Friday, June 3, 2011

Liking Linux, but....

Okay, I've been using Ubuntu (Linux) for about two weeks now for most of my work. It has been a couple of years since I used Linux and I have found this to be way superior to the last time. Most of the time I hardly notice any difference from Windows. Indeed, in many ways, I like it better.

It certainly loads significantly faster and runs very smoothly. I click on a program and it loads quickly. I notice that fewer of the programs have issues with them than Linux used to have. When I was using Linux before, it was like only half the programs I downloaded ran right out of the "box," and I either had to tweak them or to just dump them.  I've only had a couple of such instances out of about 100 programs I've tried so far.

However, I would not advise anyone to go Linux only. Why? Well, quite frankly, many of the programs many of us have to use run only on Windows or Macs. Tonight was a good example. I was looking for a screen capture program I could use to make video tutorials. The only one I found on Ubuntu didn't record sound. Well, that's pretty useless. Certainly, I could record the video and then overlay the sound in editing, but that creates two activities instead of one. It means spending twice as much time on a simple project. So, for screen capture, I'll just have to go back to Windows.

Likewise, I found a speech recognition program for linux, but you have to run it from the terminal plugging two or three lines of code. Why do I want to do that when Dragon Naturally Speaking just involves clicking on a button and launching the program.

Linux is doing massively better, but it is still not ready for prime time. But having said that, I suspect that it is becoming my primary OS and Windows my secondary. And that is a big change for this PC

2 comments:

Jim Hartley said...

Way to go, Terri! I happen to prefer Fedora rather than Ubuntu (for some nit-picking technical reasons where it matches the older traditional Unix better) but as far as I'm concerned any Linux is better than Windoze.

Yes, I still have a couple of things I need Windoze for. Doing edits I need real M$Word to do the track changes thing. And while my printer works fine under Linux, I haven't found drivers for the scanner function so I need Windoze for that. So I dual-boot once in a while. But most of the time, it's Linux all the way.

Terri main said...

Well, I dual boot, but I think I am going to stick with Ubuntu (simply because I am getting used to it) for most things.

I notice that LibreOffice (a new Open Office incarnation) picks up the tracks changes and comments from my MS-office and vice versa. The only problem with the comments is that in MS Office you can highlight a section and the comment maintains that highlight. In LibreOffice it doesn't and just inserts an arrow to the beginning of the section. That can be confusing between the two,