The only two things that bother me right now with Feisty are the bug regarding unmounting external drives and my wireless LAN. Everything else runs perfectly on both my machines.

I keep recommending it to friends and even at work and people are getting more interested now...

Let´s see what happens when Dell starts selling its computers with Ubuntu preinstalled...

none of them

[Eric Layne]

I'd like to know if your really work with Ubuntu or if you just play with it (not games of course)....

'Working' on Ubuntu desktop, as in 'working for income', is impossible. Unsupported Adobe applications is the reason for me. But my god, the system is just so damn buggy, even if Adobe wrote programs for Linux it wouldn't be the same as XP or OS X since so much time is spent fixing bugs, finding workarounds, poring through man pages and help forums, wondering about cpu spikes, rebooting the system, etc.

Glad I stumbled upon this thread, was beginning to think I was the only dissatisfied Ubuntite.

[matthew]

'Working' on Ubuntu desktop, as in 'working for income', is impossible.I beg to differ (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=2580334&postcount=89). For some, perhaps, but not for all. I'm "working for income" on my Ubuntu desktop.

[mech7]

'Working' on Ubuntu desktop, as in 'working for income', is impossible. Unsupported Adobe applications is the reason for me. But my god, the system is just so damn buggy, even if Adobe wrote programs for Linux it wouldn't be the same as XP or OS X since so much time is spent fixing bugs, finding workarounds, poring through man pages and help forums, wondering about cpu spikes, rebooting the system, etc.

Glad I stumbled upon this thread, was beginning to think I was the only dissatisfied Ubuntite.

Well in the end you get what you pat for :)

[Tomosaur]

'Working' on Ubuntu desktop, as in 'working for income', is impossible. Unsupported Adobe applications is the reason for me. But my god, the system is just so damn buggy, even if Adobe wrote programs for Linux it wouldn't be the same as XP or OS X since so much time is spent fixing bugs, finding workarounds, poring through man pages and help forums, wondering about cpu spikes, rebooting the system, etc.

Glad I stumbled upon this thread, was beginning to think I was the only dissatisfied Ubuntite.

If it's so buggy, then report the bugs, help the developers out.

I personally disagree completely - problems with Linux frequently turn out to be problems with users. Not that I'm trying to insult you - it's just people come to Linux expecting a free version of Windows, then blame Linux when they find how different it is.

As for 'unsupported Adobe applications' - talk to Adobe. Linux can't support something that doesn't exist.

[mech7]

As for 'unsupported Adobe applications' - talk to Adobe. Linux can't support something that doesn't exist.

Well linux could start with setting one standard forinstalling applications as it is now it is impossible to support all distro's.

[KIAaze]

We have PCs with Debian Sarge with KDE where I am doing an internship right now.
So yes, I work with GNU/Linux. :)

And on my laptop, I also work exclusively under Ubuntu since I reduced my windows partition to 10 GB.
There's Openoffice, Lyx, multiple great text editors, IDEs, ...

I'm no artist, so I don't have the photoshop/3D software problems others might have of course.
I did install Blender on my PC to see what I could to with it, but it seems quite buggy and obscure. :/

[Eric Layne]

If it's so buggy, then report the bugs, help the developers out.

Honestly, I would love to spend my time poring over & tweaking code, submitting bugs, etc. I want to love Linux!


...problems with Linux frequently turn out to be problems with users...people come to Linux expecting a free version of Windows, then blame Linux when they find how different it is.

It is not unrealistic to expect a desktop to adhere to the UI standards set by Winblows and Apple. Ubuntu attempts this but, as has been pointed out, the interface is built on obsolete technology. X11 is a dinosaur, and the myriad of DE's & WM's & composite managers are simply lipstick on the pig.


As for 'unsupported Adobe applications' - talk to Adobe. Linux can't support something that doesn't exist.

If people don't use Linux, Adobe won't make software for Linux.

[galvatron1983]

OS X is my primary OS because I love Macs and OS X is like the best features of Ubuntu and Windows in one place and then some. Kubuntu is my second fave OS but I dont use it anywhere near as often as OS X, mainly because everything "just works" in OS X, I cant say the same for Kubuntu.

Depsite this I really like Kubuntu, its faster then OS X, very stable, has 90% of OS X functionality, and best of all its free. Im an advocate of the free software philosophy and Im fascinated by Linux in general. I cant wait to get my MacBook which will allow me to run OS X and Kubuntu side by side. Ill certainly be using Linux a lot more when that happens.

[nanotube]

i use ubuntu dapper on my laptop exclusively (i have a dualboot partition with winxp, but that hasn't been booted in at least a half a year). i do everything i even did on windows, and more, and some of it better. it's stable, supports all features of my laptop including suspend, cpu scaling, touchpad, wifi, and i have no problems with it.

just putting in my vote for "yes, i'm working on ubuntu". :)

[lyceum]

I have been using Ubuntu for about 9 months now. It is XP at work, and I dread every minute. I have Vista on my laptop for school, but have found that I rarely need to use it. I am an artist and wanna be web designer. I am also a musition, and I am hoping to start using Ubuntu to make music soon. I find Ubuntu a great OS, and works far better than XP or Vista, with the exception of Vista's networking program.

:popcorn:

[Tomosaur]

Honestly, I would love to spend my time poring over & tweaking code, submitting bugs, etc. I want to love Linux!
Unlike commercial software, whereby the money you spend on the software goes back into the improvement / development of that server - with open-source / free (as in price) software, the only way that software can be improved is if a large number of users report bugs. The developers can't test their software on every combination of hardware. The price you pay is the time it takes to fill out a bug report, rather than £30. Take your pick. You don't HAVE to report bugs, but if you want stable software, then you should.



It is not unrealistic to expect a desktop to adhere to the UI standards set by Winblows and Apple. Ubuntu attempts this but, as has been pointed out, the interface is built on obsolete technology. X11 is a dinosaur, and the myriad of DE's & WM's & composite managers are simply lipstick on the pig.
They're not UI 'standards', because only Windows and Mac use them. Apple does pay extraordinary attention to UI, so yes, Linux could learn a thing or to, but as for Windows, it's main achievement is that it has a graphical interface for pretty much everything. As far as looks and user-friendliness go, I think it leaves a lot to be desired.




If people don't use Linux, Adobe won't make software for Linux.

Adobe have publicly stated that they won't make software for Linux because they basically don't want to code for it. They cited a bunch of reasons, none of which I personally found to be particularly valid, but each to his own.

[mikewhatever]

'Working' on Ubuntu desktop, as in 'working for income', is impossible. Unsupported Adobe applications is the reason for me. But my god, the system is just so damn buggy, even if Adobe wrote programs for Linux it wouldn't be the same as XP or OS X since so much time is spent fixing bugs, finding workarounds, poring through man pages and help forums, wondering about cpu spikes, rebooting the system, etc.

Glad I stumbled upon this thread, was beginning to think I was the only dissatisfied Ubuntite.

Ubuntu is not buggy at all in my experience. I've been using Edgy and now Feisty and had no issues people describe here, such as FF crashes or cpu spikes or scaling problems, and the only time I needed to reboot was after the kernel upgrade. Sure enough I had to learn a lot of thing to feel more or less comfortable in Ubuntu environment. I had to get over the idea of the one OS inherited from the use of Windows. The forums and the online docs have been of greatest help all the while.
I honestly think you should stop fighting Ubuntu and save yourself the frustration. Use XP or MAC if they work for you and forget about linux. Out of curiosity, do visit an XP help and support forum. You will find people having all kinds of issues because that's the place to ask for such things.
I am afraid the problem is mainly a wrong approach here and not Ubuntu. For some reason you expect it to just work, but it doesn't have to even if it does for someone else. I really do not understand this demanding attitude. So what if it was advertised so and so. Have you ever seen a commercial saying this and that is really buggy, common, use it? This is rather naive.

[kilou]

I am afraid the problem is mainly a wrong approach here and not Ubuntu. For some reason you expect it to just work, but it doesn't have to even if it does for someone else. I really do not understand this demanding attitude. So what if it was advertised so and so. Have you ever seen a commercial saying this and that is really buggy, common, use it? This is rather naive.

I think that many Linux people "fight" windows for the exact same reasons...... What I don't like about Windows is that it is not free....but that's about it. We expect Ubuntu to "just work" because so many people tell us that Linux is great and Windows is so bad. I'm just giving my own experience with Ubuntu and all I can say is that I spent more time trying to fix "system" things such as CPU scaling, power management etc than actually using it. Ubuntu is targeted at newbies.....so if things do not "just work" this is not really the right way to target Ubuntu. I don't mind having to deal with some things like in Windows but I never had to troubleshoot power management or CPU scaling in Windows. I simply don't have the skills to do that......because yes I'm a newbie.

[macogw]

??? Gnumeric doesn't appear to support VBA at all ???
I haven't tried it as I don't use macros for anything (what exactly is their point?), but my ex said it worked with Excel macros while Calc didn't (though that could be outdated info regarding Calc), and that he knew the guy that wrote that interpreter. Then again, he's known to uh..BS a bit, so I'm gonna go look that up a bit...I think Calc converts the VBA to Java or something (if not, why's Java a OOo dependency?).

[johnleonard]

I take it all back about the speed issues with OpenOffice. I just discovered these techniques for speeding up your system on another post. It makes one hell of a difference I can tell you! OpenOffice is now every bit as fast on my Ubuntu partition as MS Office on XP.

Why is this info not generally available, or have I just been an idiot and missed it??

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=329309&highlight=fast

[kramer65]

i work with ubuntu, if you take writing university reports or making economical calculations a work... of course i use OO and only OO... so i have no problem with MSoffice files :) ... i'm waiting for MSoffice to start to support .odt files so my work could be also read (in right formatting) in windows machines... i usually convert everything to PDF so it is readable to all... i am known to be as aggressive as to send .odt files to my lecturers and demanding that they use .odt viewers or that they install OO... not because i'm a hot tempered person, but because i want to spread the word that .doc is NOT a standard... it is just a file format... and there should be a standard file format that is not economically linked to any specific company (read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument)

of course, if it is not working for you, you might consider not using ubuntu... or paying for crossover office :)

I would love to hand in .odt reports to my university! But I simply don't think it would do my grade any good.. :-(

[steven8]

I would love to hand in .odt reports to my university! But I simply don't think it would do my grade any good.. :-(

My reports were always readable by the professors, since they were written on paper in ink by my own hand. No filetpye compatability issues there. :)

[KIAaze]

I would love to hand in .odt reports to my university! But I simply don't think it would do my grade any good.. :-(

Don't they accept PDFs?
Just export to PDF with openoffice.
That's something I would even do with word. (and OO had this function long before MS office)
If it's PDF, it can be read and printed on almost any platform without problems.

And PDF is also an open format even if it was made by Adobe. ;)
You don't need Adobe Acrobat reader to read it.

