What i can run and what not

[dimitargeorgiev5]

Hi guys,

One thing lead to another and here i am in the Ubuntu forum, ready to pull the trigger and migrate from Windows 10. But i have a few questions and i would like to ask and eventually get answers.

1. Is the performance i get from the live preview the same if i actually install the distro?

2. I will post a list of everything i use on my computer, please tell me what can i run and i cant. I know that some apps have alternatives like Photoshop and GIMP, MS Office and Libre etc. I am fully ok with that. Here is the list:

- PDF Viewer - Acrobat
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
- Video Codecs - its kinda let down that these are not included out of the box!
- Audacity
- ACE Stream
- uTorrent
- Trello - I need a kanban app
- Skype
- Spotify
- Viber
- Whatsapp
- Telegram
- Team viewer
- Your Phone - I have an android and i really love to be able to access my messages and the actual screen of my phone on my PC

Thank you for the help.

[fhesseti]

Im no expert, and fresh off the windows boat myself looking to stay here, but i will go off of experience and what i deem to be common sense. If anyone reads this and sees something wrong please correct me

1.It should be better as your drive will most likely be way way way quicker than the usb stick you used (unless you did it another way).
2. Ill answer as many as i can for now and get back to you if i find out anymore. Currently looking into the your phone app as I am in the same boat as you with that one. by the way, try searching for apps in the ubuntu software app, search button is in the top left of that and its basically what the windows store should have been. If the app doesnt show up there, It may take some deeper browsing on the web but most of the time it will be there.
Team viewer YES
Telegram YES
Spotify YES
Whatsapp YES
Skype YES
Kanban apps YES
Audacity YES
Video Codecs YES
uTorrent YES, BUT MAY NOT WORK WELL. PLENTY OF ALTERNATIVES THAT ARE ACTUALLY BETTER IMO SUCH AS QBITTORRENT
Acorbat SORT OF. TECHNICALLY YES BUT OUTDATED SINCE 2013
Adobe Photoshop NO (alternative is GIMP)
Adobe Illustrator NO (alternatives can be found with a little research)

Found all these with a simple search in the Ubuntu Software app

[Autodave]

fhesseti did pretty good on his answer!

First of all, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, whatever 'buntu will be quicker than you live preview and much faster than any Windows version you may have.

The programs that he didn't know of, I unfortunately don't know either. Viber does list a linux download on their website, so you should be good to go on that, too. Further looking shows that VLC should be able to do what ACE Stream does.

I want you to keep this in mind: whenever possible insall the program(s) you want from the Software center before going after online programs. 'buntu is made to be very secure and the programs in the Software center will be secure. Online progs? Maybe.

Also keep in mind that Linux is NOT Windows. Gone are the days of defragging HDDs, worrying about viruses (unless you do something really risky), updates that take minutes to hours to run, not being able to do anything while updates are being installed., etc. No more CCleaner either.

[grahammechanical]

- Video Codecs - its kinda let down that these are not included out of the box!

There is a reason that they are not included in the distribution. But if I remember correctly we can tick a box during installation to have them downloaded and installed at the same time as Ubuntu is installed.

Note the fourth tick box

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/tutorial-install-ubuntu-desktop#5-prepare-to-install-ubuntu

Some Linux users don't want proprietary software for ethical reasons. So, it is not forced on them. In some countries it might be illegal to download these codecs. So, the user has to take responsibility.

I do not think it fair to describe this situation as a let down. Be prepared for further let downs as Linux developers never have had and never will have the intention of providing a cheap, very cheap copy of the Microsoft operating system. Linux developers have their own ideas about what a computer operating system should be like and are very independently minded.

Regards

[Perfect Storm]

If you're into games, there's Steam that works great on Linux. Just saying (the more the merrier)

[CatKiller]

It's already been covered pretty well, but I'll highlight a couple of things.

1. Is the performance i get from the live preview the same if i actually install the distro?

The performance of the installed version will be better than the live one: applications need to be loaded from the USB drive (or DVD) before they can be run in the live environment, so they're slower to start than they would be when installed to a hard drive; Intel and AMD graphics drivers are open source, meaning they can work in the live environment, but Nvidia drivers are proprietary, which means that they need to be installed before they work, so graphics performance on Nvidia hardware will be lower in a live environment. PopOS gets round that by having an Nvidia live image and an Everything Else live image; Ubuntu has just the one image that can install the Nvidia driver.

- PDF Viewer - Acrobat
- uTorrent

Ubuntu flavours come with a PDF viewer and a torrent client out-of-the-box. Others are available through the software repositories; different desktop environments will use different applications, but the function is available in all of them.

- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop

Adobe don't release software for Linux. There are alternatives that you may or may not get on with that will do the same sorts of things. Or you can run Windows in a VM just for those if you really need those specific applications; my understanding is that they don't work well under Wine.

All the rest are all available natively.

- Your Phone - I have an android and i really love to be able to access my messages and the actual screen of my phone on my PC

KDEConnect is included with Kubuntu (which I would recommend to new users over the vanilla Ubuntu that comes with Gnome) or there is an extension for Gnome that uses the same framework.

[crip720]

You don't mention what hardware you are using, but imagine it is on the decent side. You can probably use any desktop/distro, but some are lighter that others and can give better performance. Comes down to what you think is best looking, unless the hardware is on the weak side and limits your choices some.

[sisco311]

- Your Phone - I have an android and i really love to be able to access my messages and the actual screen of my phone on my PC

For messages/notifications and more you can use gsconnect or KDE Connect.

To mirror and control your Android phone you can use scrcpy.

I want you to keep this in mind: whenever possible insall the program(s) you want from the Software center before going after online programs. 'buntu is made to be very secure and the programs in the Software center will be secure. Online progs? Maybe.

+1

[TheFu]

Linux isn’t Windows. There's a completely different philosophy for the OS and for most applications. Learn those differences to become happier. http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm

- PDF Viewer - Adobe controls the PDF file standards. They have an interest to keep changing it to sell "new" versions of PDF creation sorftware. Basically, the non-commercial Linux versions are on v1.6 of the PDF standard. That's pretty old. There are $30 commercial PDF tools for Linux that have free trials if you need more. I think they implement the newer standards.
- forget about adobe stuff. They hate linux.
- Video Codecs - Linux has a different method. Use vlc or mpv to playback any video file you should want to see on the planet. All popular codecs are compiled into those tools. Different gui front-ends exist. The only stuff lots of us want are the DRM libraries to access commercial DVD videos. That's easily handled either at install time (install proprietary codecs) or after by installing a DVD DRM library. I don't know about Bluray, sorry.
- Audacity - there's a native version. I use it all the time. There are lots of batch processing tools as well, which I tend to use to make my audacity sessions shorter.
- Team viewer - there are so many better tools on any Unix that we don't need to trust some 3rd party. Learn ssh and x2go.
- Your Phone - GSConnect, KDE Connect or just scrcpy. I’ve played games using scrcpy this week over a USB connection. Depends what you need. I use typical Unix tools to sync files between the phone and PC - rsync, ssh, sftp, nextcloud. Usually, just USB connect, open a file manager and drag-n-drop any files either way as needed.

Don't go outside the package management system. Definitely don't go looking for a setup.exe on any Linux.

System Maintenance for Ubuntu Desktops: https://blog.jdpfu.com/linsysmaint Lifehacker republished it, but I've updated it every few years as new releases change things, fix things, include better tools.

[Autodave]

Team Viewer works very well on Linux. GIMP will replace your Photoshop. I have used both of those and actually prefer Gimp over Photoshop.