[Alex N]

What I don't like about Windows is that it is not free....but that's about it.

Lucky you ! I am using Win2000 and it is the last system that I can use. Microsoft does great
job of repelling people from their products. I do not want to upgrade my hardware each time
I'm installing new MS OS. Also I do not want to buy another copy of the same OS when I am
upgrading hardware. MS licensing politics is nasty, and I do not want to deal with it.
I am Windows programmer and I know how it looks from the inside. It is a nightmare.
Maybe half of Windows code has only one goal - to destroy some rival technology.
.NET is Java killer, COM+ is CORBA killer, etc etc. I do not want to pay for killer code.

But the alternative OS - Ubuntu being discussed here - simply does not work for me.
All I want to do is to use THE SAME software that I am using on Win2000. I am asking questions.
No answers.

[deanlinkous]

All I want to do is to use THE SAME software that I am using on Win2000.
Then stay on windows 2000? :confused:

[D!mon]

I'm using Feisty at work (I'm Software Developer) since beta; upgraded to release without any problems. Everything seems to be stable, even beryl is working fine on my integrated video card.
I've been using Ubuntu at home for year now and haven't booted windows since NFS Crabon started bother me:)
But unfortunately sometimes it really may be a hell to get ubuntu working, I mean hardware problems in particular with acer notebooks, wifi etc :(

[ThinkBuntu]

I really am, I promise. A brief, and possibly incomplete, list of work I do on here:
* Web design
* Typical office document editing
* Invoices with an Excel-created template
* Browsing, etc.
* Coding in Ruby

[Alex N]

Then stay on windows 2000? :confused:

MS will stop supporting it soon. There will be no drivers for new hardware.

[reiki]

I've been an Ubuntu user since August of 2005. Ubuntu is my daily OS. I do have a WinXP drive (not a partition... I don't want it messing up my Ubuntu :) ..) and that's because I have medical equipment that uses software for which there is no linux port. I do everything in Ubuntu with the exception of that medical software which gets run once a week. I currently have Edgy and Feisty installed. I have been booting Feisty daily for teh last couple of weeks and my Edgy install has not been booted in that time. I am not experiencing freezes or problems in Feisty, but I don't mess with Beryl and my hardware is all real common stuff. No laptop. And... it just works. :)

[Tucatts]

I have Dapper on this desktop and Feisty on the other desktop in my office. Both machines are dual boot with Xp. I have had absolutley no problems with open office and I get excel files al the time for price quotes etc. The only real thing keeping me from going 100% with ubuntu is the ability to use my scanners. I need a scanner in my work and once that issue is resolved I will stop dual booting. Have had many x server issues with Dapper but now I know what to do and can fix it in a matter of a few minutes.Other than that it has proved to be rock solid. Feisty has been stable and I have been actually trying to break it ha ha but have not been sucessful yet. I have been messing with this for about a year now and while I am still a newbie with Linux I am miles ahead of where I was. Just stick in there and the next time you have to run microsoft updates, virus scans and multiple spyware scans and scan disk and defrag on five machines like I do then you might see a bit of time saving with ubuntu.
Tucatts

[hatstand]

Yes, yes I am. I have Ubuntu on my desktop at work, with no Windows partition. I use the Web, office, planner, evolution and skype.

At home I have Kubuntu, with a windows partition for webcam chat.

My laptop (8 years old!) runs Xubuntu.

[Macintosh Sauce]

When you use OS X you get used to everything "just working" and for me I won't be 100% satisfied until I get the same out-of-the-box reliability I get from Apple.
Amen brother! http://www.seascape.us/jrhodes/lol.gif

[Boomy]

I've been using it for about a year. I use it for browsing, word processing, basic web design, and an ftp server. I used dapper up until last month. I broke something and it became unstable, so I backed up my home dir and installed edgy. I have heard that edgy is not stable, but it seems even better than dapper to me. The only problem I have had was after installing the nvidia-glx driver, I had to edit xorg.conf to get X working again. Other than that, I almost have to say it is perfect. No crashes, faster than dapper. I'm very pleased. I want to try fiesty now, but edgy is just working so good.

[steven8]

Amen brother! http://www.seascape.us/jrhodes/lol.gif

I built a computer from scratch about a month ago. I selected each part on my own, and guess what - It worked 100% Out-of-the-box with Ubuntu Dapper. Then, I backed up my home folder, and did a clean install of Feisty Fawn, and guess what - It worked 100% Out-of-the-box. Printer, sound card, wired internet connection, video card, screen resolution and refresh rate.

I'm not really sure where these complaints are coming from.

I have redone and done from scratch many, many Windows boxes. From win95 to winXP. I think one or two in XP only worked 100% ootb. I have had a dickens of a time getting many peripherals to work. Modems in particular. I always got them to work, but it took me more than a day or two to hunt down all of the drivers in some cases. Not everything is located on a windows install disk that you may need. it's impossible. Why does everyone expect it with Ubuntu, or Linux in general?

Sorry. :) I got so caught up in my little tirade I forgot you were talking about Apples. It is also silly to compare Linux OS's and Apple, because Apple makes their hardware to go with their system. A custom fit. Linux is trying to fit all of the off-the-rack systems in the known world. You can't tell me that isn't a difficult task to say the least.

[Spoofhound]

I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary. First in a dual-boot system with Windows and then when Dapper was released I removed the Windows version, and I now work on Edgy.
In general Ubuntu meets my (relatively simple) needs, even if at times there are issues. I use my system a lot for storing and editing images, and also for some document work using OO.
For image editing I find that I am pretty well served and stuff generally works (I don't need serious colour management so thats not an issue for me). In addition, I'm comfortable using SW for linux systems that is neither open source nor free (LightZone, NoiseNinja, etc.) and I'm happy to pay for this functionality.

My big issue is printing - I still can't get adequate printing results from within Ubuntu - so I end up printing photos from my wife's WP machine. Obviously this is down to the printer manufacturers lack of support, but it is annoying. Maybe Dell offering Ubuntu on its machines will help spur HW manufacturers to take Linux more seriously.

[stee]

I am currently using Kubuntu to write my master's thesis in physics. I use Matlab a lot, and it comes in a *nix version, so that's great. In addition I use tex to write my report, and my favourite editor from windows, texmaker, is available!

So yeah, I really do work in Kubuntu. At least as much as I would have done in XP.

Also, I prefer when things don't work 100% at first. I love solving problems ;)

[Unconscious]

Oh Yeah!!! I've been using Ubuntu at home since breezy, and at work since dapper. Don't get me wrong though. It's got lots of problems, but it's more stable than M$, and I've never had to lay out big $ for software that just didn't work.

I do need to keep a windows box running in both environments, however, because there are things that I just can't do on Ubuntu, and when something breaks, which happens more often than it should, I need to have something that works.

If Ubuntu really, really, really wants its users to be dump their dedicated windows boxes, they're going to need better support for virtualization. Let's face it, there's lots of software, that just isn't available on Ubuntu, or any linux box.

At work, I'm fighting an uphill battle, as the lone linux desktop in a windows centered environment. When things don't work for me, it's my problem, and despite the kindness of the people on these forums, the support is not that good. Still, for me, and my work (I'm a software developer, writing and designing systems for everything from PDAs to legacy mainframes), it's the best tool available.

[woodgdo1]

I like ubuntu's support of my Dell Latitude D610 Laptop much better than that of XP or Fedora. There are very few issues that I have run into, and actually seems to like my dock better than XP most of the time. I do dual boot XP and Ubuntu Feisty and using Vmware server, I have the ability to boot into either physical install of XP or Ubuntu from the other native OS at any time. I only keep XP on my machine to support windows users. I started out my job as a Unix/Linux admin and now I am a centering on Windows admin issues as we have had some turnover. Probably one of the few Windows Techs running Linux... Openoffice is great, Evolution continues to evolve and work better with each version, Mplayer is great for videos. The intel video driver support is awesome and works well with Compiz/Beryl. I am currently running Feisty and the only major problem so far was fixing vmware to compile, but that is an issue with all the latest Linux kernels. I can run Internet Exploder if I need to(not sure why I would want to) using ies4linux and wine. Sadms took the gruntwork out of joining the domain with Samba. All of the hotkeys on my dock's wireless keyboard work as expected (even the volume knob). Network-Manager is AWESOME!!! Much better than the intel wireless tool in windows XP. VPN support works flawlessly. Gnome-RDP is pretty good (could use some better VNC support and defaults). There are very few things that I can't do natively for supporting out AD domain and Windows servers. It is also the best OS to use for Unix/Linux server support I've found. XDMCP to a headless UNIX box is handy.... As Linux progresses, I can't wait until more vendors such as Dell and Id software start supporting it.


Ok, I think I have said enough....:)

[mrgnash]

I'd like to know if your really work with Ubuntu or if you just play with it (not games of course). I ask this because after 6-7 months of using Ubuntu I find it is quite unreliable. There are too many things that do not work at all or not properly, especially on a laptop like power management, cpu scaling etc. I mean things do work partially but they are still buggy. Moreover I can't see how OpenOffice can be said to be "compatible" with MSOffice documents. OK a simple Word document is likely to be readable but there's no way Calc can open Excel document reliably....and forget it if you use macros! So the only way to go is virtualization (even wine and crossover don't do a good job with Excel and VBA)....but then what's the purpose of Linux if you have to run XP inside it??? It is not just for MSOffice but many other programs simply don't run correctyl in Linux and must be launched in a XP virtual machine (want to call your friends in Skype with video, want to watch TV without TV card with Zattoo...). Also many people argue that Linux is far more stable than Windows. Well all I can say from my short experience is that I had much more freezing with Ubuntu in 6 months than I had with XP for years...and I'm speaking about bad freeze where the whole computer freezes and doesn't react anymore and your only choice is to hard reset the computer with the power button!! There are also inconsistencies when Ubuntu starts: sometimes CPU scaling is working, sometime it isn't and you have to reboot to make it work again.... Suspend and hibernation are just a headache and still don't work correctly now although I'm on the right track but all this is just way too boring!

Most of the 6 months spent with Edgy and now Feisty have just been about trying to fix things. I also breifly tried Dapper but my wireless network card wan't working properly wit it so I went to Edgy. Probably Linux is for developpers but I'm just a basic user that need a reliable system to work with.....and contrary to the common belief I really find that XP is much more reliable for me.

Am I really wrong, is there a way to really work with Ubuntu and have a working system or should I just give up with it? I kind of know your answer but I still ask...

False premises.

Ok, the number one concern should be stability and to that end you should always check hardware compatibility with any distro before you commit to it, or when making your initial purchase -- especially with a laptop!

Secondly, would you try to work with .odt or .ods in MS Word? No, I didn't think so. Yes, Open-Office does its best to support these formats for the sake of convenience, but the focus is on open formats, which is really what one should be endeavoring to use if one is at all serious about FOSS. For me it's not a problem working with Open-Office/Abiword; the formats these programs use are perfectly adequate to my needs, and for the most part even those that haven't cottoned on to open formats yet, have the good sense to use .PDF for the sake of inter-portability. The .doc format is pretty worthless when it comes to preserving formatting even between the same versions of MSWord on different machines, let-alone between different versions of MSWord.

As for video support on Skype, I fail to see what this has to do with Linux, it is the prerogative of the Skype developers to get their act together on that front. And Zattoo.... whatever... as far as I can see its subject to all the same ludicrous restrictions as traditional commercial media outlets:


Sorry, there are not any channels currently available in your area. You can join the waitlist to be notified when Zattoo becomes available in your area.

The future is now!

[ticopelp]

I've only been working with it for a couple of weeks now, but have had absolutely no major problems at all. Certainly no lockups or anything serious. Thankfully, I don't have much use for Excel or anything MS-based in my daily work. The only thing keeping me from switching over completely is continuing to use Photoshop until I can properly learn GIMP, and some games.

[dpzektor]

I have been running Ubuntu for a few weeks now. I did not dual boot, but rather wiped clean and made the leap out of the Windows world and into the Linux world. I have had a few minor snags, but these were mainly me trying to do certain things that most people probably would not (setting up emulators, configuring ini files, etc), but I am really getting the hang of things now.

I do everything I need to in Ubuntu. Newsgroup binary downloads (Pan is awesome), audio/video playback, video editing, email, web, videogame emulation, office stuff....you name it. I had one crash (in Edgy) while playing with Beryl, but now that I am in Feisty I no longer have that issue.

Ubuntu is just a fantastic distro, and after witnessing what I can do here I don't think there is a chance I will ever go back to Windows honestly.

[tact]

Yes I am REALLY working using ubuntu. In fact I find myself more productive and have not regretted moving away from the corporate provided windows environment for one minute.

One really does not have to read these forums for long (like 15 minutes) to come across several threads where someone has had a bad experience with linux and want to vent. Thats ok I am sure. But when in that inward-looking posture the vent-ee is for sure having severe tunnel vision and failing to see the bigger picture.

You have to compare apples to apples. If one has problems installing linux on a PC/laptop with difficult or unsupported hardware then one MUST compare that experience to the installing Windows on a PC/laptop that has hardware difficult or unsupported on windows.

It is pointless to say "my hardware is supported under windows but not linux". Even more pointless if you have never actually "installed" windows on your PC/Laptop as it came preinstalled.

In my office (multinational corporate entity, I am based in Kuala Lumpur office) our IT arm is sold out to microsoft in every way. All staff have corporately supplied WinXP-Pro laptops and the entire LAN/WAN is microsoft technology.

So here i am the (almost) lone linux user in a sea of MS machines. I have to exchange dozens of MS-Office documents (spreadsheets, documents, presentations) with colleagues daily. Big documents. Complex documents. Commercially sensitive and vitally important documents. For humility sake I set OpenOffice to save all work in MS-Office format by default. To date - ZERO complaints.

I find that the Beryl desktop ability to zoom all open documents (from all sides of the cube) into a tiled/scaled view on one desktop (slam the mouse to top right corner of any screen) makes me SO MUCH MORE productive than clicking thru XP taskbar tabs looking for the right document - when having several documents open (15 at one stage recently, all supplied by different authors in Office formats) and cutting and pasting between them to generate a massive techno/commercial proposal.

I also demo our software products (all dependant on either WinXP or Windows Server2003) in VM's on different sides of the Beryl cube desktop (yes - Server2003 AND clients on WinXP in VM's at the SAME time and talking to each other in REAL TIME projected on the big LCD screen/monitor-- all on my laptop running fiesty and it makes for a DAZZLING demo...) and the whole show connected via wifi to a financial switch in a bank test host in another country! No slow down. Fiesty very "snappy" and reliable.

Now a peek over the fence at the colleagues still using WinXP:
- as is the case with WinXP (and often forgotten by inward-looking people complaining about linux and stabiliity) after 9-12mths constant use it gets SLOW and FLAKEY (constantly locking up just before you saved that document) and eventually requires a reinstall.

- I am no IT guru but have had to come to the rescue of several people in the above situation when they have attempted to re-install WinXP but find that screen resolution is stuck in 640x480, sound, modem, and their network adapters not working so cannot connect and download drivers from websites. (These are max 2yr old Toshiba laptops!).

- they need someone who has internet connectivity to download drivers for them to get them online to finish the job. The job is to search thru toshiba or dell support websites to find the right drivers for the right model laptop... "is my chipset THIS one ot THAT one... both listed under the same make/model support page" "is my network card the Intel Pro-V or Dell x.y.z - both are listed in the support page for my model.

- once the OS is working. HOURS and sometimes days later.. Then they have to reinstall all the corporate AV, security certs, MS-Office and on and on and on. Then they can be productive.

Peeking back at my ubuntu (then Edgy) installation experience:
- my laptop running WinXP had reached that 9mth "midlife crisis" and would lock up at that pretty Microsoft boot screen. Wouldn't boot. No way.
- Windows install disk>recovery console - could not recognise the NTFS drive as existing. It reported all "unallocated space".
- other windows based recovery tools like "BartPE" also could not read the NTFS partition. Very sad as I had so much on that drive I wanted to recover!
- on a whim I slotted a ubuntu-edgy LiveCD into the drive and booted it.

To my great delight it supported ALL the hardware in my Dell D410. I was instantly productive, on the network, able to access network shares, internet, and able to access corporate email thru "Outlook Web Access" using Firefox. Was able to work with documents. And some more - it recognised my crashed NTFS volume as NO OTHER windows tool could.
- since I was on the intranet and internet I began to copy all the data I wanted to rescue to the company fileserver
- at the same time working hard using email and openoffice.

A few days later when I was happy all done on the data rescue operation I had to comtemplate - will I now format the Windows partition and do as all my colleagues have to do... days reinstalling WinXP and corporate applications? Or will I just keep using ubuntu as i am ALREADY productive.

Easy decision - I double clicked the "Install to HDD" icon on my desktop. "Use the whole HDD".
- OS installed easily. No need to get someone else to download network drivers, screen drivers, etc.
- Open office also installed. as well as a wealth of other applications.
- easy to set up VPN as I need it whenever I am out of office (I travel overseas all thru asia constantly)
- no looking back.

It would be unfair to compare my experience installing on supported hardware against someone like the OA tho installed on apparently not fully supported hardware.

[mrgnash]

I find that the Beryl desktop ability to zoom all open documents (from all sides of the cube) into a tiled/scaled view on one desktop (slam the mouse to top right corner of any screen) makes me SO MUCH MORE productive than clicking thru XP taskbar tabs looking for the right document - when having several documents open (15 at one stage recently, all supplied by different authors in Office formats) and cutting and pasting between them to generate a massive techno/commercial proposal.

Bravo! Someone who recognizes the practical value of Beryl, instead of invoking the tired and really quite empty cliche that 'it's just eyecandy.' Unfortunately, I still have occasion to return to XP -- just to play games and download audiobooks, really -- and I find getting around to be a very unwieldy affair. Even though I might only have Firefox, a text editor, 'My Computer' and maybe a text editor or whatnot open, moving between them is a chore; whereas with Beryl, I can zoom out and see: 'Oh that update has finished downloading, and there's the movie that I'm half watching, and the document I was looking for, GIMP has finished applying some python-fu filters and that torrent seems to be going along nicely.' For me, that's very hard to walk away from.

[nanotube]

I also demo our software products (all dependant on either WinXP or Windows Server2003) in VM's on different sides of the Beryl cube desktop (yes - Server2003 AND clients on WinXP in VM's at the SAME time and talking to each other in REAL TIME projected on the big LCD screen/monitor-- all on my laptop running fiesty and it makes for a DAZZLING demo...) and the whole show connected via wifi to a financial switch in a bank test host in another country! No slow down. Fiesty very "snappy" and reliable.


nice! :)

overall, a very well-put post. :)

[Luke Davis]

I thought that I would throw in my two cents.

I have tried a few distributions of Linux since red hat 7. I was for a long time a windows man; I was really good at updating my virus/spyware/adware removal tools, being told that I did not have enough privileges to delete files and dealing with various system bugs that I could never work out. My friends/parents/relatives who were not so good at defraging/updating/installing/formatting/dealing with errors and of course their virus/spyware/adware problems used to turn to me for help at speeding up their computers and just making them work. I wondered if their was something better.

In the then looming shadow of vista (longhorn at the time) I found Ubuntu. This is the only operating system that I have installed now. It does everything that I want, it has beryl (what a useful little tool) word processing email and video encoding (tovid is awesome). I am slowly forgetting how to use windows. Friends no longer come to me for help as I just give them a Ubuntu feisty fawn CD and start ranting about Linux....

So yes I am really working with Ubuntu.

[jpkotta]

ALL of my computers run Ubuntu. My desktop, my laptop, my fileserver, and most recently my workstation at work. The one that's given me the most trouble is the workstation, not through the fault of Ubuntu, but more because various hardware vendors only support Windows. VMware is kind of a solution to that, but not really. I might have to set it up dual boot. What's interesting is that this particular hardware vendor sells embedded systems, which run Linux, which is in turn compiled using Linux (or Cygwin, but it just didn't work with Cygwin for me). So you basically need Linux to build a target kernel, and Windows to load it. Infuriating.

[ticopelp]

Bravo! Someone who recognizes the practical value of Beryl, instead of invoking the tired and really quite empty cliche that 'it's just eyecandy.' Unfortunately, I still have occasion to return to XP -- just to play games and download audiobooks, really -- and I find getting around to be a very unwieldy affair. Even though I might only have Firefox, a text editor, 'My Computer' and maybe a text editor or whatnot open, moving between them is a chore; whereas with Beryl, I can zoom out and see: 'Oh that update has finished downloading, and there's the movie that I'm half watching, and the document I was looking for, GIMP has finished applying some python-fu filters and that torrent seems to be going along nicely.' For me, that's very hard to walk away from.

Good point. I use that feature all the time, and I'm guilty of calling Beryl "eye-candy." Well said.

[OrangeCrate]

You bet. I run my consulting practice on it. Heavy email, and document usage. My install is pretty standard, with minor customization. I use Gmail, and OOo extensively.

[gradedcheese]

We all use Ubuntu at work, proof (http://picasaweb.google.com/yurovsky/RandomStuff/photo#5056080832659153474) :) I have no idea how people can be productive programmers on Windows, even with cygwin installed it's pretty unusable. There's one Windows application (a JTAG debugger) that I occasionally need so I have VMWare for that.

[kilou]

...
As for video support on Skype, I fail to see what this has to do with Linux, it is the prerogative of the Skype developers to get their act together on that front...

That's right and this is the case for most softwares that are not enough developped for Linux. But then again as a user this is not really my problem. I need something that works and something that can run the programs I need with the features I need. I truely believe that OSX is a wonderful OS, much better than any Windows....but why did I get a PC with XP instead of a Mac then? Just because although Mac is a much better plateform, most softwares I need are designed for Windows! For Linux that's pretty much the same: of course not Linux's fault but if there are no Linux equivalent for the software and features I need (without having to ask all my buddies to switch to Linux as well to become compatible...), then I don't see the point of running Linux if I still need to virtualize Windows too often.

What's the point of getting the best diesel car when there is no diesel pump around you?? In this situation even the worse car will be more productive for you if it runs on gasoline! That's pretty much the same when it comes to OSX/Linux vs Windows. Of course it depends on the needs but there is so much more than games that really require Windows.

[tact]

[...] then I don't see the point of running Linux if I still need to virtualize Windows too often.

I find that the only windows programs I need windows (XP or WinServer2003) for - do run very well in appropriate VM's. Perhaps better and faster than in Windows native. 3D gaming of course wont work so well.

I find it much faster and more convenient to boot up a VM than actually run windows to run an application.


[...] so much more than games that really require Windows.

Well perhaps you the OS you need is Windows. I don't understand why you would be looking at any other OS. Unless of course you find an OS that may have some subtle inconveniences (like having to dual boot for those few windows games u need) - an OS that does not come with a lot of very un-subtle inconveniences like spyware and virii.

If you must look only at negatives then then do a "balance of negatives" and go the way of the least negative....
Linux:
inconvenience having to dual boot for some apps - minus 10
others? you add them in....
...
...
total............................................. ..................................minus 10


Windows:
inconvenience having to dual boot to linux for
great productivity aids like beryl - minus 50
virii - minus 2000
malware - minus 2000
inconvenience of the 9mth midlife crisis reinstallation - minus 5000
inconvenience finding people to dl network drivers at
re-installation - minus 200
inconvenience due to office apps not installed
when OS installs (separate install) - minus 500

others....you add them in.
...
...
total............................................. .....................................minus9750


So far on incomplete aggregate total Linux is far less "inconveniencing"
hehehehehe

Sorry its the pixie in me.

[aysiu]

I find the longer you use Windows, the more you find Windows-only programs that you "need," and the longer you use Ubuntu, the more you find native Linux programs that suit your needs... or maybe your "needs" just change.

[skwishybug]

Yes, 98% of the time. My primary bootup is to Ubuntu. I do a lot of "work" for a volunteer organization and Ubuntu/Linux provides me with all the tools I need. In-depth document editing, graphic editing, note taking, tracking resources, presentations, and more.

I found most of what I needed to do available to me in Open Office. The only problem I have is it doesn't handle tables well that break across pages, but Abiword covers that perfectly.

I keep an XP on dual boot for two reasons.
1. I know Illustrator and Photoshop better than Xara and Gimp so for time-sensitive graphics, I need to switch over, but that is changing

2. At work everything is MS and I sometimes have to figure out some macro programming for Excel at home and unfortunately the best environment to do that is in Excel itself.

Overall I have had very few "problems" with Ubuntu. Getting my wireless to work has been relatively painless (stupid Broadcomm) and with the latest update to Feisty, my remote even works. While I haven't had a chance to try it since the upgrade, the VGA out to allow me to do presentations from my laptop to a data projector hasen't worked to this point (something I don't do a lot of anyway).

[Shay Stephens]

I have a photography business and all three computers run ubuntu. We do everything with it.

[aysiu]

Just attaching a poll

[william_nbg]

I find the longer you use Windows, the more you find Windows-only programs that you "need," and the longer you use Ubuntu, the more you find native Linux programs that suit your needs... or maybe your "needs" just change.

I highly agree with that statement.

I'm a web-designer, and after 3 years of Linux pure I couldn't image going back to an MS environment.

For web graphics Gimp is fine.

For coding I'm more than content with Bluefish, and Quanta.

Have a local server set up just for testing.

There native ports for my favorite games.

Evolution is perfect for me.

[kilou]

Thanks for the poll, it will probably give a good picture of the opinions although probably that there are more people in favour of Ubuntu in this forum generally. I agree that I didn't spent too much time looking for linux based softwares that may replace Windows ones but I know there are a couple of those that I will never find because they are ""custom"" softwares made for very specific professional needs and they are simply Windows only.

I first thought about trying linux because Vista was coming and I didn't want to pay $$$ to try something new. Basically it was only a trial first, I didn't need to switch to Linux, and just wanted to try something new, something free. I had tried Linux Mandrake a few years ago and I was already amazed by how all this looked good at the time so I thought that now Linux would just be totally capable of replacing Windows. I started to look around, read tons of reviews about linux distros and most of them just pretty showed that Ubuntu was simply the best distro for me because it was said to be the most user friendly and newbie friendly Linux distros. Everything showed that it was totally capable to do as good but more likely much better than an XP environment. There are tons of reviews comparing OOffice and MSOffice and most say that OOffice is as efficient, just slightly slower (on Windows) than Office. Gimp is referred as a replacement for Photoshop etc etc so all in all I thought that it was time to switch because if you get the same thing for free, why not try?

Well now I know a little bit more about it. Trust me, I'm in no way saying Ubuntu or Linux is bad, buggy or whatever. It's just not enough productive in my experience as what I thought after reading all the articles and reviews about it. I'm sure you can be productive with it but it depends of your work and its environment. If your company work on Linux or if you don't really need to share documents etc with others then Linux is probably almost perfect. However if you work in a company that is working with XP, uses MSOffice and you need to share things with your colleagues (not simply PDFs but documents that must be editable etc), if you work with Excel macros extensively and you need to share the xls files with others (and I do...), if you need to communicate with other persons in the company that use Skype or MSN for conference calls etc.............it's quite hard to be productive with Linux! Not to mention when you have troubles with the OS itself on top of that.....

I'm still using Ubuntu because I could finally solve the hibernation and cpu scaling problems after months of trials. But I now use Windows to work...and quite funny, Ubuntu to play....not to play games of course but to play with the OS. Beryl was nice but I get TopDesk on XP so for me there is no productivity problem, the only feature I really require with Beryl is the Exposé-like function to switch between windows and TopDesk achieves that perfectly. There are also some free Exposé-like software for Windows too.....Windows doesn't mean that everything you get isn't free!!! I get better battery life with Notebook Hardware Control in XP that I do with an undervolted patched kernel in Ubuntu, hibernation/resume is faster in XP..............and of course all my programs do work. The only thing I miss from Ubuntu is the new look, the simplicity of Gnome.....and of course the lack of firewall/antispyware/firewall but honestly I only use free versions of these programs in XP and never had a single virus (some spyware yes but they are always removed so I really can't complain).

So for me now, Ubuntu is great....for fun but not to work......yet! But maybe in the future.......



I must also say that what XP really misses is a kind of forum like this one! It's true that the support from people here is amazing and probably has no "Windows equivalent"!! :)

[blackspyder]

Do I use Ubuntu at work? No the program we use to generate/login to/complete Repair Orders and the program we use to manipulate the truck ECM's are Windows only programs and they have enough issues of its own without trying to run it using WINE. Besides I hardly touch a computer at work.

But I do get things accomplished with Ubuntu like making graphics and Icons and recording music.

BTW you can manipulate vehicle ECM's using the command line. It just voids the warrenty if you dont use the manufacture's program.

[STREETURCHINE]

[oops hit the wrong quote button

[Tomosaur]

Kilou, Skpye works on Ubuntu, and there are programs capable of connecting to the MSN network (Gaim/Pidgin, and a whole host of others).

Document sharing - ok, maybe a problem, but only if the documents you share are MS propietary formats, which is just a bad idea imo. Have you approached your boss / IT dept to get them to switch to OpenOffice? I realise that in some cases OpenOffice just isnt an acceptible alternative, but for many of us it's great (I actually find it a lot better than MS Office).

[ssam]

i am student.

i use scientific linux (red hat derivative) on the lab workstations for data capture and analysis. nokia n800 (debian derivative) for taking lecture notes. and ubuntu on my laptop which i do all my uni work on.

[euler_fan]

I use Ubuntu 99% of the time. The only reason I currently have to boot into windows is to work with a projector (it's easier and cheaper than buying my own Linux compatible one.

Free video chat looks like another reason to boot into Windows unless someone can recommend a way around that.

[crstn_udrea]

Well, I did use LINUX for production, but not ubuntu. First of all I have to share an internet connection. Ubuntu wants me to setup a full fledged server+firewall to route A SINGLE PC. :D
Second of all ubuntu has the "widget redraw" problem. Third the video driver disables itself randomly.

Applications like OpenOffice don't count for the stability and/or functionality of Ubuntu.
And I won't even begin talking about Kubuntu. The effort is appreciated, but this is FAR from being a desktop choice.

[deanlinkous]

First of all I have to share an internet connection. Ubuntu wants me to setup a full fledged server+firewall to route A SINGLE PC. :D
one package - ipmasq is all you need



Second of all ubuntu has the "widget redraw" problem. Third the video driver disables itself randomly.
Sounds like you have a problem not ubuntu... :D

[KIAaze]

Free video chat looks like another reason to boot into Windows unless someone can recommend a way around that.

Well, Skype works under Ubuntu. I think it also has video support, altough I have never tried it since I don't have a webcam.
And a quick little search brought up this:
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Kopete%20Webcam%20Support&comzone=show

So I am quite sure that it's possible to use free video chat under Ubuntu.
I can't recommend you any in particular since I haven't tried them (except for normal chat), but a good solution certainly exists.

The hardest part will probably be to get the webcam drivers...

[EdThaSlayer]

I use Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and almost everything works(except the ATI drivers, which *won't* even allow me to play opengl game[fps of 256??]). Its all about using the right repos, which I get from the ubuntuguide site.

[Pocadotty]

I am a firmware developer for a small company, and I also do some hardware development for embedded systems. I am also an Electrical Computer Engineering student. Additionally I am an industrial musician.

I do my programming on Ubuntu in Java and C using eclipse and Netbeans. The speed and stability of Ubuntu is a major benefit when running resource hogging IDE's, compared with sometimes crawling speeds on Windows XP. The difference is so noticeable that i find myself significantly more productive on Ubuntu.

Some programs, like Pspice, AutoCAD, and MATLAB, I need windows for because I am unfamiliar with the open source equivalent programs... although i plan on changing that very soon. To solve this problem, I have turned to dual booting for a while, however now I am turning towards virtualization. With virtualization I can multitask between operating systems as easily as multitasking between applications.

I do most of my music stuff on Ubuntu, with the help of Ubuntu studio. There is a reasonably high variety of professional quality sound engineering programs available in the default 7.04 repos. What I like most about using Ubuntu for sound engineering is a reasonably low latency without the hassle of setting up and using a low-latency kernel. Without having to hassle with the kernel i achived a 28 fold improvement in latency times over windows on the same hardware, which is very noticeable, and very real. :guitar:

And all this good stuff is coming from a secure, fast, and free OS.... Hellz yeah!

I blame Ubuntu for turning me into a Linux fanatic :-P

[motin]

Been working with web development 98% using Ubuntu since Dapper Flight 4 (14 months ago). Saved a lot of times and earned more money that I could've with Windows.

The 2% is testing my webpages in i Windows XP installation inside VMWare, VirtualBox or some friend's computer - due to the massive amount of IE-only bugs and quirks that makes me loose a lot of time and money. I'd love to not have to do this, but I have to make my web pages work in IE as well.

[aysiu]

Have you considered using IEs4Linux for testing webpages in Internet Explorer?

[mungy]

I've been using ubuntu for my business since march 06.

[brooklyn88]

********Warning long post**************

I have to say that working with ubuntu is problematic somewhat for me. I am a recent user of ubuntu and use itrimarily for web surfing while in school (really playin with it though). But I have to say (in my opinion !!!) that like most computer users I never thought much about my OS. Unlike most people here who seem to see their OS as a life style and culture, I like most windows users see it as a TOOL that there and works to make my life easier. I never had a problem with MS, I never really thought of Microsoft that much my primary concern was and still is with the programs I use rather the OS. Applications makes the computer experience, not the OS for most people. Unlike many of the users here (in my opinion) most people don't expect the OS to be the tool to express themselves but the apps. Using Photoshop, dreamweaver, autocad etc are what most people do when their in front of their computers, so they usually don't care or think much about the OS and have no reason to. When someone is sitting in front of a computer in a windowless cubicle for 8 hours they don't care if the OS is giving money to company a or b but rather if they can get the job done and how fast they can get it done.

(to explain the above statement)
most computer users care primarily about the apps that they can use and are more loyal to their photoshop and autocads that they need to get their job done than to MS. Now most companies have deals with MS and since most users don't think about alternatives (except mac....only the creative people) the companies that make photoshop and autocad etc don't bother making their software for linux. The companies exist to make money and their loyal followings exist to use their software so their following use the OS that they need to. Also why would adobe or any other proprietary company make software to the linux company when the linux company openly states they don't want to PAY for software. So in turn most users don't use linux for work because the softwares that they use don't port to linux and they can't work without those softwares. Linux community is primarily more about the OS than the softwares and the outputs from those softwares, while most computer users are about the software and what the software can do for them, so the OS means nothing to them.
For example I use autocad to make layouts, then type up a report on it via MSword and import the layout from autocad to word, edit what I need to edit and then send it to acrobat and edit everything out and use some photoshop to add some finishing touches to the report. I have to do this at home and school and have to send pdfs and DWGs and docs to classmates back and forth for feedback and editing so I have to use windows for all my software needs.
As great as linux is, even if its better it still lacks what people get out of windows , not so much the OS but the softwares and compatibility with others. People/companies don't always use what is better and more efficient anyways, Ever heard of the DVORAK keyboard layout !!!!!!!!!!

sorry for long post and if its not completely legible wrote it in a hurry. feel free to respond but be nice http://ubuntuforums.org/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif
:)

[nanotube]

********Warning long post**************
Ever heard of the DVORAK keyboard layout !!!!!!!!!!

yes, i have. in fact, i've been typing on dvorak for several years now, and am quite happy with it. what was your point, again? :)

you are right that a lot of it is about the apps, and for some people who are tied to a particular software that is not ported to linux (e.g. autocad, like you), it makes sense to stick to windows. nobody is trying to convince you to dump autocad and switch to linux. :)

for the multitude of people who are lucky enough to not be tied to windows through unported apps, however (because their apps are ported to linux, or because as-good or better alternatives exist on linux), it is quite a sensible move to shift to linux, for the benefit of lower cost, more configurability, better workflow, better free software ecosystem, better community, and a host of other reasons that may or may not be relevant to every user, but are relevant to some subset thereof.

arguably, there are fewer people who are tied to windows through unported apps such as autocad, photoshop (the advanced features that aren't in gimp), whatever else, than there are people whose needs can be taken care of in full with software available for linux, either freely, or in commercial linux ports of the windows software.

i wasn't going to post, but i just couldn't let that dvorak dig slide. :)

[Shay Stephens]

+1 dvorak user here too!

[brooklyn88]

yes, i have. in fact, i've been typing on dvorak for several years now, and am quite happy with it. what was your point, again? :)

you are right that a lot of it is about the apps, and for some people who are tied to a particular software that is not ported to linux (e.g. autocad, like you), it makes sense to stick to windows. nobody is trying to convince you to dump autocad and switch to linux. :)

for the multitude of people who are lucky enough to not be tied to windows through unported apps, however (because their apps are ported to linux, or because as-good or better alternatives exist on linux), it is quite a sensible move to shift to linux, for the benefit of lower cost, more configurability, better workflow, better free software ecosystem, better community, and a host of other reasons that may or may not be relevant to every user, but are relevant to some subset thereof.

arguably, there are fewer people who are tied to windows through unported apps such as autocad, photoshop (the advanced features that aren't in gimp), whatever else, than there are people whose needs can be taken care of in full with software available for linux, either freely, or in commercial linux ports of the windows software.

i wasn't going to post, but i just couldn't let that dvorak dig slide. :)

My point on Dvorak is simply that just because something is more efficient and better (as linux may be to windows in terms of stability cost etc) doesn't mean people will move to it.It doesn't matter how much you tell people/teachers/professionals that qwerty is random and Dvorak is specially designed for English typing they won't switch because qwerty is the standard as windows has become for a lot of the apps that are in use in the professional world. You are right about everything you say, and I don't disagree with what you say. Overall though I was trying to say that most people won't use Ububtu/linux because they are stuck to their apps and their apps are on windows and will most likely remain there so they'll have no reason to switch since they most likely won't be able to work well on it (or at least they'll think that). For me for example it is hard to find ways to do some things on ubuntu just cause its hard to find the apps (though I try and keep finding some....not all). Linux seems to me at least (correct me if I'm wrong to be more about the OS than about the apps, windows people (majority who are plain computer users ) talk about using the software and tweaking them while linux users focus more on the OS. I may be wrong about that view since this is the only linux forum I follow and most talk here is about ubuntu (no surprise). sorry for any mistakes still had to type this in a hurry......very busy doing homework.

[slimdog360]

Gots the ubuntus on my laptop, works well.

[rockhoppr]

Perhaps the most important fight on at the moment is over open document standards.

HA

This is SO true.

In general I think the OpenSource movement can only have limited success but getting true Open Document standards in place would really propel Linux (or any platform) in usability.

In most cases I don't care if source is open or closed (I prefer open, of course) but locking up MY data in YOUR proprietary format is a real problem.

[VorDesigns]

I have worked with Ubuntu but I predominantly use it for learning. I can't yet afford to put it on new equipment but the extended life that Linux in general has given older equipment makes it well worth the effort.

[mknepher]

My experience:

I've been using Linux almost exclusively at home for about years now. I've had a Windows partition on one machine for games, but I've hardly used it in the past year. I've had a Win2K vmware machine for Dreamweaver work, but I now have it running under wine, so haven't used that in a while. My wife has been using Linux exclusively at home for the same amount of time. I've primarily run Fedora on the desktop systems, though I've played about with various distros under vmware. I'm thinking about upgrading to feisty, however.

I went back to school to get my teaching credential and got a laptop last fall, and set up a dual boot with edgy, then feisty. I only boot into Windows XP occasionally, primarily when I need to plug in to a projector at school. Suspend has been problematic using both ubuntu and windows. The system runs a bit warmer under windows than under linux (the whole thing overheated and died one day while I was working in Windows, playing around with Visual Studio - I had to send it in for repairs).

For school, I've had to start using presentation software. The first one I did was in OOo Impress, and I was able to easily create a very nice presentation with music and image transitions. But with collaborative projects, I've had to use PowerPoint. Usability and functionality seem fairly even between the two (PowerPoint 2003 and OOo Impress 2.0, at any rate - PowerPoint 2000 was pretty lacking compared to either of those) but I've never been able to satisfactorily recreate that first OOo slideshow in PowerPoint.

At work (I'm a sysadmin/web developer), I primarily use linux. I use bluefish for most of my web development, and occasionally Dreamweaver (some of our sites were originally set up with DW templates, and I also like using the WYSIWYG for rapid development). I use openoffice.org to lay out a monthly pdf newsletter our company puts out. For a lot of uses, OO.o Writer is much more usable and powerful than Word. The thing that has kept us as a company (small, 12-15 people) from switching to OOo is Excel. The featureset of OOo's spreadsheet just doesn't cover some of the things our research analysts need, and the charting functionality is pretty crap. So I need to occasionally run MS Office under crossover wine when I need perfect compatibility with shared documents (like importing charts from Excel to the OOo-based newsletter).

I recently got a new system, which came with Vista. I worked with it exclusively for about 2-3 weeks. I finally had to put feisty on (I'm too accustomed to Gnome), and I've barely touched Vista since.

[rai4shu2]

I'm not really productive with Ubuntu, but that's really more my fault than Ubuntu's.

[MOS95B]

I'm hobbying in Ubuntu. Does that count for anything??

I have it installed at home, so no work being done.

[groggyboy]

I wiped Windows from my computer about three months back, and I haven't looked back since. Two major things were keeping from doing that: games and using s-video. I've since got the s-video on Ubuntu working, and games I've been able to do without. I was in university, and I was using Ubuntu to write my papers and do my research anyways. I never used Windows for work, so aside from the two things I mentioned, I never really had a need for Redmond's OS.

Now that school's done, I pretty much just tinker with Ubuntu (and other linux distros). If I need to game, I try Wine, or I play online Flash games.

[Foxmike]

I answered "Other" because very few things I do with my Ubuntu machine is productive. Well.. untrue since I manage my pictures, retouch them, and doing a bit of shell scripting for job (but very few, really). Well, finally I guess I could answer that I am productive!:) I just like discovering what's in it.

regards,

FM

[Nikron]

I do my homework... In OO writer..

[hurt]

I really don't have a lot of time to work on ubuntu, I do daily task on it around the house with the wireless, but I haven't scripted much in it(like i know how to anyway) . Once i graduated I might have to work with linux.

[n0dl]

I have *nix on all of my computers at home (well... one is OSX... It has Unix underpinnings but not really unix at all). In any case Ever since the fan on my main computer crapped out Ive been using my laptop (which works great with ubuntu). Ive been using ubuntu and *nix in general since Hoary and found it to be reliable. I mostly stay with the stable (except for my main box which I use for programming among other things) but that runs slackware, with nothing but bleeding edge software, drivers, heck... even the kernel is bleeding edge (i cant remember how many times ive recompiled my kernel on that thing in the last three months). In any case, I have found *nix to be quite reliable so long as you stay away from the testing and bleeding edge (Bleeding edge FreeBSD = Not so fun as it sounds).

[catflea]

I use linux for all the stuff I do, although I work for a large company (who are the biggest purchaser of MS products in the world) I still do all "my" stuff, including all my uni work on Linux - I'm lucky because all the uni systems have OO on them!

[brim4brim]

I use Ubuntu at home, we have one machine running it in the IT department.

I've always been a firm believer that an OS should just work and you shouldn't have to learn to use it. I do learn how to use the terminal and command line in windows but only because I work in IT. Other people should never have to use it IMO and for general tasks, I always prefer a GUI.

Since Feisty Fawn, I have not changed my grub listings to make windows default boot and the only reason I've booted into windows was to play HL2 and to confirm that my wireless router was acting up and not my laptop.

I'm learning to program in Perl in Ubuntu. I don't know if that counts as earning a living but I am productive on Ubuntu and more so than on Windows as I enjoy using it more as I like the Gnome display manager and that projects priorities.

[Timbo78]

I use it at home as an alternative to XP. It suits my needs as i only use my PC for internet, email and ripping/storing/playing music. I still have XP installed and use it for games mainly, occasionally i need to use XP to update my iPod.

Ubuntu is good for my PC use as it is more secure than XP when online. Plus i like the fact that all of the bits & pieces of software you want or need are easily obtainable, usable and free.

I have not experienced any instability with Ubuntu and have been using it since 6.10

[argie]

I'm using 6.06 on both computers. It does all I need. I'm a Math Student.

[ac7ss]

I have a 'family' desktop that runs linux only for the grandkids and general editing/serfing.
I have an older 'personal' desktop that runs dual boot in the back room for the occasional PC game or shockwave app for me and my wife mainly.
I have a laptop that is strictly my use, running linux. This is the one that I use for offsite business applications. I use it to edit Word, Excel etc. and watch movies.

The IT department at work would love to use linux. However, since MS is a major client (in a way), we are politically motivated to us MS at the worksites. (It is unbelievable the security holes around here.) We are not even allowed to install firefox (officially).

[pyros]

I voted other, because while I don't "work" on Ubuntu (in the sense that I am making any money) I do *everything* on it, save for the single game (which I actually play regularly) for which I still need windows. I've been using Ubuntu (starting with dapper pre-releases) on my desktop for more than a year now.

When my mother needed to set up her "new" computer for chat/email/internet, I installed Ubuntu. That's been running without a hitch for almost a year.

When my sister's new dell played host to a remarkably malignant worm last fall and she realized that her xp install cd was MIA, Ubuntu. Haven't touched it since.

When I received a new AMD Turion based notebook this Christmas-- before I even ran the OOBE wizard for windows, I booted off of an edgy cd and installed Ubuntu, it resized the drive, installed Ubuntu, set grub up for dual boot, and here I am, almost 6 months to the day, happily cranking away.

At work, I have no choice. I use windows. You want to talk about stability, reliability, ask me about the constant lockups, the lost data; ask me about those 4 days last year when a 2000 seat center was ground to a halt by a single virus-- resulting in lost wages for the employees, and lost revenue for the business-- go on ask me. When I have any say in the matter, I always choose Ubuntu.

As a professional technician, I admit that I may have some small edge of others, but speaking as the unofficial neighborhood computer guy, I can testify that I get far more "trouble tickets" from window users than the Ubuntu users.

[Alterax]

I do make my living using Ubuntu.

I work at several businesses, as I am a consultant. All of my own work is done using Ubuntu systems. This includes development of solutions, drafting of new ideas, billing, creating documentation, and even keeping up with the expenses as I go from site to site.

At each of the offices I serve, I often recommend Linux solutions, integrating them into existing Windows networks. For servers, I either use Ubuntu server or Debian. For desktops, Ubuntu seems to fit the bill just fine.

That doesn't mean that I solely focus on Linux/Ubuntu. My focus is on the network as a whole; Linux and Ubuntu, just like Windows, are merely tools that I use to get what the clients are wanting out of the network.

--Alterax

[Cannaregio]

Yes, now I am.
I keep a dapper laptop juts in order to work reliably and without surprises :-)

But I'm using Feisty on all other boxes, for the fun of it and maybe because I like to risk and finetune everything in sight.
I have slowly solved all the small problems I had updating (nvidia resolution, QTEK-pda, bluetooth-GPS...), it was fun and instructive, and I managed it thanks to the web and thanks to these messageboards.
Moreover I have installed ubuntu on my kids and my wife boxes, and they also all "work" with ubuntu now: searching, writing, producing stuff for their classes, whatever.

Admittedly my kids' box still has a dual boot for "game playing" purposes (they like oblivion and combat mission (http://www.battlefront.com/products/cmbb/cmbb.html)), but I notice that they use windows less and less now, even for their own games, and that they are enjoying the (very complex) vmware (or even wine) porting of every game in sight... they prefer to spend some hours porting a game through a virtual box than to play that very game, go figure, guess they have got the 'GNU/Linux fever', and the drang to finetune continuously. Also they told me that some of their school-mates have switched to MACs and ubuntu as well, so it looks like a general (small but steady) trend to ditch vista... at least in Europe.

Yes, games are still a weak point for GNU/Linux. However I deleted my xp partition on the box I'm using right now when I discovered that neverwinternights and all its additions DO run linux native (http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/linuxclient.html) :-)

[starcraft.man]

Hmmm, I tend to disagree with the OP of this thread. Ubuntu has been completely stable for me with two minor exceptions 1) Two or three times beryl crashed me, I don't count that cuz Beryl is still being fixed/debugged and I installed it knowing that it isn't completely stable. 2) I crashed my comp once or twice when I was just overloading it (was doing once an entire transcoding of a 3 hour movie, rendering a minor thing, browsing web and listening to an audio podcast all on my p4 no HT before it crashed :p). Other than those two instances where I crashed it, I haven't had a single problem after I set everything up.

Anyway, yes Ubuntu is my main platform, and while I don't really make any money now from work I do on it, in all likelihood (barring some unforeseeable event) I shall be using it as a platform for what I do to earn my living.

[EagleRock]

Well, I'm relatively new to Ubuntu myself, but I plan on using it for my home desktop use as much as possible. I've used Debian for years for my personal server (fileserver, web server, etc.). I did want to get into using Linux as a Desktop GUI OS instead of the command line that I usually use Debian with. My goal, hopefully, will be to use Wine for as many games as possible in Linux, as well as using OpenOffice to get away from MS Office.

Luckily, I'll be able to keep my "playing" restricted to Debian :-).

[aysiu]

This is how it's looking so far:
Yes. I'm productive on Ubuntu but don't earn money from Ubuntu "work." 39.94%
Yes. I get stuff done in Ubuntu, but I still rely on Windows for some tasks. 23.23%
Yes. I earn part of my living using Ubuntu 14.16%
Yes. In fact, I use Ubuntu to earn a living 13.31%
Not really. Ubuntu isn't functioning for me, but the programs sound good in theory. 3.68%
Not really. The programs in Ubuntu function properly, but they aren't up to snuff. 2.83%
Other (Please explain) 2.83% That's 67.41% of users active in the community cafe who are either productive in Ubuntu or productive and earning a living from Ubuntu. Not bad for a supposedly "hobbyist OS."

[ukripper]

I do most of my stuff on Ubuntu and use XP just for gaming and work purposes where I have no choice given but have to use MS SQL. Perhaps oneday I would be able to use it from within ubuntu itself except using VMwre or Virtualbox. But where as music to programming is concerned ubuntu is my only best friend.;:popcorn:

[ukripper]

Looks impressive now

Yes. I'm productive on Ubuntu but don't earn money from Ubuntu "work." 146 40.22%

[frobroj]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience. May be time to look for a new computer.

I use Ubuntu for both work and at home and am more than pleased with its abilities and reliability. Yes there are some rough edges but the lightning speed at which Ubuntu is maturing makes it tough to even get used to these peckadillos. Once you start to get used to something not functioning properly and start to work around it the wonderful hardworking folks in the Ubuntu/Debian community have fixed it.

In my experience I have found very few rough edges(especially with Feisty). As for stability... Wow I never have to reboot it! Unlike my domain connected Windows XP vmware machine. In fact I have had a few servers that have over a year of uptime and growing(they would have been up longer but we had a power outage). The only times I have had issues with freezing or Ubuntu running unstably was when I had actual hardware issues. Once it was my graphics card and another was memory.

If I were to give you one good reason to stick it out and work through your issues it would be because of the Community! The Ubuntu community is one of the most dynamic and helpful communities I have had the pleasure of being involved with. These folks aren't just going to help you with your problems but they will take the time to help you understand the problem and to learn the system. If you love to learn then this is a great distro to work with.

I will say that I have not had good luck with hibernating on my laptop(I admit its a major rough edge). But I just shutdown the laptop instead. I guess I am not mobile enough for this to be an issue for me. Keep in mind that if you want perfect functionality then you should look to a product that was built specifically for your OS www.dell.com/open.

Hope you do some searching on the forums to find the root cause of your concerns. Remember when you assume that is the os you make an *** out of U and ME(wow I sound like my third grade teacher)...

Good luck. Feel free to send me a message if there is anything I can help you with or if you would like me to keep my eyes peeled for any particular solutions.

[glotz]

If you still want to try Ubuntu and don't mind to have a bit of "outdated" software, I suggest you go with Dapper, which is really rock-solid.+1

[J77]

I'm a scientist, I use it at work -- although I also have my laptop with windows for listening ot the radio on :)

[hessiess]

i dont have a job, so its imposoble to earn any mony with it. i have been usung 100% ubuntu for quite a long time now

[wersdaluv]

At this point in time, should Ubuntu still be viewed as a "Hobbyist OS" since much has improved?

[thisllub]

Not only do I rely on it but by the end of the year hundreds will depend on webservers running Ubuntu that I have set up.

Why Ubuntu?

It was the first distro I tried that I didn't have to rebuild Apache & PHP to get all the other libraries I needed. The compile and rebuild was a 4 hour process.

Ubuntu isn't the "best" distro but I can't think of one that is noticeably better. Along with SUSE ,Debian and Fedora / Redhat it does the job briliantly.

[JurB]

Yes, i create and manage our company website with ubuntu.
But we still need windows for our accounting software.

[qazwsx]

My stepmother use Kubuntu. She is a freelance journalist (writing and photos. Yep just those things no image manipulation etc).
I am pretty sure that she dosen't know that she runs Linux :)


I am a student so I don't actually earn money (100% Kubuntu user).

[mchaggis]

I have used linux as my main OS of choise for about 7years now. I have gone from Redhat to Mandrake / Mandrivia (all various versions) and now I am entering my 3rd month of using Ubuntu.

I must say that it has become a lot easier over the years and I have ported more and more of my working day over to it. In the early days I used to Outlook, then evolution came along... Now adays I still use evolution, but have now shifted my personal email to Thunderbird and am loving it.

My only greif with Ubuntu has to be my network card and the fact that the speakers on my laptop don't play sound (headphones yes, speakers no :confused:) but compare that to the early days of trying to get X going and any form of sound other than a beep was a miracle.

I still dual boot... Well I do like gaming and while linux in general has come a long way in the ways of 3d graphics, it's still not quite there, but I believe that games developers must shoulder some of the blame for this.

All in all Ubuntu has offered me the best level of experience than when I first moved to Mandrake, lets hope the feeling lasts longer than it did with Mandrake. The two biggest things I have had to get used to are:
1) sudo'ing everything (will admit to one of my first commands executed was sudo passwd)
2) Gnome desktop. I have been a fan of KDE since it's early releases, but I have insisted that I must resist the move to kbuntu and to be honest, I'm liking it. Gnome really has come a long way to.


The main thing to remember is that there is a lot of choice out there, and the great thing about linux is that if you don't like the way it works, you can fix it :)

[jreis]

Well i use (some days) ubuntu in 90% of my daily activity.

The problem starts when i have to work with other that only use windows:

my designer uses adobe photoshop, and sometimes i have to use photoshop also under windows, because The GIMP doesn't render well some layers.
my content maneger uses the MSOffice package. Some times i have problems importing to open office.
Some times when i'm making presentations i notice that and i say "Open your browser!", the people assisting ask me "what's that?", and i need to say "Open your IE". Now just imagine what happens when i show them my gnome interface ... :confused:
when i'm preparing the CSS script, well we all know the problems of IE, so i need to see it under MSWindows environment.
i also need it to access a VPN through a paid VPN client, this is mandatory for one of my hosting services


I'm converted to ubuntu.But if we where living in an ideal world, i belive that i could stop using Bill's OS. But this is not an ideal world :(

[faraaz]

Uh...I'd say that I use Ubuntu for pretty much everything. The stuff that doesn't work, there's always VirtualBox for things like syncing my phone with my computer.

However, the problem for me is that the printer in our university campus is wirelessly networked with our computers, and its Windows ONLY...so at the moment I'm trying to get it working within Linux through installing the drivers on my VirtualBox XP installation...

But I am impressed so far with how efficient Ubuntu is. Either everything works out of the box, or there's a sticky on the forums telling you how to fix it...

[Jbloudg20]

I use Fedora when I want to get work done. Its much more reliable, and stable.

[glotz]

sez a dude who's on an OS called 'edgy'...

[tombott]

I use Fedora when I want to get work done. Its much more reliable, and stable.

Care to enlighten us as to your reasons?

I have to say Ubuntu is the most reliable OS for a Desktop I have ever used.

[danketchpel]

I had to vote "other" as none of the responses matched exactly.

I can get "routine stuff" done on Ubuntu but most of my critical "work" programs won't run on it.

I work in an engineering and design capacity at my own plastics manufacturing company. I have been looking at various Linux distros for about 5-6 years with the hope that someday I can switch from Bill's stuff to something better. Ubuntu is by far the best I've run yet.

What is keeping me/us from "really working" with Ubuntu are the following programs which are required for us to "work".

1. Solidworks (3D solid modeling)
2. MasterCAM (toolpath and G-code generation for CNC machining)
3. Quickbooks Pro (accounting)
4. PLC programming software (ladder logic programming)

Most everything else we could get done with the existing programs available for Ubuntu.

So for now, I'm still in the evaluation mode. I try to use it as much as I can but primarily on dual boot or seperate systems. I currently have 3 systems dual booting Ubuntu.

I'm patiently waiting for the day I can "really work with Ubuntu"......, it's not the fault of the OS, it's more an issue support programs. It's the same reason why Apple made their products able to run MS programs. The size of the "market" dictates where developers put their efforts.

[Arwen]

I use Solaris and Debian at school for programming.I haven't logged in to XP since 17-07-2007(I installed ubuntu 7.04 :-P) and hopefully till now everything is fine.I write programs in c,c++,haskell,prolog and java so gcc,g++,hugs,swi and eclipse are all I really need for work.I always found devc++ and visual studio irritating.Recently I also installed codeblocks.Cool tool:-)
Needless to say I use ubuntu for every casual task a normal user does.I surf,chat,print,listen,watch,manage files to mp3players and mobile without problem now:-D

[insane_alien]

i've used ubuntu to create a few papers i submitted for publishing. i also use to number crunch results of experiments and perform the analyses of the results.

[Ripfox]

I think I tend to agree with you. Lately, Ubuntu has become far too unreliable, mostly because the devs want to indroduce too many new features without enough testing. If you still want to try Ubuntu and don't mind to have a bit of "outdated" software, I suggest you go with Dapper, which is really rock-solid. Also, there a many many many Linux distros out there, not only Ubuntu ;)

I find Ubuntu to be very reliable, if I wait until the official release. I have had only minor problems, and the ones I have had have been sorted out fairly easily. Unreliable? Not here.

[macogw]

Most of the programs that I use for work are linux-based (and if there is a windows-version it's usually outdated). I use Ubuntu as a virtual guest in XP, but only because the computer came with windows pre-installed, but I could have lived without it. The biggest issue is that a lot of people use msoffice to write things that they expect me to read and correct and OO is not always a good solution. By the way, is there a way to make pdf-forms under linux?

I think LaTeX with the hyperref package can do forms. If it's not hyperref, it's some other package, but I'm sure 99% sure LaTeX (well, pdftex) can do it.

Ubuntu's very reliable for me. It's gotten more reliable over time (as support for my hardware has improved). It used to lock up, but Feisty doesn't. Debian Etch does. I think a buggy driver for my chipset (Intel i945GM) was likely to be the problem and that Debian still has that version. I used to need to put options in /etc/modules to make my sound work on every boot and to get my SD card reader working, but it all works perfectly now.

I don't use Ubuntu for my job, but I use it for school. All my notes are taken on my computer, and all my programming is done on here. The programming that isn't done on here is done at work where I use Cygwin to get a proper Unix environment for Python.

[montres]

I have found ubuntu to be quite reliable, once i solved the initial problems i encountered. I use ubuntu for virtually everything. The only reason i have retained the dual boot option is a programm called visio, which i have to use occasionally. I can't say i have ever tried to run it under ubuntu, though. So, yes, I really am working with ubuntu.

[BDNiner]

I am not running ubuntu 100%, it is very problematic on the dell inspiron 1100 laptop i use for work. There are some applications that i have not found replacements for, so i am trying to run them in a virtual machine using Virtual Box. Better use of USB ports would be great for ubuntu. None of my usb devices work in ubuntu. My blackberry doesn't work, ubuntu detects it but it won't charge it. i think that might have more to do with how old my laptop is rather than the OS. Also none of my audio production usb and midi devices work. i have 2 midi controllers and a usb external sound card and they all crash my laptop and my desktop when i plug them in.

[tombott]

I am not running ubuntu 100%, it is very problematic on the dell inspiron 1100 laptop i use for work. There are some applications that i have not found replacements for, so i am trying to run them in a virtual machine using Virtual Box. Better use of USB ports would be great for ubuntu. None of my usb devices work in ubuntu. My blackberry doesn't work, ubuntu detects it but it won't charge it. i think that might have more to do with how old my laptop is rather than the OS. Also none of my audio production usb and midi devices work. i have 2 midi controllers and a usb external sound card and they all crash my laptop and my desktop when i plug them in.

You have to install a Blackberry driver under Windows for your PC / Laptop to charge your Blackberry.
The same applies for Linux.
Blackberry don't provide a Linux driver.
There is a 3rd party driver for Linux but I never got it to work so just carry my charger with me these days.

[multifaceted]

I probably would use use Ubuntu to earn a living but, unfortunately, I work for someone else and they use WinXP in the workplace. And unless some developer comes up with a viable alternative to AutoCAD, I will still need to use WinXP.

What a shame, I do use Ubuntu for ALL of my computing needs and tasks at home. I haven't booted up Windows in over a month, no need to... it runs to slow and is too problematic compared to what I am used to in Ubuntu. I wish I had the speed and flexibility of Ubuntu/Linux in the workplace!

[BDNiner]

You have to install a Blackberry driver under Windows for your PC / Laptop to charge your Blackberry.
The same applies for Linux.
Blackberry don't provide a Linux driver.
There is a 3rd party driver for Linux but I never got it to work so just carry my charger with me these days.

yes i know i have it installed under xp and under ubuntu. it shows up in the device manager but when i try to use the vzaccess software it says that it cannot detect a blackberry connected to the computer. i have tried the blackberry solution for linux but it doesn't work. it is detected by my computer but it won't charge, the charge symbol appears and then quickly disappears.

If i can find a way to get vzaccess to work in a virtual machine then i will switch, that way i have have internet where ever i go.

[jobsonandrew]

I can really see what you mean.. not so much about the stability, because I rarely experience serious crashes in Ubuntu 7.10 64bit.. But because of the fact that arount 50% of the time, I find myself trying to get something to work.

I think like every OS/Distro there are advantages and disadvantages, it is certainly advantageous to have a pre installed office suite, so long as you dont want to share complex documents with MS Office (as a side note, why oh why is the 'Ubuntu version' of open office different from the 'official' version?!?).

Certain things work much better in Ubuntu than windows, like watching videos.. Totem is fantastically simple, like a ferarri.. I actually had a more pleasant experience using samba than I did trying to get Windows 2000 to share directories on my home server (mystery password dialogs galore from Windows 2000 Pro).

What I dont understand, though, is how people complain about Windows... you're probably going to think I'm crazy, but so much stuff 'Just Works' in Windows.. I mean, when you think about what doesnt 'just work' in Linux distros:

Suspend/Hibernate
Unending amounts of hardware
File Sharing
Printing
3D acceleration
Wireless networking
WPA
Laptop LCD brightness
Sound
Loads of others


But whats really frustrating is.. Why dont they focus on this stuff! all the time we see automatic updates for silly little packages that are probably hardly ever used, when you STILL have to edit a config file to get samba behaving like a windows share.. which really puts people off..

I dont really care that Compiz or other flashy desktop effects are 'included out of the box' when my printer is a pain to set up, or if my computer hangs on a flashing cursor when I try to make it hibernate..

Ok so a lot of these usability problems could be blamed on desktop environments like GNOME and KDE not supplying us with useful, easy, helpful frontends to edit our config files for us, but hardware issues can make a distro unusable.

I'll stop my rant now but this is how I've felt about Ubuntu for a long time; I like using it, it is a fantastic piece of work, and personally I dont mind the odd headache here and there getting something to work (you still have to do that in other OSes) after all thats what makes it fun, but there comes a point where the fixing and tweaking takes over the actual usability of the machine, and just when you think you've got everything working, something else crops up, and something else.. and when you stand back it just seems like 'getting this working under Linux' is all you do.

So if Ubuntu developers are reading this... Please, when the time comes for you to release 'Extatic Elephant' or 'Dopey Dolphin', concentrate on making the fundamentals work, like power management, laptop display brightness and wireless.. But most of all, if Ubuntu is ever to become mainstream, you have to shield us as much as possible from any editing of config files, because it scares away a lot of users

[LaRoza]

I use it daily and solely for all my computing needs.

[argie]

I can really see what you mean.. not so much about the stability, because I rarely experience serious crashes in Ubuntu 7.10 64bit.. But because of the fact that arount 50% of the time, I find myself trying to get something to work.

I think like every OS/Distro there are advantages and disadvantages, it is certainly advantageous to have a pre installed office suite, so long as you dont want to share complex documents with MS Office (as a side note, why oh why is the 'Ubuntu version' of open office different from the 'official' version?!?).

Certain things work much better in Ubuntu than windows, like watching videos.. Totem is fantastically simple, like a ferarri.. I actually had a more pleasant experience using samba than I did trying to get Windows 2000 to share directories on my home server (mystery password dialogs galore from Windows 2000 Pro).

What I dont understand, though, is how people complain about Windows... you're probably going to think I'm crazy, but so much stuff 'Just Works' in Windows.. I mean, when you think about what doesnt 'just work' in Linux distros:

Suspend/Hibernate
Unending amounts of hardware
File Sharing
Printing
3D acceleration
Wireless networking
WPA
Laptop LCD brightness
Sound
Loads of others


But whats really frustrating is.. Why dont they focus on this stuff! all the time we see automatic updates for silly little packages that are probably hardly ever used, when you STILL have to edit a config file to get samba behaving like a windows share.. which really puts people off..

I dont really care that Compiz or other flashy desktop effects are 'included out of the box' when my printer is a pain to set up, or if my computer hangs on a flashing cursor when I try to make it hibernate..


The reason could be that your experience is atypical, perhaps? Or maybe mine is. I have Ubuntu 64-bit, and all of those except for WPA (I haven't tested it) work perfectly out of the box. When I wanted to install my Epson Stylus C45, I just had to plug it in and open the Printer box, it was recognised so easily. It was amazing!

That's what really amazes me, everything works out of the box. Or maybe it's just the way it is for me, I've installed Windows on my computers for ages and it was hell. Maybe things have changed with Vista, but up until XP things aren't pretty. I was blown away when I could just install the whole OS with minimal intervention. I installed Ubuntu 64-bit just a couple of days ago and I was just thinking: "I'm browsing the forums while the OS installs in the other workspace" and it struck me how amazing that was. Then I boot up and everything just works.

I was so amazed, man.

[jobsonandrew]

The reason could be that your experience is atypical, perhaps? Or maybe mine is. I have Ubuntu 64-bit, and all of those except for WPA (I haven't tested it) work perfectly out of the box. When I wanted to install my Epson Stylus C45, I just had to plug it in and open the Printer box, it was recognised so easily. It was amazing!

I had written those merely as exaples of things I have seen... they seem to be the most typical things that people ask about.

I was also massively impressed with Ubuntu as my laptop fired up with next to no help (compared to windows) all I really had to do was fix wireless and 3d acceleration.. and luckily, the community is so rich that there are pages and pages (and even entire sites) dedicated to the exact make and model of my laptop!! (www.ubuntu1501.com).

I was merely pointing out the fundamental stuff that people have problems with when installing Ubuntu.. not necessarily my personal experiences

[argie]

I had written those merely as exaples of things I have seen... they seem to be the most typical things that people ask about.

I was also massively impressed with Ubuntu as my laptop fired up with next to no help (compared to windows) all I really had to do was fix wireless and 3d acceleration.. and luckily, the community is so rich that there are pages and pages (and even entire sites) dedicated to the exact make and model of my laptop!! (www.ubuntu1501.com).

I was merely pointing out the fundamental stuff that people have problems with when installing Ubuntu.. not necessarily my personal experiences

Ah, I see just what you mean. My mistake. But there's a thing, when there's trouble with hardware under Windows, people blame the hardware or the manufacturers because it is assumed that the hardware must work for Windows (the most used desktop OS) Anyway, here's a little anecdote that may help explain what I mean.

I have a friend who has an old external hard drive. It has a power cable and stuff. When I was at his place, he plugged in the drive to my laptop running Ubuntu and when it didn't work he said it was because I was using Linux. When I rebooted to Windows, and it still didn't work, he checked the drive, and then saw that it didn't have power. (The power cable is separate from the usb cable).

Look at any complaints about ATi under windows. People are talking about how bad their drivers are. They don't say "Windows doesn't support ATi cards". They say "ATi's drivers suck". But strangely the same doesn't extend to Linux. And the poor BSD guys, they have it worse than us.

[Mad_Dawg]

Sadly, Kubuntu is just a hobby for me to tinker with. My experience has been that it hasn't lived upto its potential in the 'ease of use' departments. After a month and a half, I still can't print a thing.

[Pethegreat]

I use Ubuntu for all my computer related needs. I use it to check on my bank account, I use it to buy things off of the internet, I use it to sell things on ebay. I would much rather submit sensitive information on a Linux OS than on a windows OS. I know some virus is not going to grab my bank account number on Linux.

[Flying caveman]

I never used Windows to make a living either. So, I don't see what the point of this is.

[StubbsPKS]

Sadly, I had to answer "Yes. I'm productive on Ubuntu but don't earn money from Ubuntu "work."""

I may not be earning money with the work I do in ubuntu, but I am earning my MSc Degree in Advanced Networking with the work I do in it.

I've found that I can do everything I need to in order to be productive in Ubuntu, AND I don't have the temptation to play games bc they require me to use wine (altho I do have a better frame rate with WoW under wine than I do in windows....).

[SomeGuyDude]

I don't work in a computer field (I'm a writer), so maybe I don't really count, but I do indeed do all of my work on Ubuntu. However, I chose the second option because I can use OpenOffice on anything and, sadly, I also have a completely non-computer job at the time.

[TeaSwigger]

I don't work in a computer field (I'm a writer), so maybe I don't really count, but I do indeed do all of my work on Ubuntu. However, I chose the second option because I can use OpenOffice on anything and, sadly, I also have a completely non-computer job at the time.

That's mainly what I use mine for, writing. I like to write in "heirarchical note managers" like KeyNote (unfortunately Windows only but mostly runs in WINE) or the cross-platform NoteCase. Then if I'm finalizing or sending anything I can put the text in OpenOffice or AbiWord for Word compatability.
The second use is music, and thirdly some website work.

Aside from my old HP scanner I no longer need Windows for anything.

[KThrace]

I'm an Engineer specializing in hardware design. Modelsim, Xilinx, Synplicity all run in Ubuntu, so from a purely work-related view, I can work fine in Linux.

[ellis rowell]

Being a pensioner I do not have to earn a living, but I do manage five domains. I am also Secretary local branch of a national club which I also run the website for. I did this under Windows as well but am much happier using Ubuntu. I still keep a Windows laptop to control specialist printers which I cannot get to work under Ubuntu, but all the preparation is done with Ubuntu.

[Lord Illidan]

I'm studying for a degree in BSc ICT now..and I don't have a single Windows computer in the house.
I'd say I am definitely using Ubuntu..how much I'm working with it is another matter..damn ut2004 and gnome-sudoku.:lolflag:

[mrgnash]

I use Ubuntu 8.04 as my production environment without too many troubles at all.

[daverich]

I use ubuntu for most of my work, although video editing is the one bit which has been a complete pain.

MainActor is now not available and Kdenlive is as buggy as a buggy thing so I may have to use windows for that for the time being.



Kind regards

Dave Rich

[swoll1980]

To me Ubuntu is like a abusive relationship. I keep looking for reasons to keep it even though it may be not be the best solution. I like the community and the ideas behind it so much that I over look the fact that it is extreamly unstable. When it's working it's the coolest thing in the world. but it crashes like 3 times a day not little crashes either the whole system locks up and I have to hard stop it. On top of that firefox crashes every 15 minutes (I could set my watch to it) when I log off nautilus hangs so when I go to log back in theres no desktop I can't do anything I have to go into the terminal kill nautilus then log back in. The wireless on ubuntu often kills my entire network I have to unplug the router and plug it back in to get it to work again. Dispite all this I refuse to give up on it . my girlfriend thinks I'm insane. I just tell her she's not perfect either and I haven't given up on her yet. Hopefully this stuff gets ironed out in 8.4

[bufsabre666]

once i have everything set up the way i like and have all my programs working, i can get all my school work done fast, programing in eclipse, doing ms office papers, and of course al other stuff in firefox

plus everything else pretty much works so it can distract me but i still get alot more done than in windows

[CJ56]

Totally - have been for nearly a year

Since I'm a writer, of course, it's not as if I need much in the way of fancy applications. OpenOffice is fine, with Thunderbird & Seamonkey for the internet. I use Picasa for the family photos, Audacious to play sound files, VLC for DVDs & er, that's about it. A standalone desktop with wired ethernet also cuts down on potential snags (I must be the last person in the country with such a primitive setup).

But the great thing about Ubuntu is that works efficiently & in a grown-up way - none of those ridiculous Fisher-Price graphics & we-know-what's-best-for-you mentality of Window$

And (and this is not a small thing) since I have to look at my screen most days for long periods of time, it's a real pleasure to be able infinitely to tweak the desktop & the eye-candy to suit my mood. GUI fatigue is a thing of the past... :cool:

[R_U_Q_R_U]

I have Ubuntu 7.10 running as a file server on an old PIII machine I built. Never crashes and does what I need. I have 7.10 on a Dell D600 laptop. Mainly used for web surfing and email. I like it and it never gives any problems. I like using Ubuntu because it is free (as in beer) and I don't have to mess with it much.

For "real" work, I use Win XP. Mainly because of Office 2007 and the Adobe CS suite. There is nothing in Linux that can beat Adobe InDesign -- not even close.

[dgray_from_dc]

I use Linux for all of my day-to-day personal computing tasks. I have one Dual-boot machine for a few of the games I haven't tried in Wine yet. I'll admit, Linux can require quite a bit of tweaking, but for me that's because I can't leave a working system alone. I'm always tinkering with my Linux boxes and invariably end up breaking something. Then again, I do the same thing in Windows.

[quinnten83]

I use ubuntu for most of my work, although video editing is the one bit which has been a complete pain.

MainActor is now not available and Kdenlive is as buggy as a buggy thing so I may have to use windows for that for the time being.



Kind regards

Dave Rich

Cinelerra not an option?

[MONODA]

I am assuming that you have compiz fusion enabled... remember, it is still beta software and I really dont know why it was included by default. I suggest you should reinstall ubuntu and not to use the effects. In my opinion they are the worst part of ubuntu since they are very buggy IMO. If you dont want to do that then I suggest you should try out a different distro such as OpenSuse or linux mint but I suggest to come back and check out the LTS of ubuntu in a few months;)